Ava sighed. ‘There seems to be a lot we can’t talk about,’ she said.

I looked up at the big red-brick building and tried to imagine what it would be like to be inside it and not to be allowed out. It looked pretty spooky, though maybe that was just because I knew what it had once been used for. Or maybe it was because the windows were so very tall and narrow, as if to discourage the inmates from thoughts of escape.

In life as in the dream, it was forbidding. A place where old secrets might be shut away, to be remembered only rarely and without tenderness.

I said, ‘Did Mark grow up here?’

‘Oh, no. No, he never came near the place. There might have been a time when staff and their families lived in, but I don’t think Ingrid grew up here either.’

At that moment the face of an old woman loomed up in the car window on Mum’s side, accompanied by a sharp rapping, and all of us nearly jumped out of our skins.

Mum wound down the window. ‘Yes?’

The old woman looked at us without smiling. She had a pearl necklace on, and carefully applied pink lipstick, and nicely coiffed silver hair. She was well-groomed and not at all friendly: Miss Havisham after a makeover.

‘You can’t park here,’ she said. ‘There are visitor spaces over in the corner, by the bay trees.’ She pointed to the far side of the car park, next to a line of tall, neatly clipped shrubs in silver pots. Then, with a slight frown: ‘You aren’t Jenny, are you?’

She pronounced it as if to be Jenny was almost certainly not a good thing – as if a Jenny might be prone to wind, or to falling asleep on public transport with her mouth open and a trickle of dribble running down her chin.

Mum was looking at her in the same way she looked at our landlady during inspections – hopeful, anxious, very slightly resentful. No, not like that – more wary. The way I’d seen her once when we bumped into a client of hers in a supermarket near my school, and she’d been terrifically polite and afterwards I’d found out that the woman had complained about a cut and colour and made Mum do it all over again for nothing.

Mum said, ‘Are you Ingrid?’

Ingrid nodded. She peered past Mum to Ava, and said, ‘So you’re Ava. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

‘This is Ellie, my youngest,’ Mum said loyally, gesturing towards the backseat. ‘I mean – my youngest for now.’

Youngest for now?

Of course, Ava would always be the oldest. That was one thing that would never change.

I attempted a winning smile. Ingrid was unwinnable, though, at least as far as I was concerned. She looked at me even harder, then turned back to Mum.

‘Mark’s running late – there’s some trouble or other on the roads, an accident and a tailback, people being careless as usual. So we’ll be able to have a nice girls’ chat and get to know each other without him around. When you’ve moved the car, press the buzzer and I’ll let you in. Flat 3 is on the ground floor, directly off the main entrance hall and opposite where you come in. You can’t miss it.’