‘Ah, here it is, and you’d better get back, your dog will be waiting.’ I was about to give the key to him, but both his hands were occupied with the crucially placed bin boxes. He gave me a look as if to say – and now what? I leant over to put the key in his mouth and he obediently parted his lips. I ushered him towards the door, opened it and indicated he should leave. ‘Heartless woman,’ he muttered as he stepped out, just as a group of people passed by on the pavement below. They took one look at him and hooted with laughter as he hotfooted it back over to his house.

‘Got shut out, got shut out,’ he mumbled out of the corner of his mouth as he raced up his front steps. I couldn’t resist waiting to see what he did. He turned away, gingerly lowered the box covering his backside, took the key from his mouth and opened his door. He backed into his doorway, shut the door and the spectators walked on. A few moments later, a text pinged through. You could have lent me a dressing gown at least.

I texted back. Sorry, didn’t think. Not every day a naked man turns up on my doorstep. Besides, why spoil all the fun by giving you clothes?

He texted back. I get a feeling you enjoyed that, Cruella.

I texted back a smiling emoji.

I went back to the sites I’d been looking at. I closed the military links, cleared what I had put in and typed in ‘Grace Harris, birthplace London’. The site asked for a year of birth. Hmm, I thought, let me think. As Marcia said, if Billy died in the Second World War, he might have just been in his twenties or a little older so that narrows the margin a bit. Grace would probably have been born around the same time.

As when I looked for Billy, there were pages and pages of women with the name Grace Harris. Two thousand in all. Can I be bothered? I asked myself. Surely this is madness? But something had gripped me – not the fact that I believed for a moment that Grace and Billy had anything to do with me, it was more like doing a particularly challenging puzzle. I wanted to see if I could find two people with the names I had been given who lived reasonably near to each other. If I could, the chances of them having known each other was likely. As I continued my search, some pages connected to different links, some showing the censuses taken, which revealed addresses and occupations. Now I know why people get hooked on this, I thought as I continued scrolling through. It’s addictive stuff.