Once wholly across the boundary, Lou slipped into her now familiar routine, of pulling up her hood. Heading for the High Street, she stopped at the newsagent to put some credit on her phone, before retracing her steps back to the privacy of St Mary’s. She took the scrap of paper from her pocket and dialled the number.

‘Y’hello?’

‘Will? Is that you? It’s me. Lou.’ Had she even given him her name? ‘We met at the library. You helped me research the Mand –’

‘Lou! Hi. I wondered whether you might call. I just wanted to say … was the hot chocolate and biscuit a bit over the top yesterday? I –’

‘The what? No. I was just phoning because I wondered whether you could tell me how to research a living person. Actually, they might be dead. But they were alive.’

‘I hope so. Otherwise there won’t be much of a paper trail to follow.’ Will laughed, but his joke fell on deaf ears.

‘I think the person might have lived at Hill House as an evacuee during the Second World War,’ Lou said. ‘Do you think you might be able to help find her?’

‘If they were a child in the forties, there’s a good chance they’ll still be alive. What’s the interest?’

‘She’s a friend of a friend. A sort of step-sister of a friend.’

‘Why don’t you come into the library? We can look her up together.’

‘I can’t today. I don’t have time. If you’re too busy –’

‘Not at all. Tell me everything you know.’

Lou gave Will the scant details of Elizabeth Goodwill that she possessed – her rough age, the possibility that her parents had died in the War – and he promised to call her back. After hanging up, Lou checked her phone for messages or missed calls. Nothing. She was about to shove her phone back in her pocket, when it buzzed. It was a message. From an unknown number. She clicked on the electronic envelope.

Your application for extended compassionate leave has been authorised. Return date set as 2 January. R Turner, HR Officer, Iceworld.

Lou read the message for a second time. She hadn’t applied for leave, extended or otherwise. She just hadn’t turned up for work one day. Why was she even surprised? If that house beyond the wall could bounce her around through time, was it beyond the realms of possibility that it could smooth things over with her employer so she could return to a life of passing curry-inspired pasta dishes over a scanner? At least there would be a job to go back to when she returned for good. For Good. It sounded so … final.

The clock of St Mary’s chimed two. Lou hovered around the overgrown gravestones for a few minutes longer. When the sense of duty finally kicked in, she left the churchyard and made her way reluctantly down the alley.

Halfway down the road, a large car – a dark people carrier – passed her and pulled up on the grass verge, in Stephen’s parking spot. The driver’s door opened, and a man got out. He looked at their house and seemed to hesitate before walking slowly up the path. He knocked on the door. Lou ducked behind a neighbour’s overgrown hedge. She could do without making pleasantries with some stranger today. She peered around the leafless branches. The man stepped back from the door and tipped his head to look at the upstairs windows. Everything about him – the jeans and padded jacket, the stubble, the close-cropped hair, greying at the temples – reminded Lou of all the plain-clothes police officers that had trooped in and out of their home recently. Was this one making a house call with news about the inquest? Lou slumped against the fence.