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doing at the house?”
    “He says he was collecting his wages. Termination pay.”
    “In the middle of a blizzard?”
    “Exactly. According to Shaw, the fire was already burning when he arrived. He went inside and tried to save Mrs. Heyman.”
    “Why didn’t he raise the alarm?”
    “He went for help but the roads were so icy he put his car into a ditch. He walked the rest of the way to Abingdon and went straight home. Went to bed. Forgot to tell us.”
    “He forgot?”
    “It gets better. He says his brother told him not to go to the police.”
    “Where is the brother?”
    “He doesn’t have one. Like I said, he’s not playing with the full deck. Either that or faking it.”
    Retreating downstairs, I follow a side path to a rear terrace garden, where rose bushes, heavily pruned, push through the snow. My gaze sweeps from the gate to the barn and then the orchard, unsure of what I’m looking for.
    Several times I walk to the fence and back again. How soon did a person become lost in the trees? How easy is it to watch a house like this and not be seen?
    A psychologist views a crime scene differently from a detective. Police search for physical clues and witnesses. I look at the overall picture and the salience of certain landmarks and features. Some roads, for example, act as psychological barriers. People living on one side may almost never cross over to the other. The same applies to railway lines and rivers. Boundaries alter behavior.
    Grievous joins me in the yard, knocking snow off his shoes.
    “Some places are just unlucky,” he says.
    “What do you mean?”
    “This is where Tash McBain lived.”
    “Who?”
    “You remember her,” he says. “She was one of the Bingham Girls.”
    I feel myself reaching for a memory and coming back with half a story, a headline and a photograph of two teenage girls.
    “Her family was renting this place,” explains Grievous. “But after she went missing, they split up. Divorced. Couldn’t handle not knowing.”
    “The girls didn’t turn up.”
    “Never. It’s one of those mysteries that locals still talk about. I remember when it happened. This place was crawling with reporters and TV crews.”
    “You worked the case?”
    “I was still in uniform—a probationary constable.”
    “What do you think happened to them?”
    He shrugs. “Five thousand people are reported missing every year in Thames Valley. More than half are kids, twelve to eighteen, runaways most of them. They turn up eventually… or they don’t.”
    Drury emerges from the house and tells Grievous to bring the Land Rover.
    “What about the dog?” I ask.
    “Pardon?”
    “The family had a dog.”
    “How do you know?”
    “There was a water bowl in the laundry and an empty dog-food tin in the rubbish bin. Something short-haired; black and white, maybe a Jack Russell.”
    He shakes his head, but I see a question mark ghost across his eyes. He dismisses it and pulls on his gloves.
    “It’s time you met Augie Shaw.”

 
    U ntil we went missing
    the worst thing that had ever happened in Bingham was when a German bomber overshot London by eighty miles and dropped its payload on a community hall where people were sheltering. The death toll was never made public—the government wanted to protect morale—but local historians said twenty-one people died.
    The next worst thing was the night that Aiden Foster ran down Callum Loach and crushed both his legs, which had to be amputated above his knees. Now he has these stumps, but mostly he wears prosthetic legs made of skin-colored plastic.
    Tash giggled at the term prosthetic. She thought it sounded like prophylactic, which is a fancy name for a condom. That reminded me of when our PE teacher (Miss Trunchbull) put a condom on a banana in sex-ed class. Tash raised her hand and said, “Why do we need protection from bananas, Miss?”
    I laughed so hard I almost wet myself. Tash got sent to see Mrs. Jacobson, the headmistress (otherwise known as Lady