Anna walked on to it. There was almost no sound. She could feel the rays of the sun on her face. Elly loosed her hand and danced off over the inviting space.

‘It was very big.’ Anna pointed, swinging her arms to try and explain it. ‘All across here. That wing over there had been burnt, but there was a lot of the front left – here. And it was beautiful – the façade of it, anyway – like a Victorian stately home. And there was a water tower about here. Square thing, all black . . .’ She picked out as best she could the places where she thought there had been airing courts, wards, filling in the shape. They walked round in silence for a few minutes, turning, staring, trying to imagine.

As she did so Anna saw something incongruous trapped in the earth at her feet. Pale blue, icy, pressed down and half hidden. She fished a knife from her picnic bag and prised it out of the ground: a round, plastic bead, its hole for stringing blocked with a brown thread of soil. She turned it round in her fingers, cleaning the outside until it felt warm and smooth. Olivia’s voice came to her: ‘I wish I had something to hold on to: a bead, a stone, a strand of hair, anything to call mine.’ She slipped the bead into the pocket of her jeans.

She walked slowly over to Jake and saw him watching her, taking in the sight of her as she came to him.

‘After I’d seen this place I knew I couldn’t condemn her,’ she said.

Jake nodded, put his hand on her shoulder, and she turned, reaching up to kiss him.

But then Elly was pulling her arm, impatient. ‘Come on. Let’s do something.’

‘You’re right,’ Anna said. ‘Let’s get the picnic going.’

They found a spot on the grass not far away and put the rug down, laying on it French bread and cheeses, crisps and samosas, fruit and a Thermos of coffee. Wrapped in their coats and scarves, they sat looking across the countryside, at the gentle swell of the land and brown, scoured fields, oblong farmhouses like Lego pieces, dots of bushes. Elly was quiet, eating crisps with sudden concentration.

Anna sat back, feet stretched out, the wind ruffling her hair. She had bitten into a samosa, delicious spiced potato, plump peas.

Even up here there was very little for them to say about Kate and Olivia that they had not said many times already. There had had to be an inquest after Olivia’s death. At the funeral Anna had been startled by the intensity of her own grief for Olivia. And for Krish struggling with his guilt, his new sense of release. She thought of him now almost as a brother to whom she owed protection.

There came to her a feeling of peace, of standing outside time, as if she could walk along the ridge of Krish’s life from up here and see that he would live through this, would surface again.