She phoned me and left a message, saying she needed to speak to me urgently. When I rang her back, she told me she was sick, and asked if there was any way I could fit her in sooner. She didn’t specify what was wrong with her, but said she didn’t know how long she had left to enjoy her garden, and as things stood there was, she said, ‘little about it to enjoy’. I considered telling her I had made prior commitments to other people and didn’t want to let them down, but decided in the end that, in such an unusual case, it was better to be flexible. None of my other clients or prospective clients was terminally ill.

She was a primary school teacher, in her early thirties, married with no children, and lived in a village close to the Leicestershire-Lincolnshire border, on Woodmansterne Lane, a narrow road with detached fake stone cottages, modern but trying to look old, hidden behind hedges as solid as concrete walls and thick-trunked trees that seemed to stand guard on both sides. I thought as soon as I heard the street name that it was unusual and a little bit sinister. It made me think of a stern woodman, whatever one of those was. My reaction was too mild to be called a premonition—the most I can say is that I felt something I didn’t normally feel when I noted down clients’ addresses.

Woodmansterne Lane was the perfect place to live if you wanted privacy, she told me the first time I went to the house. She was obsessed with privacy, mentioned it constantly, whenever we met. On the wall by the front door there was an oval-shaped plaque with the words ‘Cherub Cottage’ painted on it. The name was her invention. For our first meeting, she wore a smart grey suit—the sort no primary school teacher needs to wear to work—with sheer black tights and enormous dog’s-head slippers that made her look utterly ridiculous.

I can still picture those dogs’ faces, as vividly as if they were in front of me. Each one had a red cloth tongue dangling diagonally from its mouth.