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about to leave when her hand fell upon an extra publication she hadn’t noticed earlier. She knew this was true because the book – in fact, it was little more than a stapled pamphlet, around twenty pages long—had no Dewey decimal details on it. She checked the back cover as well as the imprint page, but found nothing informative. It was ostensibly an authorless text bearing a few amateurish illustrations.
    If the booklet couldn’t be checked out, there was no reason she should reveal she was borrowing it. If it had been placed on the shelf by mistake, nobody would miss it, and after reading and extracting any information she required, she could return it without saying anything to the various librarians patrolling the building, like seagulls hunting for prey on the unforgiving coast.
    This publication was called The Undermined: the untold stories of Sandsend’s mineral excavations. This title was provocative, as if something had been deliberately deleted from official accounts of her new home’s past. Alternatively, the book might have been written by a local crank and, unknown to anyone other than the culprit, slotted into the formally arranged row of tomes, to give voice to interpretations best left in the realms of unhealthy fantasy…Meg would find out for certain by using her own judgment. She tucked the booklet inside her handbag and then made her way swiftly out of the building.
    She’d never stolen anything in her life, but didn’t consider this latest act illegal. Even while pacing back into town for the bus stop, she refused to interpret the multiple sounds of footsteps scuttling in her wake as anything other than tourists fleeing for transport, hoping to make it back over the North York Moors before too many of their fellow day-trippers had the same idea.
    Meg had time to kill before her ride would arrive, and so stole into a nearby newsagent’s to buy a copy of the local newspaper. When the bus finally showed up, five minutes late, it was four p.m. and the sky above the sea along the craggy coastline was a cerulean blue tilting toward dark. With slow reluctance, Meg glanced away and consulted the front page of the Whitby Gazette .
    The headline reported on a young woman, a tourist who’d recently been vacationing in the area, having gone missing. The article was accompanied by a photograph, a beach shot showing the woman dressed in the all-black garments of a goth, standing on the beach at low tide, with chinking cliffs behind her.
    Something about this image troubled Meg, but she was unable to figure out what it was. Her gazing eventually straying from the picture, she read the text and learned that this twenty-five-year-old had been visiting the region alone and hadn’t been seen or heard from since Tuesday, two days ago. Her West Yorkshire family were frantic, apparently, as Meg imagined parents would be. The fact that the woman—whose name was Melissa: a sweet name for such a robust-looking girl—hailed from the same region in which Harry worked was of course just coincidence, nothing more than fuel for pernicious speculation. Meg should know better. Then she switched her gaze back to the young goth’s photo, noticing her fingernails were painted dark purple, and her lips likewise, as if she had some fatal heart condition.
    That was the diagnosis doctors had ascribed to Meg’s dead child: a congenital defect even modern science could do nothing about. The knowledge had been heartbreaking, leaving Meg—and her husband, of course—in a cold stew of horror. They’d drifted around for weeks afterward, hardly able to accept it; Harry had buried himself in work, staying away for days. The hospital had been in constant touch, recommending counseling, and Meg, less cynical than her bullish husband, had agreed to a meet a college-taught youngster. The advice the guy had offered had been useful, and Meg had made swifter progress than she’d imagined possible. Harry remained as Harry always was: