What will I find in Alfredston? I’ve been wondering ever since my younger sister went missing. Now I am in the UK, driving west on the M3, towards Hampshire. Sweating. I turn down the heat and loosen my blouse. In the rear view mirror, a black saloon car, blurred by the rain, maintains its distance. The tooth is in my pocket. “You’re in it girl and deep,” I mutter, remembering how it all started.

*

The stranger arrived in Cumbres de la Sierra, Andalucia, in late September of last year. Some say he came on the afternoon bus, others claim he emerged from a vehicle with foreign number plates. Gregorio Sánchez had just left Los Pinos, a bar, when the man approached and asked, in perfectly respectable Spanish, if there was a flat available to rent in the village. By chance (or fate), Gregorio himself owned a flat.

“He had a front tooth missing,” Gregorio told me. “And he covered two months’ rent in cash after I had showed him around.” He also signed an agreement giving a name, Martin Peters, and a Spanish foreign residence ID number. A few months later, when the search for Beatriz began, neither name nor identity number could be found anywhere in the files of the Spanish Home Office.

On the day of his arrival, Martin Peters went to Los Pinos in the early evening. According to Matilda Gongora, who runs the bar, he sat on a stool at the far end. Matilda poured him a glass of beer and gave him a tapas of Russian salad. He drank the beer slowly while old man Hector and his group, who always sit at a table in the corner with their dominoes, discussed his origin.

“What conclusion did you come to?” I asked Hector when I interviewed him on my return to Cumbres.

“That he was English.”

“Why English?”

“Well, he had blue eyes and blond hair so he must have been English.”

That is why the man became El Inglés. In fact, his nationality is uncertain. Peters could be from almost anywhere.

After his beer, he took a stroll around town. When he neared the park, the children became interested in this tall, foreign gentleman with the missing front tooth, and for a moment he must have found himself the centre of undivided attention until parents and guardians whisked the children away. From then on, he was observed from afar. By some suspiciously, others objectively.

My sister was in the park that day, looking after our little cousin Victor. I wonder what she felt when she first saw the stranger? A stirring in her heart? A kind of uncomfortable yearning or an uncertain yet heightened sensation, like waiting in line for a fairground attraction?

Or perhaps that came later.

*

The black saloon follows me into a motorway service station not far from Winchester. After parking, I hurry through the blustery rain into a café. At a table with an espresso, I watch the black saloon. I can barely make out the driver. I stir the coffee. When fear and uncertainty turn to anger, I get up, exit the café and march towards the vehicle. As I approach, the driver reverses and speeds away. Is it Martin Peters?

*

Various people have told me that he was solitary. That he would walk alone for hours on the paths and tracks around Cumbres and that, when he came into a bar – which was infrequently – he would sit alone. He preferred books for company and could always be seen with one on his person. Usually in the left pocket of his grey jacket.

No one knows what he did for a living or why he came to Cumbres.

It is not clear when Beatriz started ‘seeing’ El Inglés or if they were, indeed, together at all. But let us look at the evidence. Not long after he arrived in the village, people – including my parents - say a change came over Beatriz.

“It was as if a mist had come over her,” Salomé Maldonaldo, her music teacher, told me in the room of her house where she once gave Beatriz clarinet classes. “Like she was absent. It is not the first time I have seen that look on a young lady. Or a young man for that matter,” she added.

I asked: “And what distraction could have caused this absence or mist?”

She looked at me, her eyes bright. “Love,” she replied. “It could have only been love.”

Now, Salomé is a romantic and I know so little about ‘Love.’ I prefer looking at the facts . So I asked Gregorio, whose own house is situated next to the flat he rents out, if he thought El Inglés and Beatriz saw each other in secret.

Gregorio looked at me with those solemn brown eyes of his and said he couldn’t be sure, but that on a number of occasions he heard footsteps leave the rented accommodation in the early hours of the morning.

“And we are talking about fast, dainty steps,” he added. “Not the slow, heavy steps of El Inglés.”

