Erin had only discovered her halfsister’s existence some three years earlier. Erin’s father had left Prosperous when she was little more than an infant, and her mother had subsequently remarried – to a cousin of Thomas Souleby, as it happened. Her father hadn’t been heard from again, and then, at the end of 2009, Dianne had somehow tracked Erin down, and a tentative if genuine affection had sprung up between them. It seemed that their father had created a whole new identity for himself after he left Prosperous, and he never mentioned the town to his new wife or his child. It was only following his death, and the death of her mother, that Dianne had come across documents among her father’s possessions that explained the truth about his background. By then she was on her second marriage – to a man who, coincidentally or through the actions of fate, lived in the same state that had spawned her father, and not too far from the town and life that he had fed.

Erin had professed complete ignorance of the reasons why their father might have gone to such lengths to hide his identity, but when Dianne persisted Erin hinted at some affair with a woman from Lewiston, and her father’s fear of retribution from his wife’s family. None of it was true, of course – well, none of the stuff about the affair. Her father’s fear of retribution was another matter. Nevertheless, she made it clear to Dianne that it would be for the best if she kept her distance from Prosperous, and didn’t go delving into the past of their shared father.

‘Old towns have long memories,’ Erin told Dianne. ‘They don’t forget slights.’

And Dianne, although bemused, had consented to leaving Prosperous to its own business, aided in part by her halfsister’s willingness to share with her what she knew of their father’s past, even if, unbeknownst to Dianne, Erin had carefully purged all that she offered of any but the most innocuous details.

So Erin and Harry were the poor relatives, bound to Dianne and her husband by the shade of a father. They were content to play that role, though, and to keep the existence of Dianne and her husband hidden from the citizens of Prosperous. Unspoken between them was the fact that they might have need of Dianne at some point in the future, and not only for money, for the Dixons wanted nothing more than to leave Prosperous, and that would be no easy task. The board would want to know why. The board would investigate. The board would almost certainly find out about Dianne, and the board would wonder what secrets Erin Dixon might have shared with her halfsister, the daughter of a man who had turned his back on the town, who had stolen its money and, perhaps, whispered of the deal it had made to secure itself.

Keeping all their fears from Dianne and her husband was not easy. To further complicate matters, Harry and Erin had asked for the money to be paid in cash. She could still remember the look on Dianne’s face: puzzlement, followed by the dawning realization that something was very wrong.

‘What kind of trouble are you two in?’ she asked them, as her husband poured the last of the wine and gave them the kind of disapproving look he probably reserved for patients who neglected to follow his postoperative advice and then seemed surprised when they started coughing blood. His name was Magnus Madsen, and he was of Danish extraction. He insisted on the pronunciation of his first name as ‘Maunus’, without sounding the ‘g’, and had resigned himself to correcting Harry’s literal pronunciation whenever they met. Harry just couldn’t seem to manage ‘Mau-nus’, though. That damned ‘g’ kept intruding. Anyway, it wasn’t as if Magnus Madsen was fresh off a Viking longship. There were rocks that hadn’t been in Maine as long as the Madsens. His family had been given plenty of time to learn to speak English properly, and drop whatever airs they’d brought with them from the old country.

‘We’d just prefer it if people in Prosperous didn’t know that we were having serious difficulties,’ said Harry. ‘It’s a small town, and if word got out it might affect my chances of bidding successfully for work. If you pay us in cash, then we can make pretty regular lodgments into our account until we find our feet again, and nobody will be any the wiser.’

‘But surely any dealings you have with your bank are entirely confidential,’ said Magnus. ‘Couldn’t you ask your bank manager for an extended line of credit? I mean, you’re still working, and you must have paid off the bulk of your mortgage by now. That’s a nice house you have, and it’s worth a fair sum, even in these difficult times. It’s hardly like asking for an unsecured loan.’

There was so much that Harry wanted to say at that point, but it could have been summarized as ‘You and I do not live in similar worlds’. Those words ‘unsecured loan’ bit at him as well, because that was precisely what they were asking of Magnus and Dianne, but mostly he knew that Magnus had no conception of the way in which the town of Prosperous worked. If he did, it would turn his hair white.

And shortly after that, he’d be dead.

Magnus and Dianne gave them the money in the end, and Harry used it to pump up the deposits being made at the bank, but the borrowed cash was almost gone now, and he didn’t think that his in-laws could be tapped again. In any normal situation, Harry and Erin would have sold up and moved on. Sure, they’d take a bit of a hit on the house, but with a little luck they might come out of it with a high five-or low six-figure sum once the mortgage was paid off. They could start again, maybe rent for a while until the economy recovered.

But this wasn’t a normal situation. They knew that they probably weren’t the only ones in the town who were suffering; there were rumors, and more than rumors. Even Prosperous wasn’t entirely immune from the vagaries of the economy, just as, throughout its history, it had never been completely protected from conflict or financial turmoil or the anger of nature. Yet it had always been better protected than most. The town took steps to ensure that was the case.

‘What do you think happened?’ Erin now whispered to her husband, as they watched the men approach. ‘Did she get away?’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t believe she did.’

If she had escaped, then these others wouldn’t be here on their doorstep. There were only two possibilities. The first was that the girl had been captured before she could leave Prosperous, in which case the chief was going to be mad as hell with them for failing to keep her locked up, and they could only hope that the girl had sense enough to keep any suspicions about the ease of her escape to herself. The second possibility was that she was dead, and Harry found himself wishing that the latter was true. It would be easier for all of them.

They didn’t give the chief time to knock on the door. Harry opened it to find Morland with his fist raised, and he flinched instinctively in anticipation of the blow. There was a doorbell, but it wouldn’t have been like Lucas Morland to use it under the circumstances. A sharp knock was much more psychologically effective.

Harry opened the door wide to admit them, the chief with his face set hard and Thomas Souleby looking more disappointed than angry, as though Harry and Erin were teenagers who had failed some crucial parental test.

‘We know why you’re here,’ said Harry.

‘If you know why we’re here,’ said the chief, ‘then why didn’t you call us to tell us about the girl?’

‘We only just found out she was gone,’ said Erin. ‘We were about to call, but—’

She looked to her husband for help.

‘But we were frightened,’ he finished for her.

‘Frightened of what?’

‘That we’d let you down, that we’d let the whole town down. We knew you’d be angry.’

‘Did you try looking for her?’

‘Sure,’ said Harry. ‘I mean, no, not yet, but we were about to. See, I’d put my boots on.’ He pointed down at his feet, which were, indeed, booted. He never wore footwear in the house – Erin bitched about the carpets – but he’d put his boots on that night, just in case it all went to hell. ‘I was ready to head out when you arrived.’