Nor was it particularly strange that the curtains were permanently drawn across the front windows and, as far as anyone could tell, the lights were never turned on. But the house smelled. For weeks now there had been a rotten, sewagey smell that had seemed at first to be coming from a blocked pipe but that had rapidly got worse until people had begun to cross the street to avoid it. And whatever was causing it seemed to be affecting the entire place. The grass on the front lawn was beginning to die. The flowers had wilted and then been choked up by weeds. The colour seemed to be draining out of the very bricks.

The neighbours had tried to complain. They had knocked on the front door, but nobody had come. They had telephoned, but nobody had answered. Finally, they had called the borough council at the Ipswich Civic Centre but of course it would be weeks before any action was taken. The house wasn’t empty. That much they knew. They had occasionally seen the owner, Gwenda Davis, pacing back and forth behind the net curtains. Once – more than a week ago – she had been seen scurrying home from the shops. And there was one other piece of evidence that there was still life at number twenty-seven: every evening the television was turned on.

Gwenda Davis was well known in the street.

She had lived there for much of her adult life, first on her own and then with her partner, Brian Conran, who worked occasionally as a milkman. But what had really set the neighbours talking was the time, six years ago, when she had inexplicably adopted an eight-year-old boy and brought him home to live with her. Everyone agreed that she and Brian were not exactly the ideal parents. He drank. The two of them argued. And according to local gossip, they hardly knew the boy, whose own parents had died in a car accident.

So nobody was very surprised when the whole thing went wrong. It wasn’t really the boy’s fault. Matthew Freeman had been a nice enough child – everyone agreed – but almost from the moment he arrived he had been in trouble.