She drew up at the front of the house. Normally it would have been golden with lamplight at this time of night. But it was in darkness, as Inga had said.

Her phone blinked with a voicemail. She began listening to it: something very complicated from Alice about how, in the Renaissance, male writers couldn’t help writing about sexy island women, and at the same time couldn’t stop destroying them either, if you just think about Spenser with Acrasia and Phaedria, and Shakespeare with Sycorax, whom Prospero basically—

Eva got out of the car. As she walked round the front towards the kitchen door, she saw one of the kitchen windows flapping in the wind; the glass had been smashed, and still lay where it had fallen. She peered through the broken window. In the thin light of her phone she saw a vase of the mahonia which Mariam liked to pick for the house on the kitchen table: the wind had blown it over. The puddle of water had spread along the table and over a piece of white paper that was held there by her heavy stone mortar.

Reception was often terrible on this side of the house but there was just enough coverage for the call to go through to the police. Eva was still speaking to the operator as she entered the kitchen. She flicked on the light and stood looking down at the note on the table. She recognised Sister Lucija’s handwriting but whatever it was that the nun had wanted to communicate was lost. She could just make out the words ‘Papa Astrid’.

Eva distinctly remembered the operator, somebody in the police call centre, telling her to leave the premises, even as she left the kitchen and turned towards the back stairs. The rest of the house was silent, as well as darker and colder than she remembered it being for a long time. She switched on lights as she went: up the stairs, along the passage to the landing outside her bedroom, on up the stairs to the attic. As she walked, she called for them – Mariam! Lucija! On the top floor, she opened the door of the room where Mariam slept. The covers were pushed back from the mattress on the floor. There was a knight’s helmet on the chair. One of Mariam’s pretty colourful shirts was hanging over the window. There were a few books on the shelf – a school textbook about Pakistan, some poetry. Words in Sindhi, the language Mariam spoke, maybe; or Urdu? She wasn’t sure. What else? She looked around her. What on earth had happened?

She went downstairs again.