‘Yes, she has. At school, of course,’ I said. That red paperback had never seemed so absurd to me as now.

‘Good.’ She paused and her face softened a little as she moved on to a new subject. ‘Will Lorelei Addington be coming again?’

‘I’m sorry?’ I asked hoarsely.

‘I saw her here when she came, oh, a few weeks ago.’ Her face broke into a smile. ‘She was my heroine when I was at school. Will she be coming again?’

I hoped Hazel wasn’t within earshot. ‘No. She won’t, I’m sorry, I have to –’

‘Did Dr Cawson give her the magazine?’

‘What magazine?’

‘She was in an old magazine I found, and I thought she would want it. I gave it to Dr Cawson to pass on to her. Did she get it?’

So it was this obsessed girl who was the source of the glossy publication I had found in Nick’s surgery before Lorelei’s death, the one that had made me imagine all sorts of false things.

‘I’ll see to it,’ I mumbled.

‘That would –’

‘I really must get on with this.’

A pregnant pause passed between us, but it meant that she finally got the message and left me to it. I thought about abandoning what I was doing and going back into the house, afraid of what she might know or say in one of her Party meetings, but I pressed on. Stretching as far as I could, I managed to touch the sharp corner of one of the bricks at the edge of the gap, yet couldn’t reach in any more than the sunlight could.

Back on the ground, I folded away the ladder and returned to the house. I couldn’t access that narrow space from the outside, but it struck me that it might be possible from within the house. Passing Hazel’s room, I made sure her door was closed, and then I entered Nick’s study. I had made a mistake, I realized, when I had searched through it previously for anything that the Secs would have wanted. I hadn’t thought of Lorelei’s house. She had had a hiding place in the ceiling of Hazel’s room. Wouldn’t Nick have one too? Rachel had been trying to tell me where it was.