I feel a surge of disappointment. Charlie leans back to put his empty mug down on the windowsill behind him. ‘But, if she did, the answer will be in her notes. She made lots of them. Let me show you her office.’

April seems to be content sitting in her bouncer for the moment, so Charlie turns the sound back up on the television and leads me upstairs. He walks straight ahead, pushing open the door to a small room that looks out over the messy back garden. Any view of the estuary would be from the other side of the house. A large desk fills the area under the window, and there are bookshelves and filing cabinets lining the walls. A slick Apple computer takes pride of place in the centre of the desk. The room is tidy, but I can see from here that the computer screen is dusty from underuse.

Charlie pulls open the top left desk drawer to reveal a series of notebooks crammed inside.

‘Nicki was always writing in these,’ he says.

He closes that drawer and opens the next to expose more notebooks.

‘I haven’t gone through them.’ From the tightening of his voice, I take it he hasn’t wanted to. ‘But all of her research is in here.’ He opens another drawer. ‘She also used to keep diaries when she was younger. Her dad moved to Thailand for work and she’d visit when she could. A lot of what she wrote about back then made it into Secret. I think you’ll find clues as to where she planned to go with the sequel.’

I look up at the crowded bookshelves and notice several Post-it notes sticking out of the tops of some of the books. What pages did she mark? Were they significant?

Nicole did a couple of interviews around the time Secret was published last October, so I already knew that her father is a French chef called Alain Dupré, and that she wrote under her maiden name. But, as she died just two weeks after her book was released, before the sales had taken off, her readers and I don’t know much more about her – it’s very surreal to be standing here in her office.

‘Did she leave notes on her computer, too?’ My mind boggles. Where would I start?

Charlie hesitates almost imperceptibly before reaching behind the screen and feeling for the ON button. The computer fires up with a loud dong.

‘I would’ve thought so,’ he says.

His back is to me, his posture tense. I stare at his frame and out of the blue think of Elliot. It’s been almost six months since we’ve seen each other and, on the whole, I’m coping. But suddenly I miss him intensely.

April lets out a cry downstairs, making Charlie start. ‘Take a seat and have a look,’ he mumbles, leaving me to it.