Cressida gave a shrug as though Theresa was stupid, and said in that swooping tone, ‘Noooo! He was in the assembly hall. But he was a long way away. I didn’t really see him. I was bored.’

Theresa’s fingers gripped Cressida’s shoulder.

She was getting somewhere.

But at that moment the phone in her pocket buzzed again.

‘Hi, Theresa. I ran across the road but once I’d locked the van he’d vanished. I can’t imagine how he disappeared so quickly. Really. I can have only averted my eyes for fifteen seconds and whoosh – gone!’

‘Did you look up the hill?’

‘Of course. I looked in every direction. I’m beginning to wonder if he wasn’t a hallucination.’

Lola, already dressed in her school uniform, came out of the bedroom and dragged Cressida back inside.

‘Oh, and by the way, you’d better get back here pretty damn quick, or La Mosaïque is going to fold in days. Three days ago we might have been in the ketchup, but now we’re positively swimming in it.’

From downstairs, Imogen let out an anguished cry.

‘I have to go, Carol. Speak soon.’

Theresa ran down the stairs as fast as she could.

Imogen was standing in the kitchen, holding her hand under the cold tap. ‘Burned myself. Stupid.’

‘Shall I . . . ?’

‘Just leave me alone.’

Theresa crept back up the stairs and quickly dressed. When she came back down Cressida and Lola were tucking into breakfast.

‘I’ve decided to go into school today,’ said Imogen. ‘With the girls. So please could you stay here, just in case. Hold the fort.’

Theresa said yes. What else could she do? But she wondered why on earth she was here.

After they had gone, the house descended into an eerie silence, with only the ticking of the kitchen clock to break the monotony. Theresa wandered around for a while. She sat on Chloe’s bed and pulled out the drawers hoping something would prove to be a clue to her whereabouts. But it was only the usual things you’d find in a teenage schoolgirl’s room: socks, T-shirts, pants and weekend clothes.

Theresa went downstairs, made herself a coffee and flopped down on to the sofa. She tried to put herself into Chloe’s mind. But the impossible thing was to imagine her mind under the influence of some bald old man. She felt sure now that Cressida was fantasising or confused about his wearing a brown dress. Unless perhaps this Laurence was a transsexual teacher …

On the shelf beneath the coffee table there was a pile of magazines and the orange spine of a photo album, exactly like her own, which she had been so worried about during the night.

She wondered if she hadn’t gone mad and inadvertently thrown the photo album into her bag and brought it with her and not left it on the counter back in the kitchen of La Mosaïque. As she reached forward and pulled it out, she vaguely recalled a Christmas when she’d absent-mindedly bought two for the price of one albums, gave one to her daughter and in the end kept the other for herself.