An excerpt from The Body in the Marsh

Prologue

She hated confined spaces and had always been terrified of the dark. But the tiny pantry was still the best place to hide from him. Somewhere he’d never think to look. She had crouched in this cubbyhole as a child playing hide-and-seek on seaside holidays. Empty shelves, lined still with parchment-stiff newspaper, rustling even as she breathed. Once, they had been stocked with her grandmother’s home-made jams, with Be-Ro flour, Atora suet and tin after tin of Fray Bentos. Translucent spiders, all stilted legs and no body, had tiptoed like glass ghosts on the high shelf, among her grandfather’s bottles of Bass and the tin of Rover biscuits. There had been seaside picnics, the scream of gulls and Wall’s ice cream in blocks like butter that fitted in oblong cornets. Memories steadied her breathing and stilled her fear like the grasp of a parental hand.

She remembered the day when, aged seven, she had hidden for hours with a torch and read all the newspaper on the shelves. One article stood out: Daily Express, 23 June 1954. Grisly discovery. Detectives baffled. A young woman’s body in the marsh. Romney Marsh, just a mile away. A dismembered body. Dismembered. In pieces! She’d had to look the word up, and it gave her a frisson of fear and excitement. She’d read the article again and again. For two days she couldn’t sleep. Was the murderer still around? Would he come to get her too, she had asked her grandmother.

The slow scrunch of tyres on pebbles, a gritty sound like the slow beating of butter and sugar with a wooden spoon, dragged her back to the here and now. The slam of a car door. Her heart was hammering as she heard the key turn in the rusted lock and the door squeak open just a few feet from where she crouched. He must not find her, or it would all end now.

The prophetic shriek of gulls again: death, death, death. The body in the marsh.

Dismembered.