He bestowed a beam of pure sunshine upon her. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. He unbolted the back door and held it open for her. ‘After you, twinkletoes,’ he said.

She laughed and, still bare-footed, picked her way gingerly down the garden path to the shed. Mr Lawrence followed her. He was training a youngster, called Bess, and he told Alison how she was doing – grand – and asked her if she’d like to come out with him in a week or so, on Bess’s first five-mile flight.

‘Oh, yes please!’ she said.

‘Right you are,’ he said, and they settled down with their tea in the warm, feathered fug of the converted shed. The birds perked up at the company, they danced and swaggered, and dipped their perfect little heads. Mr Lawrence and Alison chatted about A Levels, and the band, and the pigeons. Next January the two of them were going together to the Blackpool Winter Gardens, the Royal Pigeon Racing Association show, staying in two rooms of a boarding house near South Beach Promenade. Daniel thought she was mad, but it was all booked, and Alison said she couldn’t wait.

Back home, she paused at the threshold to try to gauge the lie of the land, but the house yielded no information; it was quiet, but this didn’t always signify peace. For a while this year, back in the spring, Catherine had come off the booze. It wasn’t the first time, but she did better than she ever had before. Early March through to mid-April. Six weeks with no wine or vodka in the house. No bed-wetting or soiled clothes. No futile rages or tearful atonement. No Martin, either, and no other strange, unwholesome men tagging along home with her after closing time, for a nightcap and a no-strings fuck on the sofa with a semi-comatose drunkard. But on 15 April – the date stuck in Alison’s mind, being her seventeenth birthday – her mother fell off the wagon again in grand style and embarked on an almighty bender, an extraordinary, destructive, desperate binge, a twenty-four-hour festival of annihilation. Since then, she’d been impossible to control or predict, and Martin Baxter was back, with his own key and a new, disturbing air of ownership, as if, having survived the brief exile, he’d returned triumphant, and stronger, to his private fiefdom.