Four hours later, she was back at the end of the garden, where, alone with her thoughts in the sun, she made the same mistake as the firemen – although what she thought she saw at the base of the summerhouse was not a heap of embers but an illustration from an old-fashioned children’s book. Kegs and brassbound caskets were depicted spilling their contents – surely ‘treasure’? – across the floor of a sea-polished cave, in the dimness of which it was difficult to tell salty pebbles from jewels the size of hen’s eggs or hanks of weed from fabrics rich and strange.

A washy resolve converted this semiotic boutique to something she could understand: burst removers’ boxes, some of them twenty years old, full of stuff she had almost managed to forget. Her father’s collection of ancient maps and charts, curtains Anna couldn’t be persuaded to throw out. Christmas tree decorations. A Hornby trainset still in its box. A cannon. Coloured plastic crockery too small for a picnic, too large for a toy. Trick items Marnie had collected, age seven, when she determined to be a magician: joke liquorice, ‘X-Ray Specs’, handcuffs you couldn’t take off. There was a japanned box in which you placed a billiard ball you would never find again, though you could hear it rattling about in there forever. There was the cup with a reflected face in the bottom that turned out not to be your own; the valentine heart which lit itself up by means of loving diodes within. They were children’s things, made of Chinese plastic, cheap rubber, feathers: objects trivial in their day but now of great value to collectors.

‘I feel at a loss,’ Marnie told herself.

While she was in Lewes, the police had given up on James the cat and departed on some other errand. Marnie was relieved. Their energy had been a burden, on a day when she didn’t have much energy of her own. Should she have offered them a cup of tea? They hadn’t seemed to expect it.