‘Yeah,’ Paula said, sipping her stewed tea and wondering if she’d ever get used to hearing her dad say ‘my daughter’ and not meaning her.

‘I looked her up online, like you suggested, to see if I could find her,’ he went on. ‘I typed in “Frankie Hallows”, but there was no one with that name who looked like her.’ He slopped brown sauce onto his plate and dipped a chunk of sausage into it. ‘I’ll pop back to our place to see Lynne next door, just in case she picked up any other clue that would help us find her. It’s a long shot, granted, but I’m not sure what else to do.’

‘Knowing Lynne, she’s got a secret CCTV camera set up somewhere,’ Paula commented, attempting a joke. ‘She’ll be able to give you Frankie’s car registration plate, her shoe size, her height . . .’

Harry shot her a worried look. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked. ‘Me looking for her, I mean. It’s just that she went to all the effort of tracking me down, only for me to . . . not push her away, exactly, but, you know. It wasn’t the best moment to chat. So . . .’

‘I don’t mind you looking for her,’ Paula told him, and then a knotty silence descended, when they both munched and wondered what to say next. ‘What was Kathy like, then?’ she asked after a moment. ‘How come you and her . . . ?’ Unsure how to finish the question, she left it dangling, and her dad grimaced, his voice gruff when he eventually replied.

‘She was fun, Kathy. She was temping in the school office for the summer term one year, bit of a wild one, bit of a daredevil. At the time I was – not dissatisfied with life, exactly, but maybe feeling a bit restless. Feeling as if I was a bit stuck, as if the world had got very small around me, whereas Kathy seemed to represent something different. An escape.’

Paula bit her lip, trying to get her head round this version of her dad. He’d always seemed perfectly content to live in the same house for years on end, happy within the boundaries of that so-called small world. Clearly not.

He glanced across at her when she didn’t reply, looking awkward. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled after a pause, then a thought seemed to strike him. ‘You’re not just asking because your mum put you up to it, are you?’

‘No,’ Paula replied. ‘I haven’t heard a thing from Mum. Not for want of trying. I don’t even know when she’s coming home again, do you? I mean, I looked online, and the flights are every Sunday, so I’m hoping she’ll be back at the weekend, but . . .’ Her voice petered out, as she saw her dad shrugging.