Autumn began to run. She felt an icy terror flood through her. He must have been waiting for her. He’d followed her all the way here. To this open, empty place. He knows where I live.

When Autumn was born, it was as if she recognized her, as if she’d always known that it would be her, this little person who had come to live with her and reside permanently in her heart. It was a love unlike any other: fierce and powerful.

A cool white, wintry light glazed the buildings on the highest hill: Will’s memorial, the unsightly chimney from the hospital, the modernist cathedral in Clifton. The jumble of styles and eras lent the city the semblance of a medieval Roman town. Laura drove the long way round, up past the Clifton Suspension Bridge, strung like an a engineer’s dream over a river sinking into the mud. Leigh Woods was on the far side, the trees dark, bereft of leaves, clawing at the sky.

The lines began to sing, a shrill, electric song, and then the cacophony of the train roared out of the darkness. The carriages were almost empty and painfully bright as they hurtled along the tracks to the heart of the city. In the fleeting light she saw the meadow, dotted with stunted hawthorns, their twisted limbs dense with red berries, and then a shape: achingly familiar, child-sized, shockingly still.

Most of the vegetables in the allotments had died back but one, tended by a Jamaican man, was full of squash. They lay among the dying leaves, rimmed with frost, huge, orange and alien, half hidden by the mist. They reminded her of the fairy stories she’d read as a young child, of white horses and gold carriages that turned into mice and pumpkins on the stroke of midnight.

She could already feel the dryness in her throat, the catch in her voice, when she’d have to stand up in class and tell everyone what her grandparents did. After the other kids read out their work on grannies who baked them squidgy chocolate chip cookies, she could imagine how the others would look at her when she talked about Grandmother Vanessa who strode through the desert with her binoculars, counting kudu.

She couldn’t tell how long she’d been searching for her daughter. It was dusk, but it had seemed darker as she ran through the wood, tripping on hooked tree roots, her feet crunching through crisp, curled ash leaves.

There was no sign of her daughter, no sign of a small body crumpled by the railway.

She was more exposed to the elements now: the wind and rain howled through the metal cage enclosing her. It seemed impossible that someone could fall or be shoved from the bridge. She forced herself to look down. She had to prepare for the worst.