Grace evidently read at least some of these thoughts. ‘I would be in your way downstairs,’ she acknowledged. ‘And I am not too worried about the heat – and I suppose it will be cooler in the night. It is actually quite perfect,’ she said with apparent sincerity.

Still Thea had no notion of what this woman’s life had been. What were her qualifications, her career? Did she have any close family? Was she actually a criminal of some kind? Was she perhaps insane? Would it be wise to barricade the way to the attic, to prevent herself from being murdered in her bed? Again, the damaged shoulder swung the argument. ‘Will you manage to get down to the loo?’ she wondered. ‘I’ll leave the landing light on for you, so you can find the bathroom.’

‘I can wait until morning,’ said Grace with a very oriental serenity. ‘I’ll be more myself tomorrow.’

‘Good – because I still don’t understand what’s going on. I’m trusting you, okay?’ Somewhere at the back of her mind, Thea had the idea that to mention trust was to reduce its force. People said Trust me when they were at their most unreliable and dishonest. Too late now, she thought.

‘I understand. I really am grateful. And actually, I haven’t told you any lies.’ Grace finished with a direct look.

The words only served to increase Thea’s doubts. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Although …’

‘You will be calling your husband this evening, I expect?’

Thea nodded.

‘Can I ask you not to say anything about me? Is that completely unreasonable? Is it too much to ask? It’s because he’d obviously worry about you. He might even 56come to see for himself. And then people might notice something unusual. It’s probably silly, but I think there’s a chance that they might still be watching out for me – somewhere out there. Do you understand?’

Thea found the emotion behind these words difficult to assess. Everything sounded formal and calculated, on the one hand, but why should the woman bother to say these things at all if she wasn’t genuinely frightened? ‘Just for this evening,’ Thea conceded. ‘But after that, I’m not making any promises.’ Again, she felt tendrils of apprehension that this mysterious woman might actually attack her in the night. She wondered whether she could block her bedroom door somehow.

When she finally went back downstairs it was half past eight. The sun had set and an owl was hooting loudly somewhere close by. An owl! Thea thought ruefully that she would have found this exciting before she’d raised the bar on thrill levels by admitting an extremely strange woman into a house that did not belong to her. What was wrong with her, she asked herself fiercely. Nobody else would have done as she had – except she did have good reasons. Grace was so helpless, with no car or phone. In the face of such evident need, there really had been nothing else to do. Perhaps if Thea had taken her own phone with her on the walk, everything would have been different.