She envied the people at college who had bigger families and talked about cousins, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. She’d never had that. But there you were, you couldn’t have everything.

Chapter Twenty-Two

As she’d been asked to bring another piece of work to the interview, Stacy put a montage she’d just finished into the car. It was a miniature set of steam punk machinery, which had to be carefully linked together, then it could be set in motion to deliver a ping-pong ball from one end to the other by means of various wheels and cogs which spun round easily when she wound up the clockwork mechanism, which was the only thing she’d had to buy.

The ball zipped along tubes, travelled along tiny moving tracks till it dropped on to one bar of a vertical conveyor belt, which moved it upwards to plop into the metal mesh bowl she’d set at the other end.

She hoped she wasn’t fooling herself, but she thought ‘The Way To Go’ was one of her very best pieces.

This had been created in the tranquillity of her room in the industrial centre. It had been fun to work on and Jim had loved it. He sometimes came in to see what she was doing in the room he sublet to her and seemed to treat his industrial unit as a second home. He was often pottering about there, whatever time of day she went there.

She hummed as she drove to Sexton Bassett and easily found her way up Peppercorn Street and into the drive at the top, then down to Saffron Lane on the left at the rear of the grounds. The renovations were clearly works in progress, but Numbers Two and Three seemed more finished than the others. She liked the solidity of the houses, which looked as if they were there to stay.

She stopped outside Number 2, as instructed, and a woman came to the door to wait for her to get out of the car. When she went to unload her montage, the woman hurried forward to lend a hand with the pieces, holding the other end of the biggest one.

‘You must be Stacy. I’m Nell.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Angus will be with us shortly. He’s just finishing off a little job at Number Four. We’ll take this through to the back, if that’s all right with you, and put it in the kitchen. Go straight across the shop and through that door at the rear.’

Stacy backed along, holding her end of the central piece carefully, and found herself in a large, bright room.

‘We could put it on the breakfast bar.’

They set down the piece and Stacy turned to go back out. ‘There are two more parts.’

‘Need more help?’

‘If you don’t mind.’

When she’d put the three pieces together she stepped back without another word.

Nell was studying it with a smile on her face. ‘Does it work? It looks as if it does.’