The deli looked as if the good folk of Hampstead were preparing for a siege – and a very expensive one at that. The queue for the counter snaked onto the pavement, while the aisles were rammed with panic and sharp elbows, baskets bulging and weighed down with treats. The mood, far from brimming with good cheer, was focused, everyone hell-bent on the task in hand.

By the time Connie struggled out of the shop with her meagre waxed-paper bundles of cheese and salami, a pot of olives, a chicken and leek pie and a slab of serious 85 per cent chocolate, she was stressed and sweating. Next on her list was alcohol. Devan always chose the wine, so the rows of bottles meant little to her, beyond knowing she wanted something dry and white. She left the shop with a Chablis that the man serving her insisted would ‘set her taste buds dancing’.

It was nearly lunchtime, and Connie made her way towards her favourite café for coffee and a sandwich rather than going back to the empty house. Leaving Tessa’s earlier that morning, she’d felt stalwart and resolute. The furtive glances she cast at the other shoppers were a natural reaction, she told herself, to what she’d recently been through. But even as she ate her delicious smoked-salmon and cream-cheese bagel, with the newspaper she’d just bought open at the quick crossword, she kept flicking her gaze upwards with every ting of the café door. All who entered, however, were blissfully strange to her.

Still unwilling to shut herself up for the rest of the day, Connie lingered on the hill, gazing into shop windows at things she had no desire to buy, wandering back into the bookshop to check whether her hat and gloves had been found – they had not – and buying a couple of books, checking the times of the services at the Unitarian chapel she’d noticed, close to where she was staying.

She and Devan were sporadic attendees at the village church – although Devan had been a devoted bell-ringer before his back had started playing up. But Connie’s mother had been a lifelong Unitarian and this Christmas she felt drawn to the chapel for that reason. If only I could ring Mum now, she thought, as she viewed the noticeboard in the chapel porch. Sheila would’ve been upset with her daughter for what she’d done, Connie had no doubt. She’d been no soft touch when it came to moral issues. But she would have listened, talked it through in a sensible manner, not condemned her out of hand. Sheila had loved Devan, but was realistic about relationships, her own fraught at times as Connie’s father had become anxious to the point of disorder as he grew older.