McAvoy feels his cheeks flush crimson. ‘Sorry,’ he mutters. ‘I know, I know, I have to talk to her, but the way she’s acting, it’s as if she already knows. They have a different code, Trish. Their world and everybody else’s – sometimes there’s no bridge between the two. Her father, her family – they’ll already be taking steps, and they still see me more as a police officer than as her husband and they’ll just clam up. And if it’s all in my head, if I’ve made connections that aren’t there, then I’m going to scare the life out of her and trigger memories that nobody should ever have to see again. And she’s tough, Trish. You know that. Tougher than me.’ He drops his head, a picture of despair. ‘I’ll talk to her properly when I know what to say.’

Pharaoh puts her phone away, message unanswered. She takes a glug of coffee. Gives a soft growl of irritation. ‘My nana had the sight, or so they say,’ admits Pharaoh, staring into the distance. ‘Her mum, the one with the links to the music hall, the original Nefertiti …’

McAvoy doesn’t meet her eye as she talks. Recently, after years of deliberately not asking, Pharaoh had unexpectedly divulged the origins of the family surname. She had a great grandmother who performed in variety shows, under the alluringly mysterious pseudonym of Rosetta Pharaoh, which provided more titillation than the original moniker of Mabel Cartwright. Her son was Thomas Pharaoh, and he married the much younger Glenda just before the war. The name carried on down the generations. When Patricia Pharaoh married, she kept the name. Her daughters have all been warned that they will damn well be doing the same.

‘The sight?’ asks McAvoy, though he knows exactly what she means.

‘To see,’ she shrugs. ‘To see what’s in store for people. Good times, bad times, catastrophes and windfalls. Could tell you if somebody had died in a room, and she’d get these headaches, real killers, thy were – as if there were a hundred different voices all talking to her at once. No wonder she turned to drink. And she told my nan that it was a curse, not a gift. Seeing what fate had in store for people, getting these whispers from the other side … I’m not closed-minded, Hector. And I know your Roisin’s got the touch of something about her …’

McAvoy scratches his beard, wishing they could talk about something else. His head is full of memories. Fears. He hears himself mumbling something about Lilah, sharing a confidence he hadn’t planned to divulge.

‘She’s got more than a touch,’ says McAvoy, quietly. ‘When she met her grandmother, Ro’s mum, it was like they were welcoming some sort of Messiah into the clan. They saw something in her. To you and me, she’s a very intelligent, astute little girl. To them, she’s got something, sort of …’

‘Mystical?’ asks Pharaoh, not unkindly.

‘I don’t know,’ says McAvoy, his shoulders sagging. ‘She can be a bit unnerving, I know that. Even before she was talking in real sentences, she’d babble away having conversations with empty air. She’d draw pictures with her crayons of animals she’d never seen. Sometimes she’d be laughing to herself, all alone in her cot. And now she’s bigger, she knows stuff she shouldn’t. It’s like empathy, but so much more than that. She can meet somebody for the first time and get a feeling from them … more than a good vibes, bad vibes thing, and there’ll be times when she’s talking to you, but not you … as if she’s seeing something just behind your ear …’