Bedell had left his curtains open when he’d taken Simon into his office. Through the window, Simon had seen a lit courtyard surrounded by long, single-storey prefabricated huts with dark wooden sides that had looked almost oriental. Perhaps Garstead Cottage was one of those.

He walked round to the back of the building, where he found another path that led to what looked like a signpost about 200 metres away. It was much darker here, almost too dark for Simon to read the signs when he reached them. Several rigid rectangles of painted wood with arrow-shaped ends protruded from a pole. One said, ‘Cecily Wyers Theatre’. Another said, ‘Main Building’, but it was the third one Simon read that made him grab the pole and trace the letters with his fingers: ‘Darville’. Beneath it, pointing in the same direction, was a sign that said, ‘Winduss’.

As far as Simon knew, these names belonged to people who’d bought Aidan Seed’s paintings. Who lived at addresses that didn’t exist. For a few seconds, standing alone in the darkness and the silence in front of this strange object that looked a bit like a white tree, its branches at right angles to its trunk, Simon felt like an idiot who didn’t know what to do, or what to think.

There were five paths to choose between. He strained to see as far as he could along each in turn, which wasn’t far at all. Each one disappeared into blackness. There was no sign of the prefabricated huts he’d seen from Bedell’s window. In the end he decided to follow the sign that said, ‘Stable Block’, on the off-chance that Garstead Cottage might once have housed whoever looked after the horses. It was as good a guess as any.

He crossed a field, after which the concrete walkway narrowed and gave way to a dirt track. Definitely still a path, though. Simon followed it through a cluster of small trees and into another field. When he started to feel wetness at his ankles, he looked down and saw that he’d been walking on grass. Where was the dirt track? Had it run out or had he strayed off it? He saw dark shapes ahead and made his way towards them. The stable block. He’d assumed, when he’d read the sign, that this would be a conversion: a languages or science laboratory, or living space for the pupils, but as he approached he both heard and smelled evidence of the presence of horses. There was no Garstead Cottage, not here.