‘I told you – I didn’t text you,’ he said. He stopped wiping down the countertop and came over to stand mawkishly in front of her. ‘I’m really sorry that you were scared. But you’ll understand that I was freaked out too, won’t you? By seeing her.’ He pointed at the computer on the table.

She dropped the sponge and wiped her hands on the dishcloth and went to sit back at the table. ‘Show me, Vincent. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He brought up a photo and turned the screen to her, and now she could recognise what she was seeing. The image brought an instant spurt of shock through her, the set still bringing a visceral reaction. When she’d wandered through that eerie chapel set, she’d thought about her father’s funeral, the overstuffed emptiness of the gesture, and had started to cry.

Vincent framed a section of the photo, a segment with the window from the chapel set and the right side of the altar, and zoomed in. Now Petra recognised that this was what she’d been looking at before – the white slash was the edge of the altar lit by a bright spot from beyond the fake window. And there, under the altar, someone was crouching.

The more Vincent zoomed in, the more grainy the shape became, until she was seeing the same segment he’d shown her before.

‘Can you see her now?’

‘I did, I think, for a second. But I don’t anymore.’

‘Look again,’ he said, highlighting the blur under the altar – and as it was selected, the image switched to a negative, and there, clearly, was a young woman’s face. Like an optical illusion, she’d been looking at it all this time, and now that she recognised it, she couldn’t unsee it.

‘Okay, I see her now.’ The idea that this actor could have been hiding there every time she’d gone through the set creeped Petra out. ‘What about her? Did she jump out at you or something?’

‘Oh,’ Vincent said. ‘Oh, yeah, there’s no way you’d know… Petra, that’s Beccie.’

She put out her hand towards Vincent for a moment, retracted it. ‘No. It’s not.’ Looked into his face. Her heart was literally aching. ‘You know it’s not her. These shows, they mess with you deliberately. When I went in there, I thought of my father. There’s all this imagery – they do it on purpose, draw on our emotions, our losses. It makes for good theatre, I suppose.’

But Vincent didn’t seem to be hearing her as he scanned through another folder and clicked on a file. A picture of a lovely, pretty girl came up – her eyes looked tired but she was beaming a warm smile. She had her ringlets tied back in a red ribbon; she was wearing a sweat top with narrow horizontal blue and white stripes.

Vincent brought up the image from the fake chapel, adjusted the contrast, upped the colour saturation. The actor was wearing a narrow-striped top and a red ribbon in her curly hair. And, yes, she did look a hell of a lot like the smiling girl in the photo.