That’s why I didn’t want Terry with me. Who would want their adult friends to see the child they once were? Standing in the cold, Heather felt a fresh wave of anguish move through her.

‘The ghosts are just too bloody loud.’ She wiped her hands down the front of her jeans and went back inside.

It was after a few hours of sorting and cataloguing that she remembered the attic. There had been no more strange noises, but passing under it again with a mug of tea clutched in both hands, she found her eyes drawn to it. The Man in the Loft, she thought to herself. When I was little, Granddad used to blame the Man in the Loft whenever anything went missing.

It wasn’t a reassuring thought, and Heather knew she would have to go up and check it out, or be doomed to lie in bed that night, listening for the Man in the Loft – or even worse, the soft footsteps of her mother.

‘Christ, what’s wrong with me? There are no monsters in the attic. A couple of days alone in the house and I’m behaving like a hysterical five-year-old.’

An hour later and she was sitting, legs crossed, in the surprisingly comfy space, sorting through a box of old vinyl records. There was a lot of dreck – a lot of bands and singers in strange suits that she did not recognize, and a handful that were promising: Led Zeppelin, Siouxsie Sioux, David Bowie. Her dad’s, no doubt. He’d told her once that when he and her mother had been dating, he had been trying to form his own band; he had been learning the bass guitar, but never quite got the hang of it. Smiling faintly, she put the records to one side, thinking that she would either keep them or put them on eBay, and when she went back to the box, she saw that they had been hiding an old, battered biscuit tin. She levered it out and popped the lid, wrinkling her nose at the dust. Tightly packed inside were two fat bundles of letters, secured with elastic bands.

Each one was addressed to her mother, and the ones in the first bundle looked very old indeed, the envelopes stained and creased, the ink faded to shadows. The ones on the top of the second bundle looked right up to date – she even recognized a recent set of stamps featuring old Doctor Who villains. Unable to resist, Heather pulled out one of the letters from the second bundle and began to read. The correspondent had untidy, expansive writing, and the black inky scrawl stretched from one edge of the paper to the other. The spelling was extremely erratic.

Dear Colleen,