Mary looked up from her purse.

‘I mean, I was a bit spooked at the time,’ Fran continued, ‘but there obviously couldn’t have been someone in your garden, so it must have been someone in Ruth Cavanagh’s?’

‘There’s a pathway between the gardens,’ Mary said. ‘It’s very narrow, only a few feet wide. A kind of dirt track between the trees. I think the builders used it for access and it was meant to be closed off after they finished Rowanbrook, but it never was.’

‘Really? I had no idea!’ Fran said. ‘You mean, right behind our house too?’

‘Yes, but you have that big, high wall at the end of your garden, so you can’t see it.’

True. For reasons now lost to history, her father had built a twelve-foot wall at the end of their garden, so instead of the gently swaying evergreens everyone else looked out at, her family had grey concrete. An apt legacy from the man who had added no value whatsoever to any of their lives.

‘So, you think someone might have been walking along that path when I was out there with Lily? Watching and listening?’

‘Perhaps kids passing through,’ Mary said. ‘They do that sometimes, to get to the green. Maybe it was Ellen from next door. Now, this is for you.’ She passed a five-pound note to Fran. Creepy noises and evil eyes notwithstanding, this was easily the best paid babysitting job around.

Later that night, on the phone to Zara, Fran filled her in on her afternoon next door.

‘I found this weird drawing under the wallpaper in Lily’s room,’ she said, keeping her voice low while dragging the phone into her bedroom. ‘Some kind of evil eye type thing.’

‘God. Like a curse? Do you think Mary and Robbie know about it?’ Zara’s family had a telephone extension in her parents’ bedroom, so she had all the privacy she wanted.

‘I don’t know … I didn’t say anything because I assumed it was them who put it there, but maybe it wasn’t.’

‘Hmm. I could see Mary believing in that kind of thing, definitely. Not Robbie though,’ Zara mused. ‘He’s far too smart. Have you ever heard him talk about politics? He makes the Anglo-Irish agreement sound interesting. One time, on our way home from babysitting—’

And she was off. As Zara zipped from subject to subject – Robbie, fake ID for America, dresses to bring to Virginia Beach – Fran let her chatter uninterrupted. Virginia Beach was exactly what Zara needed to fix her broken heart. And even though the Robbie infatuation was silly – so ridiculously silly – it was harmless most of the time. If it got Zara through her break-up, and as long as she didn’t actually act on it, what harm could it do?

As Zara moved on to the topic of free drinks on the transatlantic flight, Fran pulled the phone across her room towards her bookshelves. Every book she’d ever owned was still there – a row of Sweet Valley High paperbacks, a half-dozen Robert Ludlum spy novels, and all her Stephen Kings. On its own, at the end of the bottom shelf, sat the big red hardback encyclopaedia she used to use for schoolwork. She picked it up and sat on her narrow bed, leafing through the ‘E’ section as Zara kept talking.