Tess opens the door again so Baxter can find her and sits down on one of the kitchen chairs, all of a lump. She counts the problems off on her fingers. ‘Georgia is in France. She does not have her phone. That means she also won’t have email unless she happens to be staying in a hotel with internet access. She told me she doesn’t want to be disturbed. She said it was an opportunity to get to know her grandfather, and that not having her phone was a sort of blessing.’ She runs out of fingers. ‘I can’t even quote from the letter.’ She looks at the narrow staircase that leads off the kitchen, up to Georgia’s office, and for a moment she finds herself grumping like an obstreperous teenager. ‘It’s not as if it’s any of my business anyway.’ But she already knows the answer. For as long as she has lived in the house, there have been postcards. Every few days, another postcard came through the letterbox; sometimes they had the annotated circles drawn on one side, and other times there were views of the mountains of the north-west of Scotland, somewhere beyond Ullapool. She had judged him. Judged them. Tess is furious with herself. ‘I am such an idiot! Georgia even said something about Stan having terrible phone reception when the pipe burst in the kitchen and she needed his advice.’ She sighs. ‘All the clues were right there in front of me and I’ve been so obsessed with my own nonsense I haven’t been paying attention.’ She sits down at the table and picks up the soggy sheet of paper by one corner. ‘Fat chance of deciphering this now. If Georgia sent postcards as well, there wouldn’t have been enough room to tell him where she was going. Not in any detail anyway.’

She takes a deep breath. This isn’t going to be easy. Over the last few weeks she has started to use a computer at the library. It’s not that she can’t do it, she has discovered, she just prefers not to. In many ways Stan is the person she has become. Doesn’t like the internet. Prefers paper and pen. The difference is that he has probably always been this way and she hasn’t. Among the three of them, Georgia is the exception: internet banking, emails, messages to the neighbourhood WhatsApp, booking tickets for concerts and ordering books. In administration terms, her life is organised online.