Resisting the urge to give up and go home, Sue pressed the silent button again, harder and for longer this time, as if the duration might somehow be more likely to elicit a response. Still nothing. Her nanny, and the youngest Thorne sister, Cordelia, would have brought home the children from school and nursery by now, they’d be sitting in the kitchen eating their tea, feeding the dogs and pursuing their quest to bring the always implacable Cordelia to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Suddenly Sue missed them terribly – their cheerful certainty that everything was always going to be all right, their tolerance of her raft of extra-curricular activities and, most of all, their faith in the existence of Santa. How much simpler life would be if Santa was really real.

Her children’s happiness, Sue thought anxiously, their sweet fragile, childish happiness rested completely on her shoulders, and somehow she had to find a way to tell them something that would break their hearts. And yet here she was, standing on the doorstep of a celebrity instead of being at home with her children. She really would go to any lengths to avoid facing the truth.

Turning on her heels, she began to walk away from the gate, determined to get home by what Cordelia laughing referred to as bedtime, but a disembodied voice stopped her in her tracks.

‘Hey you, where are you going? You can’t get a man out of bed, and then just walk away.’ The male voice was as familiar to her as if had been her husband’s or even Jago’s. It was the same voice that had seduced a million women or more, and inspired the same amount of men into imagining themselves to be just like him. It was Blake Fletcher.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘Come back here and tell me what you want.’

Sue straightened her shoulders a little and marched back to the camera. She knew how to deal with Americans, even the famous ones. Drop a title, posh it up, refer to the Queen on a first name basis and they were putty in your hands.

‘Good day to you,’ she said. ‘My name is the Right Honourable Susan Montaigne, I am the owner of Castle House in the centre of Poldore. My family has been resident in the town for over—’

‘Oh, Sue, it’s you, come on in!’ A buzzer sounded, and the gate swung slowly inwards. What did he mean ‘Oh, Sue, it’s you’? As far as she was aware, they had never met or spoken before. She paused for a moment, before looking over her shoulder, suspecting perhaps that she might the victim of some sort of elaborate prank, and walked down the long driveway towards the house.