Lee looked sheepish. ‘Sorry. I did the diva thing again. Mum rang here to check on me once too often and so I got a late booking at a guesthouse in Wells and took Daisy to build a few sandcastles while the sunshine lasts. I was anxious so I turned my phone off. I overreacted but I felt everything closing in on me. I should at least have left you a note.’

Aaron nodded, knowing with sick certainty that ‘everything closing in on me’ was Lee-speak for ‘I was perilously close to completely losing my shit’.

‘Problem is, Mum did find a note,’ he said gently, and filled his brother in about its contents.

‘Crap! That must have fallen out of my stuff when I was moving here. I haven’t felt like that lately. I think it’s just a bit of venting left over from when I’d realised Beth wasn’t bothered about being part of Daisy’s life. I am such a fuck-up.’ Looking helpless, Lee ran a hand over his hair.

‘There’s something else.’ Aaron hated to complicate the delicate situation but didn’t see any option. ‘Apparently, Alice has left Hugo. When you vanished at the same time …’

Lee’s hand dropped. ‘Alice has left Hugo?’ he said blankly. ‘So where’s she gone?’

Aaron could only shrug. ‘I didn’t have a chance to ask Clancy if she knew anything before she rang off just now. She’s coping with her own dramas.’ Which there was no point in heaping on Lee at this second. ‘You ring Mum. I want a word with Jordy and Anabelle.’

He pulled on a sweatshirt over his T-shirt and, deciding to leave Nelson behind in case Jordy got loud and Nelson met aggression with aggression, he let himself out into the bright and breezy day and set off across the village.

As he strode along the dusty footpath that took him through the jumble of tiled cottages that was Trader’s Place as a short cut to Droody Road, he replayed the conversation with Clancy. Home’s got to be more than just a roof over your head. Harry has that in Nelson’s Bar but it doesn’t make him happy. Then something about Rory. In parallel, he heard her making a remark in relation to herself. I don’t have a home. It wasn’t hard to join up the dots but he wasn’t sure he liked the picture.

He arrived at Jordy and Anabelle’s place, half hidden behind the green crinkled leaves of a hornbeam hedge, and knocked at the kitchen door. He was answered in a second, Jordy throwing it open, expression turning belligerent as he saw Aaron. ‘Oh, yeah, getting involved again, are you?’

He stumped back into the house, leaving Aaron to follow him into the kitchen where Anabelle stood by the table, her skin a contrasting pallor to Jordy’s angry, dull red.

Aaron went straight to the point. ‘I thought you’d like to know that Harry’s safe. He’s in London again. With Rory and Clancy.’