There was nothing to do in Whitecross; nothing there except a stone market cross and a straggle of houses, a petrol station and an off-licence, one grocery shop. The primary school had closed two years ago. Fields at the top of the lane near the church had been sold off for new houses, but none had been built. The fields stayed as they’d always been, only no one played there any more. The main road that went straight through the village was lined with tall lime trees that dripped sweet sticky stuff on to the pavement where Mia and her friends waited for the bus to the secondary school in Ashton. In the spring, they’d find the splatted pink mess of baby birds fallen out of nests in the lime trees. In the summer, the trees were smothered in pale yellow flowers and the sweet-scented air hummed with insects.

From Mia’s house in Church Lane you could walk to the sea – not the sort of sea where people come for holidays, just a long strip of pebbles and, at low tide, a stretch of gravelly sand. The sea was too shallow to swim, and clotted with stinking seaweed. The tide left its trail of bottles and plastic, frayed rope and old shoes along the top of the pebble strip; just occasionally it left a clutch of shells or the fragile skull of a seabird, scoured clean by the waves.

Above it all stretched the sky, a wide dome of pale blue or grey or milk white, filled with the thin cries of sea birds. In high summer, swifts darted and swooped with their sickle wings, and the air was filled with their high shrieks and screams until it was dark.