‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault. I promise it’s not your fault. Everything’s going to be OK.’

There was a soft breeze as she opened the front door a while later, Callum taking her hand and tottering along next to her as they made their way from the house, along Crofton Road. Sadie walked a few steps ahead, her hair swishing against the top of her rucksack.

As they approached the tennis courts Gabriela looked sidelong at Sadie to check if the venue threw up any associations from the incident in the playground a little further along the path, but her daughter looked undaunted. Briefly, Gabriela bristled at the thought of leaving them there, but then she remembered, with a further chill, that it really could have happened anywhere.

‘They’re supervised all day, right?’ she probed the coaches before leaving.

‘Of course,’ they smiled back at her, just another diligent mother making sure her babies were safe. ‘They won’t be out of our sight.’

‘I’ll pick you up at four, OK?’ She kissed each of them on the forehead and watched them run towards the other children, falling into easy conversation with faces she didn’t recognise.

Turning reluctantly from the courts, she moved automatically towards the café, reluctant to head straight home, back to the incarceration of those four walls. Besides, she wasn’t ready to leave the children just yet, not entirely.

Walking in the direction of South End Green, her feet moving of their own accord along the path they knew so well, she reached the top of Kite Hill, the view of London spilling across the skyline like the chaotic signature of a life support monitor; she considered stopping for a moment to take in the skyline. But when she reached the bench, she saw it was already taken by a couple of women lost in conversation, side by side. The younger one was seated on the bench, her hand resting on a double pushchair; the older woman in a trench coat. How she envied them. When was the last time she had been out for a walk with a friend? The very prospect of it felt odd, and yet so much of her youth had been spent here on the Heath, roaming every inch of it with Saoirse on long hot summers and dark wet winters that seemed they would never end.

Looking back through a nostalgic lens, the light bleeding through the leaves at the tops of the trees, she pictured them sprawling on the long grass at the end of Fitzroy Park, where a secret world opened out at the end of the lane. Their very own Narnia.

It was the same lane her mother and father and she would amble down years earlier, her mother regaling them with the lyrics of Keats who also used to walk here.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?