Later I drove up the crowded motorway past Colchester and on towards Ipswich. As I negotiated the bypass I wondered where exactly it was that Mr Rainbird had come from. Beyond Ipswich the route was quieter and I remembered that I was in no hurry. I slowed down to watch the unscrolling fields of sour-yellow rape and the flat meadows stocked with black-and-white cattle. I felt, and always do feel, a city dweller’s sidelong, qualified appreciation of the open countryside. Five-barred gates seemed to beckon me into lush grass and down towards willow-fringed slow rivers, but I knew that if I did stop the car and try to step into the picture postcard I would find myself wading through cow-pats and nettles into a thick cloud of midges. I stopped in a village instead and sat on a bench outside the post office to eat a prepacked cheese and ham roll followed by a choc ice. The war memorial cast a finger of shadow over plump young mothers pushing babies in buggies to pick up older children from the gates of the primary school. I wondered how it would have been to bring up Jack and Lola in a place like this, and immediately my chest squeezed with a fierce, partisan affection for the grit and discord of the city.

At the end of the afternoon I reached the hotel I had booked. It was a red-brick battlemented place that faced in one direction on to the cropped fairways of the golf links and in the other over the crinkled sullen blue of the North Sea. My bedroom had twin beds with wooden headboards and candlewick bedspreads, and a dressing table made of the same shiny brown as the headboards, topped with a trinity of mirrors. I studied my greenish-tinted reflection from several angles, then rearranged the rose-patterned pin tray and powder jar on the glass-topped surface.

After I had hung up my clean trousers and put my folded tops in a naphthalene-scented drawer, I went out for a walk along the harbour wall. At the far end there was a Martello tower and I strolled with the elderly tourists and locals walking their dogs to look at the closed gate leading across a gangplank to a small, solid door. I would have liked to look inside the thick walls, but everything was locked up. I walked back even more slowly, past the yacht club where the dinghies were berthed in neat files. I was enjoying being alone. I could feel myself slowly uncoiling and expanding with the luxury of choice, the lure of my empty room.

I ate a solitary dinner and with the sound of waves washing on the shingle I slept better than I had done for weeks.

The next day I drove half a dozen miles inland to the village where Auntie Angela now lived.