I take a long shower, then head to the hospital for a supposed catch-up on admin on my own time. Paediatric Outpatients is a ghost clinic, eerily quiet, with no one else there. Genuine admin is mostly what I do, in order to disguise the small part that is not genuine. My search history will show that I’ve been rooting around in places I don’t belong on a day I shouldn’t be in, though it’s unlikely anyone will have the time or inclination to look.

I dig deeper into Alice’s records. She was referred to our clinic by a paediatrician in London, but I can only trace her medical files back a year. Why is there nothing earlier? Is this evidence that there is something odd about the circumstances of her birth?

I close my eyes and shake my head until my neck hurts. Even so, I continue shaking my head like a madwoman, as if doing this will force enlightenment into my brain. It doesn’t work. For now, I must move on. In any case, I am in a position to know how dramatically hospitals in the UK vary in their progress with migrating to electronic records. Some are fully there, some are still using paper, and some are in the messy hinterlands in between.

I don’t leave the empty clinic immediately. Instead, I turn off the hospital computer and switch on my laptop, which I’ve brought with me. I find out that Eliza studied Art History at University College, London, which is where Zac went to medical school. The circumstances fit, as well as the minimal truth Zac told about it the night I glimpsed her with him in that London hotel. They graduated from UCL the same year. Her degree would have taken three years, whilst his was six plus a gap year after school for European travel, like an eighteenth-century gentleman’s grand tour.

Zac is forty-three now, and Eliza half a decade younger than he is. If she spent all that time with a crush on him, and then they finally got together, she may be all the more in his thrall – and under his control.

I learn also that she comes from an extremely rich family, with a financier father, and is an only child. Her family money explains how she bought the surviving wing of that once-magnificent but still-stupendous house. She worked at a New York art gallery for five years – Zac had told me in London that she’d returned to the UK after a spell in the US.

Finally, I find the barest snippet of a report about Jane, referring to the as-yet-unidentified body of a woman thought to be in her mid to late thirties discovered on Tuesday morning. The cause of death is suspicious, and police are urging members of the public to come forward with information.