The paddocks around the Hopkinses’ property were damp for eight months of the year. A smallholding nestled in the western shadow of the sprawling Forest of Dean, the wet came with the territory. But, on a fine, chilly November morning, one might have been excused for believing rain was a stranger to this place with the blue expanse of the heavens above and the ground beneath rock hard from the third consecutive night of frost.

Chris Hopkins blew pluming furls of steam from his mouth into the windless air, then smiled as he stepped out into the yard from the warm farmhouse kitchen. Despite his two sweaters and a waxed jacket, he shivered. He cupped both hands around the Thermos of coffee he’d just prepared, but it didn’t help. How could it? Chris smiled and shook his head. Far too early for all this.

Five steps and his ears were already stinging; always had and always would in this weather, being the generous size they were. His smile widened into a grin that had won him some good friends and several lucrative contracts in the competitive animal feeds’ market, which occupied his nine to five and a good slice of his remaining waking hours. He put the Thermos under one arm, curled his fingers into a soft clenched fist, and blew into both his hands before rubbing them together to get a little circulation flowing.

He had warned her, but as usual she’d insisted and got her own way. He shook his head and wondered again at his daughter’s stubbornness, knowing it was glued onto a gene with more than its fair share of his wife, Sara’s, DNA. OK, perhaps it was better that at sixteen Nia still wanted to sleep in her horse’s stable with her best friend, rather than hang around outside pubs or stay up all night at some rave experimenting with God knows what, but she could have chosen a better night for it, for crying out loud. Well, maybe it would at least cure her of the habit for the winter. It hadn’t been so bad during the summer but this was becoming ridiculous, hi-tech Arctic sleeping bag or no. Next thing you knew, Gwen would be wanting to do the same thing and Sara, still warm and cosy under the duvet upstairs, would throw a blue fit. She was not going to let a ten-year-old girl freeze to death in a stable, even if her big sister wanted to, and that was that. Gwen had yet to develop Nia’s manipulative skills, but it would come. Chris secretly looked forward to it.

Jesus, it was cold. He shivered and hurried down the yard to the whitewashed stable that had been nothing but a rat-infested hen house when they’d bought the place five years before. He glanced about him as he walked, feasting his eyes on a Christmas card landscape of white. All around him the bare trees were wreathed in feathery hoar frost, and across the lower fields a surreal milky mist hung low, creeping stealthily upwards towards the tree-lined horizon. It was going to be a beautiful day. Crisp and clear and unpolluted; the sort of late-autumn day he loved.

‘Wakey, wakey, girls!’ he called as he pushed open the stable door. The musty odour of hay and horse greeted him, mixed with something else, something unusual: a sharp, unpleasant tang.

He heard no rustle of sleeping bags and so added a chastising, ‘Come on, ladies. Don’t tell me you’re still asleep? I come bearing hot coffee!’

His eyes locked on to the horse. There was something wrong with Genevieve. The mare stood huddled in the corner of her stall, shivering and twitching, not offering her usual greeting nicker.

‘Nia? Beckie?’ He stepped in and looked over Genevieve’s stall to the stall containing the camp beds, fan heater and rickety desk lamp Nia had collected into a makeshift bedroom. Everything was still there, but order had been replaced by a chaotic jumble. A Microlite sleeping bag and three extra blankets lay piled in a heap near the foot of an upturned camp bed, the lamp lay on its side, shards of broken glass from the shattered bulb scattered over the floor. On the other bed, a lumpy shape lay unmoving. The sharp tang that greeted his nose crystallised into the unmistakable stink of vomit and triggered a frown of sudden concern.

Chris stepped across and pulled back the blanket that covered the shape on the bed. Beckie lay there, pale and sweating, mouth open, saliva and vomit glistening on her chin.

‘Beckie? Beckie, what’s wrong?’

The girl moaned, leaned over and retched.

A barbed, unnameable fear lanced at Chris’s gut. What the hell had they been doing? He put down the Thermos and looked around, eyes wide, registering the space where there should not have been one.

‘Shit. Nia? Where’s Nia? NIA?’

Ugly thoughts tumbled over in his head. Maybe the girls had eaten something. Perhaps they’d been stupid enough to try something. He pawed at the debris on the floor. Chocolate wrappers, Coke cans, phones. No sign of matches. No cigarette papers or syringes…

Syringes? What was he thinking?

