“He died six years ago. He seemed to be getting better. I’d retired by then, so we used to do things together when he felt well enough. He liked to sit on the station platform and watch the trains.

“Then one day I came down and he was gone. I’d got careless and he took my keys out of my handbag and let himself out. He was hit by a train on the level crossing. It may have been an accident—we don’t know. He was only twenty-one.”

“I’m so sorry. What a sad story.”

“I felt so guilty, because I was supposed to be a nurse and I’d failed him. But it was also a relief—and that made me feel even more guilty. Mother had passed away by then and there was just me left. I used to wonder what on earth would happen to him when I was gone. For eight years I didn’t have a single day without that worry.”

“I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“But thinking what he did to that poor girl—when she was supposed to be in my care. And now there’s a child to worry about. Such a terrible, terrible wrong.”

Jean returned the pressure of Alice’s fleshless grip.

“Don’t torture yourself about what might or might not have happened to Gretchen. We can never know for certain.”

And yet I do, she thought. Everything she had been told confirmed Kitty’s story of her strange night visitor. No angel, then, but this troubled boy, standing over Gretchen while she slept her drugged sleep. She could feel the burden, as it passed to her from Alice, pressing down on her, forcing the air from her lungs, as heavy as a grown man.

“Well, you must do as you see fit. He’s beyond harm now and I will be too before much longer.”

“I’m glad you told me,” said Jean.

It was a lie of kindness. She felt a wave of nostalgia for her previous anxieties and dilemmas. What comfortable worries they now seemed. Having set out in pursuit of the truth, she had now learned something it would have been better not to know. She would never again be able to look on Margaret with the same innocent delight, unspoiled by fear of what the future might bring.

“Will you pass my purse?” Alice was saying, indicating the bedside unit behind Jean’s chair. “I want to show you something.”

Jean located the red leather wallet from among the few belongings and watched as Alice withdrew a buckled photograph with shaking fingers. It was the size of a playing card and showed a dark-haired boy of about seven holding a cricket bat. He was standing in a garden, in front of a wicket chalked on a wooden fence, and was poised to receive a delivery, caught in a moment of perfect absorption. Jean couldn’t help scanning it for any likeness to Margaret, but the image was too small to make any meaningful comparisons.

“That’s Vicky, before he got ill,” said Alice. “He was such a lovely boy.”