But I still found it perplexing – almost perverse. To choose a group of the least good, least functional, least hopeful, least … least reverential individuals to fulfil a mission so … so unknowable, so … so …

So it had all happened for a reason. Hadn’t it? But even worse than that (far, far worse than that), I had finally realized (didn’t I always know? Yes? No? Didn’t I?) that I was stupidly, excruciatingly in love with Mr Franklin D. Huff. That awful man! That skinny, sneaky, arrogant, strange, slightly unstable and patently unreliable aspirant Lothario …

Or was it actually love? How to describe the feeling, exactly? Hard to pin it down … A kind of squint-eyed keenness. An infuriated interest. A passionate irritation. A midge-bite on my heart which I just longed to scratch and itch and pick away at until it finally got infected and then … then hurt. Stung. Most dreadfully.

If that is love. If that qualifies as love (and I’m hardly much of an expert in these matters) then yes, yes, I was in it, right up to my chin, and the one thing I was certain of (before I’d even got to grips with it, before I’d even … I don’t know … so much as teased away at it with an idle nail), the one thing I truly knew (a feeling of indescribably hollow dread deep down in my gut) was that I was going to be asked to give him up. To offer him up. To hand him over to Mrs Sage Meadows, no less. For Orla. For my sins.

‘Good heavens!’ Sage Meadows exclaimed, answering the door at Lamb House after my third extended ring on the bell. ‘I thought you were … Didn’t your bungalow just …?’

I handed her the piece of newspaper.

‘Would you mind explaining this to me, Mrs Meadows?’ I asked, pointing to the four digits. ‘In a little more detail, perhaps?’

‘I heard about it on the local news!’ She grabbed my arm (as if to check that I was real). ‘It was all the talk on the Wednesday market! Was it terrible? I could hardly believe it. I was all a-tingle! I kept thinking, But I was only with her a few hours ago …!’

‘I wasn’t home when it happened,’ I said. ‘I actually stayed in Pett Level overnight.’

‘With your father?’ she asked, sharply, quickly releasing her grip on my arm.

‘Uh … My father’s dog had died,’ I quickly sidestepped the issue.

‘Oh. Well that was lucky.’

She frowned. ‘I mean unfortunate, but, you know …’

‘Yes. He was very fat. Rogue. The dog. He slipped into a diabetic coma.’

‘Oh. I see. I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘Yes.’ I nodded.

She continued to gaze at me, perplexed.

‘We had to dig him a very big … a very big hole,’ I aimlessly expanded.

‘What an eventful twenty-four hours you’ve had!’ she exclaimed, almost satisfied, inviting me inside, pouring me a glass of water and then leading me out into the garden where the air was redolent with the scent of … of …