Emma lay on the bed wondering when someone would come. She moved slightly from one side to the other but, whichever way she turned, her arms soon became prickling stumps of pins and needles. She realised now that she shouldn't have refused the Happy Meal she'd been offered. She hadn't thought at the time how hungry or thirsty she was, only how insulting it had been - a girl of her age being offered a child's meal. Now, what felt like hours later, she longed for the clammy, sticky sweetness of the cola drink and the reassuring blandness of the burger meal. She could smell the spilt cola in the room, mingling with the smell of sweat coming off the sheets in the July heat. It was the first day of the school holidays and Emma knew she was being punished.

Emma and her mother had left London at Easter and moved to live with her grandmother in a small Hampshire village in the New Forest. It was a dully quiet, well-groomed, retirement village. A place where the signal on her mobile was flaky at best. Not that she let on to her mother. One of the reasons for moving had been to get her away from her friends in Islington - her mother would probably rejoice if she knew their calls to each other were getting shorter. She had called them vacuous, tarty girls, when they first came to the house. Screeching with laughter in Emma's bedroom about school intrigues, she pictured them dragging her clever girl into makeup, skimpy clothes and relationships at the end of third year. So her ever-neurotic mother had decided to move them out of London, away from temptation. Emma hated her for it.

    It had been a miserable first term at the local comprehensive. Emma had stood out immediately with her trendier clothes, bought in the boutiques of Islington, and her London slang. More importantly, Emma could see that alliances were already formed. She spent the greater part of the summer term trying to work out which group she should join, getting encouragement from none. By the end of term, still undecided, she had felt relieved that six long, hot weeks of freedom were ahead of her. That was, until she realised there was little chance of her mother letting her go up to London on her own.

    When the school bus stopped in the village, it was ten to four, too early to go home. Her mother would still be at work. Much as she loved her gran, she didn't feel like sitting and making conversation with her. Her gran was sometimes more switched on than her mother and she knew Emma was unhappy, which made her feel uncomfortable and ungrateful.

    She looked up at the church and was dazzled by the sun flashing about its spire. Feeling dizzy, she leant back against the concrete bus shelter, red white blotches crossing in front of her eyes. She blinked rapidly to focus and when she did, she frowned. She could see nothing of interest. The road in both directions was long, straight and empty. Nothing was happening. The village was sleeping and she knew there wasn't a prince for miles to whisk her away.

    Nothing had happened since they had arrived. Nothing except the annual village show on the recreation ground, which had comprised a marquee of polished vegetables, lightly-dusted sponge cakes, carved scones, miniature themed gardens on tea trays, deformed knitted toys and oil and watercolour paintings of varying degrees of awfulness. A bouncy castle had been set up to amuse the residents' grandchildren; there were stalls of second-hand romance and detective novels, jars of gooseberry and plum jam, butterfly and victoria sponge cakes to occupy the adults; and at 3pm the young and not so young competitive types from surrounding villages had lined up to compete in the annual 5km race. The social highlight of her empty new life to date.

    There was not the slightest hint of a breeze. Emma's blouse clung to the small of her back. Her fringe was damp. Twisting her long, blonde hair into a bun, she held it away from her neck for temporary relief. Nothing was moving. On the pavement outside the shop, a black cat was stretched out, its head in the shade and its stomach facing the sun. Flowers propped up in buckets at the door, half in sun, half in shade, had drunk their water and were wilting for lack of any more. A lopsided rack of postcards and cards was fading in the sun. The crates on which barbecue brickettes had sat were bare. Even the ice cream sign looked defeated, buckled in the heat.

    Emma walked along the road, climbed the stile and walked across the recreation ground towards the duck pond in the corner. As she walked past the playground, she pushed a couple of swings to get them moving for company and then sat on the end one, kicking away from the ground. After six or seven swings, she jumped off and headed for the pond. She could see no ducks, except where the willow dipped its fronds, she thought she could see their shadows. They, too, were sitting in the shade, waiting for something to happen.

