Helen had sat in the stuffy yellow heat of the loft for half an hour, her breathing shallow as though the insulation was asbestos, choking her, gazing at the photographs.

Could she be wrong?

No. It was definitely Marion. What the fuck was going on? Did Sean know she was still alive? Did Alice? Maybe that’s where Alice had disappeared to. Helen remembered how Marion had once acted oddly when Helen told her Sean was picking her up from the gym, how she had suddenly announced that, instead of leaving, she was going to try out the sauna. It had suited Helen to have a friend who didn’t know her husband, but on any occasion when the two of them could have encountered each other, Marion had made herself scarce.

It also explained how Marion’s Facebook profile was so minimalist – no photos, very little background, hardly any friends. Marion had called herself a Luddite and a technophobe, and claimed she only joined Facebook so that she could communicate with her brother in Africa . . . a brother who probably didn’t even exist.

It seemed inconceivable, but it was true: Marion was her husband’s first wife. Alice’s mother. And yet she hadn’t seemed particularly interested in talking about Alice with her, or expressed any interest in seeing her. She’d encouraged Helen in her moaning about how awful teenagers were. She’d been far more interested in Frankie, cooing over photos on her phone and asking lots of questions.

Back in the hotel, Helen sat for seven minutes, according to the big station clock on the wall across the lobby, her nerves increasing with each slow steady sweep of the big hand. What good would it do, to talk to Marion now – she tried to start thinking of her as Penny, but kept defaulting to Marion – with Frankie and Alice both missing? She bit her lip, and thought about leaving again, going home, to see if there was any news. Frankie was her only priority now. She pulled her phone out of her handbag to check it, but the screen was blank. Damn – she’d forgotten to charge it last night, yet again. Or rather, she’d plugged it in, but not noticed that the switch was off at the wall.

And yet she knew she wasn’t going to wimp out now. She couldn’t. There were questions she had to ask: why had Sean lied to her, and to Alice, all these years? Since Penny wasn’t dead, had they ever even got divorced? Was Sean a bigamist? When the registrar had asked he’d said he’d never been married before, and they hadn’t checked up. Helen twisted her wedding ring around her finger and gulped. If Sean could lie to her about something this important, what else was he hiding? She had to talk to Penny, or Marion, or whatever she was called now, to get the facts before confronting Sean.