Her mother’s forgotten phone lay as dormant as her own on the table beside the whisky bottle, the only sounds coming from the shuddering fridge, bubbling flue and the still-nameless puppy, curled up in front of the Aga, having a whisker-twitching dream. She thought jealously of Ronnie partying with friends, merry on half a glass of white, as quick to reel in admirers as she was to cut ties.

Looking at her watch, she was shocked to see barely a few minutes had passed since her toast with Lester.

The hiatus was unsettling, making her mind breed negative thoughts, like bacteria on Petri dishes: a custody battle, her teenage mistakes brought out, her unsuitability as a mother, her family’s tragic track record.

At seven thirty on the dot, Pax called Mack’s mobile from the house landline to wish Kes artificially bright night-nights, ignoring her husband’s hissed, ‘Have you got my messages?’ before he handed the phone across to their sleepy son. She kept Kes talking too long because her heart hurt, quickly hanging up before his father came back on the line, ignoring Mack’s three callbacks, then taking the phone off the hook, pacing all the while. She knew it was childish to avoid talking to the husband she’d lain awake beside just hours earlier, but she was afraid of more one-upmanship and manipulation, of his anger, or, even worse, that stiff-jawed Happy New Year politeness the Forsyths did. She didn’t want Mack to have a Happy New Year; she wanted him to get food poisoning.

The clock hands had barely moved.

She lapped her way around the table again, eyeing the bottle, wondering how far down it she’d need to go to kill the grief throbbing in her chest, to still the ever-moving legs. The reception of the old radio on the windowsill was too crackly to endure – how her grandmother had managed four decades of The Archers Omnibus with it was beyond belief. It was too cold to settle anywhere else in the house, and she didn’t trust the chimneys enough to light a fire. The freezing fog that forecasters had been warning about was already cloaking the Comptons up on their high ridge.

She looked up Luca O’Brien’s number on her mother’s phone contacts, using the landline to dial it. An automated female voice invited her to speak after the tone.

She matched its robotic, stern depth. ‘This is Patricia Forsyth, Ronnie Ledwell’s daughter. I shall be collecting you from the airport.’ She reeled off her own mobile number. ‘I’ll hold your name up at Arrivals, but if you miss me for any reason, please call me. Don’t call the house – nobody’s here.’

Older sister Alice, who had Googled O’Brien extensively, insisted he was a charlatan, unable to hold down a job for long, his departure from the legendary German stud Gestüt Fuchs veiled in secrecy. Their brother Tim knew a wine grower in South Africa whose besotted showjumping wife had spent a fortune on horses at the Irishman’s recommendation when he was based there. There was also a strong suspicion that he’d once been Ronnie’s lover. None of the three children trusted their mother’s judgement.