No, he knew his daughter. Maybe she’d gone to the bathroom. He turned back to Beckie. She didn’t look well.

‘Beckie, love, what’s wrong?’

She opened her eyes. Looked at him but didn’t see him. Her eyes drifted up and over Chris’s shoulder to the tack on the walls, the light beyond.

Something visceral and deep within him rippled and uncoiled.

Beckie giggled. He glared at her, but she still wasn’t seeing him. She giggled again but he barely heard, because he was stepping back, his skin crawling, confused and unnerved. No syringes or cigarette papers maybe, but something was very wrong here.

Heart knocking hard against his chest, Chris moved forward again, stepped over Beckie, and leaned in to pick up the canvas camp bed. The expensive orange-and-grey sleeping bag lay like a collapsed cocoon on the floor. He picked it up to throw it back on the bed, but stopped as his eyes fell on a dark purple stain covering two handbreadths of the surface in an irregular smudge. Whatever fluid had been spilled, enough of it had leaked through to the inner lining to mimic the surface stain. Chris stared, the sudden trembling in his arms nothing to do with the freezing temperatures.

Behind him Beckie moaned again.

A dark liquid smudge. The colour of blackberry juice. Chris brought the material to his nose and breathed in a sickly mixture of iron and copper. Blood. The sleeping bag fell from his fingers. He turned, stumbling over Beckie, feeling his way along the walls to the outside, his mind buzzing with chaotic panic as he sprinted back to the house. He threw open the doors, calling out his daughter’s name.

‘Nia? Nia?’

She was not in her sister’s room. Not in the bathroom, kitchen, living room. His frenzied search woke up the other children, and they watched with bleary, owl eyes as he yielded to blind panic. He ignored their frightened pleas for explanation, running from room to room, checking behind sofas and in cupboards.

Nia was not in the house.

Sara appeared on the stairs, but Chris was already heading for the door. He ran back out into the yard, heedless of his wife’s calling, hurtling around the outbuildings, opening doors, stepping up on the four-bar fences that ringed the fields to call her name. All the while seeing Beckie’s unfocused pupils and hearing that awful giggle in her voice.

‘Nia? Nia?’

No answer but for the cawing of the rooks his yells disturbed.

He turned and ran back towards the house, the freezing air searing his chest.

Sara stood outside the front door, arms clutching her dressing gown about her. She grabbed at him. ‘Chris! Speak to me!’

He could hardly breathe. There was no hope for words yet.

Her nails dug in to his arm. ‘Chris, you’re frightening me. What’s wrong?’

He sucked in air and looked in to his wife’s face, his legs trembling beneath him. ‘Nia’s not in the stables.’

Sara frowned, a half-smile began and then dissolved as his desperate fear ignited her own.

‘And something’s wrong… with Beckie.’ He threw out the words in a broken whisper.

Sara moaned and ran towards the stables. He let her go and staggered to the front door until the noise of his other children crying reached him. He ushered them into the lounge, frightened and confused, plying them with false assurances. He hurried to the kitchen, picked up the phone and dialled 999, recalling the stark, pathetic images of desperate, sleepless parents in the glare of TV lights, begging for help in finding a lost child.

A voice answered the phone, efficient and practical, asking him which service he required. Chris’s mind faltered, unable to respond to the simple question, wondering for a fleeting moment if he was overreacting. He stared at the kitchen door. Nia was going to walk back into the house at any moment, wasn’t she? Hugging a dressing gown around herself, fragile on those long, coltish legs, wondering what all the fuss was about. Her eyes, so like her mother’s, round and troubled from having caused her father the worry, spouting some improbable explanation so he could end this miserable call with an apology.

‘Is it the police you require?’

The question burned away his hope. ‘I…’

‘Sir? How can I help you?’

He tried twice and failed, the words freezing in his larynx until, somehow, he managed to vomit them out. Hearing them was like having his heart squeezed in an iron vice. ‘Ambulance and police. Something’s happened. I don’t know what. But my little girl, there’s blood.’ A sob choked off the sentence. He took a deep, tremulous breath and finished, ‘It’s my daughter… she’s missing.’