    To the right of the pond stood a row of smart red-brick cottages, newly-converted from the old mill that had stood there. The mill wheel had been kept in the garden of the end cottage and was now draped with mottled ivy, flashy red begonias, the bruised colours of pansies - yellow, blue and purple – and weeping fuchsias. Nothing clashed. Each plant had its own space and the fuchsias and ivy were being coaxed and trained with twine and miniature latticework. The cottage lawns were all regulation height and clipped at the borders. Either side of the dark wood doors hung a colossal basket of colour, trailing ivy reaching for the cool of the stones below. It was like sitting in the pages of a pop-up book.

    Emma sighed and stood up, pulling her skirt away from the back of her legs and plucking at her blouse. She was thirsty. Crossing over the wooden footbridge, she walked alongside the mill stream and back towards the main road. At the junction, there was a man leaning against a car, reading a road map. His sleeves were rolled up and Emma could see his shirt clinging to his underarms and back. He looked up from the map and smiled.

    “Quiet here, in't?”

    His voice was deep, relaxed and warm.

    “Like you wouldn't believe.”

    “Oh, do you live here?” he said, smiling again. “I'm lost. I think I took a wrong turn at Lyndhurst. Perhaps you could help?”

    Emma walked round the car and looked at his map. It took her a while but she located the village by finding the larger ones that circled it.

    “That's where we are,” she said, pointing to the minuscle dot on the map. She was amazed it was recorded at all.

    “Thanks, you've been a great help.”

    “Where are you going?”

    “London, hopefully, if I ever get out of Never, Never Land. It's all very quaint here.”

    “London?”

    A thought shot into her head. One night. It wouldn't matter if she was away for one night, would it? What she wouldn't give for one night with her friends.

    “Can you take me with you? I need to get to London tonight for a party.”

    She'd blurted it out before she had time to think. Her mother would be furious, she knew that, but for one night back with her friends in Islington, it would be worth it. She could deal with her mother when she got home. For now, all she wanted was to get back to them for one night, away from this slumbering kingdom.

    He had lied to her, of course. He hadn't been going anywhere near London. She had no idea where they were when they stopped. Everywhere looked the same in Hampshire – one neat little row of houses ran into the other, broken up only by the same regular hedgerows and fields each time. He said he'd hurt her, if she screamed while getting out of the car. He'd held her wrists together in one hand so tightly that she had wanted to cry out. But something had stopped her. The fact that there was no point. Where he lived looked the same as her grandmother's village. It, too, was empty, sleeping. Who would hear her, if she did call out? No one had noticed her leave in the car with him. No one would have noticed her get out of the car with him here either.

    So she hadn't screamed or called out once. She had let him lead her into the bedroom without either of them making a sound. The only time she had said anything was when he'd returned later that evening with a Happy Meal and a coke for her. She'd shouted then and he'd slapped her hard across the jaw, sending her back down onto the bed. She'd kicked the coke over and he had called her an ungrateful little bitch. He'd left the coke seeping into the carpet and had taken the Happy Meal with him.

    Now she could hear his footsteps on the stairs once more and she knew that this would be the last time he would come for her. As soon as he opened the bedroom door, she closed her eyes tight and started talking, although not really to him, more to herself.

    “I'm sorry, really sorry, sorry I was bored. It'll never happen again, I swear. If I can just go home, I promise I'll never complain again. I don't like what's happened. Things like this don't happen in our village. Nothing's ever happened like this before. I don't want to be the first one from there that something happens to. I'm sorry. Please, I wish I were home. I just want to go home now. To mum and nan. They'll be worried. I'm scared. Please, oh please.”

    She was crying, as he put his hand over her mouth and pushed down.

    It was five long hot weeks before they found her body. Someone out walking their dog had called it in to the police. The smell had been suffocating, they had said, and the dog had become frantic. When the police had arrived, they found her, barely recognisable, lying face down in a ditch, severely decomposed. They thought it was her from the chain she wore about her ankle and the earrings her mother had given her as a moving present. During the postmortem examination, dental records confirmed her identity and the local community's worst fears. They, too, wished that nothing had happened to break the peace of their village life.