‘No need to discuss it, but I’d like you to give them another going over. They’re really quite filthy.’ Then she turned on her heel and marched out of the room.

‘I’ll let you get on,’ Max said.

‘I cleaned them properly last week. I promise I did.’

‘I’m sure you did.’ He smiled again. ‘If you’re going to use her toothbrush to clean the loos it’s the green one, not the orange.’

Angie wanted to laugh, but she suspected Eleanor might be listening from the kitchen, so instead she picked up the box of cleaning products and hurried towards the stairs.

Angie started in the bathroom as she’d been told. She examined the floor when she went in. It was spotless. Nothing more sinister than a fine film of dust, but she would have expected that after a week. As she rested the box of cleaning products on the windowsill her eye was caught by the two girls walking down the lawn towards the coast path. Though she couldn’t put her finger on why, this new friendship made her nervous. She had the overwhelming urge to build a brick wall around her daughter to protect her from these people. Perhaps she was being overdramatic. Different wasn’t a bad thing. Yes, the Davenports were from another planet, but it didn’t mean they weren’t nice people. It was just there was something about the way Tamsyn spoke about them, how she looked at them, adoration in her eyes and voice, plus the fact she seemed to think the house gave her some sort of connection to Rob. It made her uneasy. He should never have told her they’d live there one day. Silly nonsense. As if they could ever have afforded a house like this on Rob’s salary. That was him, though. Always a dreamer.

Rob had loved the place since they were children and used to drag their group over to play in the garden back in the days when it was owned by the absent granddaughter of an American tobacco merchant who’d built on the land well before the planners had any say over who and what could ruin the natural beauty of a place. She once made the mistake of telling him it gave her the creeps, so he’d dared her to run up the lawn and touch the surface of the pool. Just before she was about to creep through the gate he told her the pool was turned black by the souls of a hundred drowned sailors.

Don’t be a wimp, Ange. You just have to touch it.