Keith – Dad – rubbed his face with his hand. ‘Darling, when Ruth, Mum, died, I … I started a lot of emails that I didn’t send. I’ve always been a pick-up-the-phone sort of bloke. I thought it was better to, you know, speak to you in person but then …’ He shrugged, and smiled. ‘You know what would make all this easier?’

Years of therapy? A gun? Subtitles?

‘What’s that?’

‘A nice cup of tea.’

‘Seriously?’ She’d expected him to say whisky.

He nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a nice cup of tea.’

Tara couldn’t speak. Again, tea. Tea had always been their thing, their in-joke. He’d poured her her very first milky cup, aged three, to her granny’s horror: ‘He’ll be giving her alcohol next! Teaching her to smoke!’ (That wasn’t an actual memory; it was a memory of what Ruth said her mother had said. But it had been repeated often enough to stand in its own right.)

I would advise a client to ask him to leave, she thought. No, not ask, tell. It’s outrageous.

Yet she couldn’t. Even with this fury simmering in her, Tara couldn’t bring herself to tell him to leave. What if that was it? What if she never saw him again? It would definitely be her fault he’d left this time.

‘You look like you could do with one,’ he added. ‘Why don’t I make it? I bet I can guess where.’

‘No! No. Sit down.’

Tara moved around the kitchen on autopilot – the tea bags, the kettle, the teapot which was in the same place it had always been. Keith didn’t seem remotely on edge. He was too busy charming Sybil, the traitor, who was curling around the doorway, eyeing him up while snaking her tail in a flirty manner Tara hadn’t seen before.

‘Have you inherited him along with this house?’ he asked. ‘Very Ruth, a black cat. Chic!’

‘I’m looking after her for a friend,’ she said, shortly.

‘What’s she called?’

‘Sybil.’

‘She’s a very elegant cat, aren’t you? Yes, you are.’

Tara played for time, hoping her brain would snap into gear and make sense of this situation, but she couldn’t get hold of any sensible thoughts: they kept slipping away, overwhelmed by a curdling fear that she was handling this badly.

Eventually, she turned to face her father across the marble counter. ‘I don’t know how to say this without sounding rude, so I’m just going to say it: what are you doing here?’

‘I was looking at a property in Perryfield for an old friend who’s thinking of buying it. Turville Court – do you know it? Lovely old pile, two hundred acres, woodland. He asked me to have a look around, see what I thought.’