But when I got up, though, I realized his was the one area of my troubled life where I could take some positive action. Cara’s phone call had left me in no doubt that, like it or not, I had to pay another visit to the Lancing bungalow.

I have a kind of rule that, except in special circumstances, I don’t make work calls until after nine thirty. I’m not interested in other people’s morning routines, but I reckon that gives them long enough to have completed them. I’d call Edward later.

I found I was sitting in the kitchen over my second cup of coffee and feeling sorry for myself. Having witnessed depression first-hand from husband and son, I know I’m not a depressive. But that doesn’t stop me from getting down. Non-depressives have a right to feel down too. The only difference is that when we feel down it’s for a reason.

And I know, for me, the only way to get up again is to do something. Preferably something that involves helping someone else. It may sound pious but it’s true – the best way to stop thinking about yourself is to think about others. Maybe I should embroider that on a sampler and hang it on a wall somewhere …?

I rang the care home and said I’d visit Minnie at ten.

She was getting weaker. It was sad to observe, every time I saw her, how much closer the skin was to the bone. And the sequence of strokes had left Minnie’s movement severely impaired.

But she was remarkable. She still somehow managed to read. The local library was good at keeping her supplied with books – one of the librarians delivered them to the care home personally. And it went without saying, they were all about London.

As I had intended, the visit did have a therapeutic effect on me. On Minnie too, I hope. She made me think, as I sometimes do, of the randomness of death. Here was an old woman I didn’t know very well, but whose company I enjoyed. And, probably within a few months, she would no longer be around. I wouldn’t feel exactly grief or bereavement, as I would with a close friend or a family member, just a sense of absence. Why did Minnie have to die?

On the plus side, I left the care home that day knowing that ‘to walk penniless in Mark Lane’ meant to have been swindled. That ‘bunny’ once meant ‘talk’ in Cockney rhyming slang, apparently from ‘rabbit and pork’. Which sounded pretty dubious to me, but then I would never argue with Minnie’s sources. I also discovered that a ‘kingsman’ was an outsized coloured handkerchief worn by costermongers. Though I couldn’t think there’d be many occasions when that would come up in conversation.

Back in the Yeti, I took out my mobile. I knew I had to ring Edward Finch but felt unaccountably unwilling to do so. Probably because I desperately wanted to ring Ben, but I knew I shouldn’t. Mustn’t be a suffocating mother, must wait for him to contact me. Wait for him to volunteer what – if anything – was happening with Tracey.