A practitioner can emulate the effect, but it’s a ridiculously high-order spell so I was guessing that this was an unconscious phenomenon. The fae are often lavish in their glamour and I surmise that they deploy it in the same unthinking manner as do young ladies their charms – so sayeth Victor Bartholomew who despite being a dullard and a wanker has yet to steer me wrong.

‘My father was a heroin addict,’ I said. ‘Sometimes it was like living with the walking dead – so I had to get out.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Zoe.

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘You make the tea and I’ll wash up.’

I’d got there just in time – another twenty-four hours and the Environment Agency would have declared the sink a Site of Special Scientific Interest and refused us access. I did briefly consider taking a broom to the spider webs in the corners, but you don’t get the full Studio Ghibli from me without a sizable cash advance.

The disposable phone pinged while I was drying up. Food is terrible here.

That had to be a hospital reference. Was she trying to tell me where she was? Why was she texting me? Was she reaching out or trying to misdirect?

‘Girlfriend?’ asked Zoe when she saw me staring at the phone.

‘Colleague,’ I said without thinking, and texted back. U only have yourself to blame.

Zoe Thomas did have a photograph of herself from before the incident, a head and shoulders portrait in school uniform. In it she’s smiling lopsided at the camera with her head tilted ever so slightly to one side, as if questioning the whole purpose of the exercise. The picture was big enough for me to see that her eyes were blue. I looked up from the photograph to find Zoe staring at me.

‘Your eyes . . .’ I said. ‘When did that happen?’

‘The night I ran away,’ she said. ‘And do you know something – my parents never even noticed.’

‘I think you’d better tell me what happened,’ I said, and she did. Over tea and biscuits.

Even when she was small she liked to go out at night – especially when the moon was up.

‘That’s the best bit about living in the country, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘All the stars.’

I asked her if she used to dance around in the nude and she gave me a funny look.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I’ll tell you afterwards,’ I said.

After Mummy had left, she’d started going further away from home.

‘And this is going to sound weird,’ she said. ‘But I felt like I was being called.’