“So someone was visiting him?”

“Indeed.”

And there was the fact that Beatriz, who had never liked exercise, took up jogging. My father says that she suddenly became “sports mad” and would disappear for entire afternoons dressed in her Lycra sportswear only to return later with ruffled hair and a smile on her reddened face.

“I thought...” he began before breaking into tears.

I know what my father thought. And other family and friends. They were happy for her. They thought that she was dating Teo Iznalloz, the lawyer’s son, or Daniel Gutiérrez, who is studying to be a civil servant.

When Manolo, the shepherd, saw Beatriz with El Inglés, gossip carried like wildfire across our small town. My parents changed their “liberal attitude” (my father’s words). He locked Beatriz in her room so she went in on herself.

“It wasn’t love,” my mother said. “She was infatuated, possessed.’

Being far away, in Madrid, I didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation until it was too late. And she was gone.

It happened on January 15th. That morning, she took the bus to Granada and disembarked at the usual stop, near the Escuela de Arte where she was studying illustration. However, she didn’t attend any classes. Nor was she seen in the library or cafeteria. And she didn’t take the bus back up to Cumbres. She simply disappeared.

“El Inglés left that day too,” Gregorio told me. This had been arranged the previous week and Gregorio had no complaints - his flat was clean, everything was in perfect condition, the rent paid to the end of the month. “After returning the keys, he drove off in a black saloon car,” he added. “Never to be seen again.”

When Beatriz didn’t return that afternoon, the alarm bells started ringing. Phone calls were made to family members and friends. But no one knew where she was. The police were called and after twenty four hours, she was officially declared missing.

You might have seen her face on the news and heard about the story. If you have, you would have seen the face of El Inglés too, drawn by Maria del Mar Fernández, an artist who resides in the village. I have the image on my phone and I am told it is a very good likeness. No photos of El Inglés were ever found. No one could remember the exact number on the licence plate of his car either.

There was no sign of foul play. Not a single hair of Beatriz was discovered anywhere in Gregorio Sánchez’s flat. All the police discovered was a tooth wrapped in a corner of paper. On the paper, the words Alfredston, Hants, had been scrawled in black ink. The police said it could be part of an address torn from the corner of a letter.

*

I am driving down a winding, narrow road. Thorny hedges claw the air. My parents begged me not to go alone but I said I could handle it. That I was a big girl. That someone needed to discover the truth because the police, whose resources are limited, have all but given up.

In Alfredston, I park by the village green. No one’s around. Low clouds hover, greying the surrounding houses and a Saxon church. The post office is closed. So is the newsagent. I spot an old woman and call out but she shuffles away. I ring a doorbell. No one answers. Leaning over a stone bridge, I glimpse a trout in a stream below.

Beside the stream, weeping willows bow. There’s a sign: To Folly’s Corner. Folly’s Corner turns out to be a solitary inn. It squats on the edge of a wood. Ivy climbs wildly over its exterior. The black saloon is parked outside.

I peer through a grimy window. Two small cages are visible. In one, an agitated canary flits up and down, trying to escape. The other cage is empty, its gilded bars shine, the door is open as if waiting for a new guest.

The wooden door of the inn creaks when I push it open. The bar room is dimly lit, the smell of hops hangs in the air. On the wall above the embers of a dying fire, a dead fox - a hunter’s trophy - grins. The tables are empty so I perch on a stool and wait for the driver of the black saloon to appear.

“Coffee please,” I say to the barman.

“No hot drinks,” he replies.

“A Martini then.”

He nods and turns around to make the Martini. Sweat clings to the back of his shirt. A door creaks somewhere from the back of the inn. A tall figure appears. He’s wearing a grey jacket and holding a book. He quietly takes a seat at the end of the bar where a lighted candle flickers. I gaze at his face as he opens the book. My heart is beating fast. I stand, fumbling for the object in my pocket. As I step closer, he looks up - his eyes are glassy pools. And when he smiles, I don’t mind the gap, for his missing front tooth is in the palm of my hand.