But, of course, Fethering, like so many other places, did give way to the relentless march of the multinationals. And, though Carole at first condemned the fickleness of the locals who immediately flooded into the new Starbucks, she did occasionally find herself ending up in there. She had even been heard to order, ‘A black Americano, please.’

There wasn’t a regular pattern to when she went out for coffee. Apart from mealtimes, the two fixed points of Carole’s day were Gulliver’s walks on Fethering Beach – as soon as it was light in the mornings and just before it got dark in the evenings. She had bought the dog initially so that she didn’t look lonely when out walking. After leaving the Home Office – slightly earlier than she had planned – and moving to Fethering full-time, Carole had hated the idea of locals conjecturing about her relationship status or, even worse, pitying her. So, she always looked busy – busy when walking with giving exercise to Gulliver, and busy when in Starbucks with doing The Times crossword. She had always been terrified of looking as if she had no purpose in life. In common with many shy people, Carole Seddon worried that other people were far more interested in her behaviour than any of them bothered to be.

She rarely combined a visit to Starbucks with one of her Gulliver walks. Although the management did not object to dogs, some strange puritanism within her didn’t like the idea of pets in a venue that served food.

The morning after Jude had visited Rhona Hampton, Carole decided she could justify a Starbucks coffee. It was a Thursday, when The Times crossword could be a stinker of a kind that required more than the customary twenty minutes over lunch.

Sure enough, when she sat down with her ‘black Americano’ and perused the clues, for all the sense they made they might have been written in Serbo-Croat. Some days, she knew, the crossword was like that. The important thing was not to panic. Just calm down, look at the words, break them down into their component parts.

‘Well, good morning, Carole. Fancy meeting you here.’

She recognized the voice and looked up to see Adrian Greenford, holding a mug of his customary flat white.

‘May I join you, or will I divert your focus from the crossword?’

‘Any diversion would be welcomed. It’s totally impenetrable today.’

‘It’d be totally impenetrable to me any day,’ he said as he moved a chair back with his leg and sat opposite her.