I don’t speak. Whole seconds tick by. She doesn’t recognise me at all. Me and her in the same space and time, feet away for the first time in years.

‘How about a toastie? Extra salad cream?’

Her eyes become hooded. Her face darkens.

There it is. The flicker.

‘Jesus! No! No! Christ no!’ she screams, like she’s being led towards the Wicker Man.

She drops the watering can with a clatter and the door flings back. She runs into the hall, skidding on another coconut mat which slips beneath her feet. She screams for her life.

‘Somebody! Help me! Help me!’

There’s nobody around, she’s made sure of that, moving to somewhere no other sod lives. She runs, up the wide, winding staircase two at a time. A distant door slams. I retrieve my box from the flower pot and place it down beside my rucksack and the shabby chic wooden sign that reads Home Is Where The Heart Is in curly script. The hallway is peppered with photos – skiing, Christmases, pumpkin-carving, first day at school. Ashton laughing his head off at some clown; Mabli cuddling one of her dearly departed rabbits.

The place is magnificent – I can tell that from the hallway cos you can see in to all the other ground floor rooms – the enormous pine kitchen with white marble island, the sprawling family living room with its gigantic squashy cream chairs. On a thin table in the hallway sits the most ornate bunch of flowers I’ve ever seen – funeral flowers, it looks like – blue hydrangeas, cream roses, white carnations and Asiatic lilies stretched wide open like they’re laughing. It looks like it’s been stolen from Liberace’s headstone. I pick up the card. My offer still stands. In Deepest Sympathy – FLC.

Freddie. Litton. Cheney. Same gilt-edged card.

I close the front door behind me, checking momentarily outside for signs of heroic lumberjacks or maple syrup sellers who have heard her screams, but seeing signs of neither, I climb the stairs. There are many doors on the first-floor landing but it’s obvious which one she’s behind – the closed one, at the end of the cream runway – I hear her breathing heavily, a muffled high-pitched wheeze, and the door judders, like she has her back against it.

‘Seren?’ The wheezing stops, like she’s clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘I want to see you. Let me in.’

‘The police are coming,’ she says with a shaking voice. ‘They’ll be here any second. And I’ve got a gun.’

‘What are you going to tell them? Your dead sister’s ghost has come to attack you? Come on, I want to talk. You owe me that at least having shot me in the face and buried me. I don’t have a weapon. And I only have one hand. You’re properly in the driving seat here.’