I gripped the fence until the wire bit into my flesh. I didn’t know where to go. I sat on the ground, feeling the wet sand and stones under me, and told myself I should return home, pack what little I owned and catch a train, stay with Sally while I tried to learn the truth of what had happened. And if it turned out that my fears were right, I could stay there, or in some town where I had never been and knew no one. There were so many rootless people these days I would simply be one more piece of driftwood.

And yet I knew that I couldn’t leave, because no matter what had happened and what I had heard that day, I had never been as happy as I had been in the months spent with Nick. When I had gone through his desk, when I had followed ghosts in Kent and lied to NatSec, all of it was for him.

A sharp pain stabbed in my chest. Something was surging and I doubled over as my stomach convulsed, bile falling from my mouth in short, sharp jerks. It came in waves of nausea and pain, and when there was nothing left I sat on a mound of broken bricks. I stayed there for a long time, watching the birds glide and the sun move across the sky.

Back at our house – his house, really – I sloped upstairs and collapsed on the bed. All the way, I had been telling myself that I needed to know what had happened to me, just to have some level of certainty; and a thought had entered my head, a way of discovering the truth. It came from the look in Nick’s eyes when he had seen me at the theatre – when, just for a second, he had seemed to think Lorelei stood in front of him.

I pulled the box of her possessions from the back of my wardrobe and delved through the books and compacts until I found her perfume bottle. I unstoppered it and let the sweet scent drift out. Then I found what I needed: the record of one of Lorelei’s plays. It would be my teacher for a task that seemed reckless to me – but then the world had shifted and I had to change with it.

In Nick’s study I placed it on his player. My fingers itched to open the drawer where I knew those letters from Lorelei lay, but I resisted and instead lowered the needle to the disc. The speaker on the side began to play the sort of music they danced to in nightclubs between the wars.

‘Five pounds on red,’ Lorelei called out. ‘Yes, thank you.’ With her scent on my wrists and her voice in the room, it was as if she had never gone.