‘I doubt it. She doesn’t have family, as far as I know, and we don’t get a lot of passers-by up here, so there’s no one for her to tell, apart from her animals.’

‘Thank you, Frankie.’ Irena breathed out loudly and returned to her seat.

Frank turned away from her without answering and picked their plates up off the table. Maureen was the only person who had ever called him Frankie before, and the memory had brought unexpected tears to his eyes. Blinking them away as he tipped the uneaten food into the bin, he washed the plates and then dried his hands on the tea towel.

‘Right, I need to nip out for a bit,’ he said turning to Irena. ‘Will you be all right till I get home?’

‘You are not go to police?’ she asked warily.

‘No, of course not,’ he assured her, lifting his coat off a hook on the back of the door. ‘I’m going to the shop to pick up a few bits, that’s all. If anything happens while I’m out – which I’m sure it won’t – my mobile number is on the pad next to the phone in the hall.’

Frank’s phone started ringing as he was pulling into the car park behind the supermarket, and he smiled when he saw his daughter’s name on the screen.

‘Hello, love. I’ve not heard from you in a while. How’s it going?’

‘You tell me?’ Jo replied sharply. ‘Yvonne sent me a message telling me you’ve caught some kind of bug, but I’m not to worry, because your niece is looking after you.’

‘Yvonne?’ Frank frowned. ‘I didn’t know she had your number.’

‘I gave it to her before we left, so she could let me know if anything happened to you,’ said Jo. ‘And I’m glad I did, or I’d never have found out about this. So who is this mysterious cousin I seem to have acquired overnight, because this is the first I’ve ever heard of her.’

Aware that she would react badly if she heard he’d invited an illegal immigrant with a violent trafficker on her tail into his home, Frank said, ‘She’s just a lass who got lost on a night out with her mates. I caught her trying to break into the barn in the early hours, and it was freezing, so I let her spend the night in your room.’

‘Are you crazy?’ Jo spluttered. ‘What if she’d let someone in when you went to sleep and they’d murdered you in your bed?’

‘I doubt she’d have risked that after having my gun aimed at her head.’

‘Oh, my God, Dad, why have you still got that? I thought you said you were getting rid of it when you retired? What if they’d wrestled it off you and you’d got shot?’