However, unlike Kay, you took to Daphne straight away. She was like an aunt to you, and even though she was quiet with me, she chatted away to you, as if she was more comfortable in the presence of children. She sat for hours on the sheepskin rug in the front room with you, playing with your Sindy dolls. She even knitted your favourite doll a jumpsuit, in sage green and cream. You loved it.

I assumed she might stay in her room more often but every evening she came and sat with us, handing me a cup of tea even though she’d only just got home from a shift at the pub. Every week she brought back logs for the fire. She was thoughtful.

Daphne had a cash-in-hand job as a cleaner at the Stag and Pheasant so was out most afternoons, and you went to playschool three mornings a week. We usually sat down to dinner at the same time – Daphne liked to cook stews in one of my old brown casserole dishes that had been my parents’. Most days there was one bubbling on the stove, and sometimes, if she was feeling extra creative, with dumplings. That was mainly what she ate that winter: thick meaty stews. ‘It’s cheap and easy,’ she said, chopping the carrots so professionally I wondered if she’d ever worked in a restaurant. She spent ages in the kitchen in her baggy jumpers with holes at the wrists that I suspect she’d knitted herself, slicing up whatever meat she could get her hands on from the butcher, standing at the counter with one leg bent, like a flamingo. ‘Oh, I’ve had so many different jobs over the years,’ she’d said, when I asked. ‘What haven’t I done?’

Even then, at the beginning, when things were good, when I was oblivious to what lay ahead, something about Daphne intrigued me. Apart from that first night, we seemed to have forged an unspoken agreement not to talk about our pasts. But I found myself wanting to know more about her, yet realizing if I probed too deeply she might do the same with me, and that I might reveal things that could put us in danger.

What or who was Daphne running from?

But in those weeks, those first few weeks in particular, I felt more secure having another grown-up in the house. I felt cared for, and it was a lovely, unusual feeling. Something I hadn’t felt since Audrey.

It was a cold winter. Our leaded windows were opaque with condensation and there was a fine layer of frost on the internal glass. The stone floor in the kitchen was like stepping on an ice-rink – we could even feel it through our socks – but it was cosy in our little cottage, just the three of us, away from outsiders. Safe.