‘Yes,’ said Dennis. ‘A little wooden doll with a wind-up key. She had it wrapped up in her dress. Lovely thing, made of real ash.’

Georgie nodded and smiled.

‘So, you gave her your surname but she kept her first name?’ Priest said, moving the conversation forward.

‘I couldn’t let her give that up,’ replied Rose. ‘It was the only word she spoke for weeks – just her name.’

‘Handful she was growing up,’ muttered Dennis.

‘Hardly surprising,’ Rose snapped. ‘Given what she had been through.’

‘And the diary . . .’ Priest prompted.

‘We were very worried about it,’ said Dennis, shaking his head. ‘The doctor said her subconscious was reliving the story, looking for an outlet. But Ellie had no idea that she was actually writing about herself. It’s called dissociative amnesia, or something. You’ve probably never heard of it.’

Priest smiled. ‘It rings a bell.’

Dennis continued. ‘It was horrifying. To think that what she was writing wasn’t her imagination but actually a suppressed memory, rising to the surface. The only godsend was that she didn’t recognise it as such – she thought it was her own imagination telling her a story.’

‘Anyway, they’re dead now, I hear, those horrible people. Good riddance,’ Rose added.

‘How did you know that Alexia and Dominique Elias were involved?’ asked Georgie.

‘We were never sure,’ said Rose, defensive. ‘We knew that Ellie had developed a sort of morbid fascination with the Eliases and we knew they used to live in Tome . . . but we had no way of proving anything. She kept asking and I just kept saying to stay away from them.’

All the time, you were fuelling her interest, rather than dampening it down, thought Priest. Although you weren’t to know. ‘Tell me about Karl Jones. Where does he fit into all this?’

‘Oh, dear me,’ breathed Rose, hanging her head. Dennis got up and started searching through a bread bin on the kitchen worktop. ‘Yes, of course. Well, for a start, we all knew him as Michael. He went by his middle name. There were, as I recall, two Karls in his class so people just started using his middle name.’

‘He was funny-looking, too,’ Dennis chimed in. ‘Didn’t look a bit like the photographs the news showed. I heard he was in a car crash a few years back. Buggered up his face: he had to have surgery.’

‘Is that why Elinor never recognised him?’ Georgie asked.

Rose nodded. ‘I suppose so. The Michael we knew had long hair, down over his shoulders, spectacles and he was so much thinner. She probably never studied pictures of him when she was looking into The Real Byte, so no wonder she didn’t spot him.’