‘Really?’ Jake asks, sitting up a little now, interested. ‘And? Did you notice anything? Any signs of what was to come?’

‘Well, Charlotte was drunk, of course,’ Hilary states, recovering herself, ‘but Charlotte was always drunk, nothing unusual there.’

‘She had a drink problem?’ Leah asks quietly.

‘Oh, yes! Once, when Greg and I were living in that flat,’ she says, warming to the subject, ‘there was an afternoon when I was in the garden and I looked up and saw the two children sitting on the windowsill of the bedroom upstairs, their legs dangling out over the edge. Two little ones – younger than Matthew is now. And you’ve seen the height of those windows. It must be a drop of twenty feet at least.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I called out to them to get back inside, but they just kept sitting there.’

It had been raining that day, Hilary remembers. She had been outside, her shoulders up around her ears as she hastily unpegged her washing when she had spotted them.

‘So I ran up to the back door of the house and started madly banging, trying to get their mother’s attention. But nothing.’

‘Where was she?’ Leah asks.

‘In the living room. Asleep.’

‘But the children – did you manage to wake her?’

‘Eventually. I broke into the house.’

‘No way!’ Jake says, impressed, and she assures him that, yes, she actually did.

The one and only time in her life she’d ever smashed a window. She still thrills to the memory of taking that rock from the edge of the flower bed and sending it crashing through the pane of glass. Then, manoeuvring her hand in to turn the lock and open the kitchen door, crunching over the glass on the floor. She’d gone straight upstairs, her heart in her mouth as she entered that bedroom, praying with every step they wouldn’t fall before she got to them.

Afterwards, she had felt rage as she pulled the window shut, the two children scampering away from her downstairs. Such carelessness! People like that didn’t deserve to have children.

‘I found her afterwards – Charlotte,’ she tells them, unable to keep the cold disgust from her voice. ‘Laid out on the couch. Drunk. And, my God, the uproar when she found out about the broken window. Accused me of vandalizing her property, claimed I’d made the whole thing up about the kids. Of course, there was no love lost between us, not after she forced me to put my dog down, but I was trying to help her children. You’d think she’d be grateful. If it hadn’t been for me they might have fallen.’

She realizes her voice is shaking. The others watch her warily.

‘She made you put your dog down?’ Jake says, and she sees his eyes flickering to the boy who has abandoned his bug hotel, turning his attention now to Mona stretched out on the lawn.