The same key worked on the lock of the medium-sized suitcase, too. ‘Oh,’ I said out loud. Because there was no way that the suitcase nested inside belonged to Zac.

Despite my grandmother-shaped aversion to brown, the hidden case was quite charming. The diagonal lines of four-petalled flowers and interlocking Ls and Vs processed in their determined order, stamped in muted gold on a brown background. One of my hands floated towards the monogrammed canvas and slid extra-lightly across the PVC coating, surprised by how smooth it was. But I quickly got down to the business of unbuckling the leather tag to check whether there was a name on it.

JM was hot-stamped on the surface. It had to stand for Jane Miller. Had to. To my delight, there was a piece of thick cream paper inside the tag, though there was no writing on the front. I took it out and flipped it. On the reverse, in Zac’s perfectly regular cursive, it read Jacinda Molinero. There was no address or telephone number or email. Just the name. Hardly of any use if the suitcase were to be lost.

My language skills had languished since that final MI5 interview. Practising them hurt like an imperfectly healed wound when you picked off the scab. But there was something about the word Molinero . . . I needed to remember what it meant.

I closed my eyes to try to think. What came to me was the illustrated deck of cards from when I first started to learn Spanish. The teacher thought the cards would help us with the words for different occupations. It was a kind of un-cosy version of Happy Families, where the dentists and plumbers and shopkeepers all looked tired and overworked. There was a particular card I was fumbling for, in whatever dark corner of my brain it was filed in.

I squeezed my eyes shut more tightly, and the picture began to form. An old lady scowling in her blue apron and white hat, letting flour fall from her fingers into a huge yellow sack. Behind her was a red-roofed wooden house with a windmill attached to it. Señora Molinero. That was what it said beneath her. Mrs Miller.

Molinero was Spanish for Miller. Jane Miller. Jacinda Molinero. The first names started with the same letter. Jacinda had to be Jane. Zac’s handwriting on the suitcase label seemed to confirm this.

If you come across any objects of Jane’s, tell us about them in as much detail as you can. That was what Maxine said to me on the bench by the cliffs. But it wasn’t Maxine I wanted this knowledge for. It was me. Me, myself and I, as my grandmother used to say, never clear as to whether she thought this emphasis on self was a good or bad thing. I grabbed my phone and typed in the name Jacinda Molinero, but the search engine returned only blanks.