It turned out that not much changed, from teenager to teenager over the decades, either. Because on arrival in Falmouth, having caught a hair-raisingly pricy cab there alone (‘You two stay here! Have fun! I’m sure I won’t be long,’ she had trilled to George, on the verge of hysteria), she discovered exactly what the ‘bit of trouble’ Izzie had referred to, so cagily, actually entailed. For a start, when she tracked them down in a small gift shop, the three teenagers were all chewing minty gum with suspiciously glassy eyes (booze? cannabis? Em speculated, narrowing her own eyes to slits). The second item of note was that there was a large balding, rather angry-looking man standing alongside them, with a meaty hand clamped on Jack’s shoulder.

‘This your lad, is it?’ the man said when Em burst breathlessly onto the scene, still shoving her purse back in her bag from paying the cab driver.

‘Yes,’ Em said, blinking rapidly as she tried to take in her surroundings. Watercolour seascapes on the walls. Jewellery in glass boxes. Small clay birds on a white shelf. Postcards and prints and cards. And the three kids huddled together, heads down, guilt written all over their faces. ‘It is. What’s happened? What’s he done?’

‘It was just a stupid dare, I wasn’t going to nick it,’ Jack protested without preamble, and Em’s heart sank into her sandals.

‘Yeah, but you did, mate,’ the man pointed out. ‘You stuffed it in your pocket and left my shop. Without paying. Which, I think you’ll find, definitely counts as “nicking it”.’

A blonde woman browsing at the rack of postcards turned her head in interest just then, although she turned it straight back again, upon encountering Em’s eyeball-blistering scowl.

‘What a stupid thing to do, Jack,’ Em said. ‘Especially in a shop like this, where everything has been hand-made by artists, rather than mass-produced in a factory for some faceless corporation or—’ She broke off, aware this might be the wrong thing to say. ‘Not that it’s okay to steal anywhere, obviously,’ she added in her most severe voice, for the benefit of the shopkeeper, plus the eavesdropping woman, who didn’t seem in any great hurry to move on. ‘Honestly, Jack, I thought I’d brought you up better than this. I’m ashamed. What have you got to say for yourself?’

‘She said the thirteenth shop, and this was the thirteenth shop, so I had to—’