‘I wonder,’ says Georgia, thoughtfully. ‘When Keith boxed it in, Annie and I were away youth hostelling on the west coast; it was at the end of my second year at university and it was a treat for doing well in my exams. We already had the electric cooker so the range hadn’t been used for a while and it was just gathering dust. Soot kept falling down the chimney and Annie got so exasperated with it. So when we were away, Keith got it all framed out and plastered. Annie was so pleased.’ Georgia traces a letter G in the sooty dust on the hotplate. ‘But I remember coming into the scullery from the garden on the evening we got home and they were standing in the kitchen. They didn’t know I was there, and I heard her ask if he had looked in the oven before he started the work, and he said he hadn’t. He was quite upset that he’d done something wrong but she just hugged him and told him she thought she might have put something in it for safekeeping when she was having a clear-out one day. And then she said that she was probably mistaken and it wasn’t important.’

Georgia bends down and grips the handle on the oven door. She turns it and the door swings open. Inside is a small box. ‘What have we here then? Is a fifty-year-old mystery going to be revealed?’ She reaches for it. ‘Or not, I suppose. It might be empty.’

But when Georgia straightens up and opens the box, Tess can see that inside it is a small key.

Chapter 61

July 2011

‘I need you to go in the attic for me,’ says Georgia. ‘I was going to ask Stan but he had to get back up north to be ready for Hazel coming out of the hospice. She’s been in for a week’s respite care.’

‘You want me to go up there right now?’ Tess is at the scullery sink, washing the courgettes Georgia had collected from Stan’s allotment that morning.

‘Soon,’ Georgia replies, ‘I’ll be in my office for the afternoon,’ and she disappears up the uncarpeted wooden stairs to the room above the scullery.

Tess sighs. Things have been rather strained since the little box was found.

‘If only Georgia was consistently one thing or another,’ she had said to Fiona just last week. ‘One minute she is chatty and friendly and as soon as I think we are getting somewhere, the shutters come down again and we are back to monosyllables. I can’t make it out at all.’

‘She has her reasons,’ Fiona had said.

‘I wish she would tell me what they are. We’re going to be living in the same house for the next twenty months, and this is bloody painful.’

‘I expect she’ll tell you in her own good time.’