The boy tried to take this in; for him, Marnie could see, the meaning of it lay fully in the words, divorced from body language or tone of voice. ‘She does her shopping down in Wyndlesham,’ he said, as if this explained anything. ‘She likes a pint of Harvey’s.’ He wiped his left forearm across his face. His dog barked suddenly, a small but sharply cut sound that went across the garden like the cry of some less well-known animal. ‘This new bitch of mine,’ the boy told Marnie, ‘I got her from them down the estate. Some say she’s dangerous, but I know she’s not.’ Forelegs braced, its little bristly face sniffing the air, the dog appeared too small, too willing, to be a danger to anyone. Every so often it would gaze up at Marnie or the boy, seeking confirmation of the things it saw. Yes, Marnie wanted to explain: this is grass. It’s a lawn. And that’s a tree, with a pigeon in it. And that, which used to be my dad’s Russian-looking summerhouse, that’s a pile of wood: quite right. This morning my mum died. It was just like her to die without any clothes on, half in and half out of a Russian summerhouse, and be found by firemen. You can tell a lot about her from that. I don’t know, she thought suddenly, what Enny Mae’s going to say.

‘You don’t need worry about this bitch,’ the boy said. ‘She wouldn’t harm a child.’

‘What kind of dog is it?’

The boy gave her a sly look. ‘A working dog,’ he said. ‘An older woman lives here, her name is Anna. She said she had some work she wanted done.’

‘There’s no work,’ Marnie said. ‘I don’t know who you are, but whatever you thought you’d get from her it isn’t here.’

She added: ‘No one lives here now but me.’

The boy blinked. ‘She’s supposed to live round here somewhere,’ he said; then, accepting the situation suddenly, lunged away across the lawn. His shoulders were hunched, his torso compressed and tense, but his stride had a loose, loping quality; the upper and lower halves of him, it seemed, had little experience of each other. The terrier followed, yapping and gambolling, nibbing at his heels for attention. Up at the house, he stopped and fumbled with the side-gate latch. ‘If I did the work, I wouldn’t have to go to the toilet here,’ he promised. ‘I’d go in the village.’ Marnie, completely unable to interpret this plea, felt that they were misunderstanding one another to a degree that could only be her fault. She likes a pint of Harvey’s. Where her mother had met the boy, or how, she preferred not to think.

‘Wait!’ she called. ‘Wait a moment.’