She thought about the house, of the pink roses against the mellow golden Cotswold stone wall, the big old-fashioned kitchen and the rambling bedrooms with their diamond-paned windows. Usually she felt conflicted about The High; there were too many childhood memories of her father there, the faintest of happy memories from a time before, those brief few years when her parents had been together, but so many memories from after of the escalating rows between them and the terrible moment when they came to tell her that her mother had been killed...

She found she was gripping the bedcovers as tightly now as she had gripped the bannisters then, a four-year-old child trying to steady herself in a vicious adult world that gave no quarter. It would be a challenge to go back to The High but perhaps that was something else it would be good for her to face. It was time she allowed herself to change.

Her mobile rang. For a moment she was confused since she thought she had turned it off, then she realised it was the private one, close family and friends only. Wiping away the tears from her face, she checked the caller display. It was her cousin Juliet.

“Hi, Jules!” She hoped she didn’t sound as hysterical as she felt.

“Lizzie!” For her part, Juliet sounded breathless or down the end of a distant and very crackly line, or possibly both. Lizzie felt warmth slide through her as she visualised her cousin; Jules would be wearing her old hiking boots and a battered waterproof coat, her hair would be in a messy blonde bun beneath an old velvet hat and she would be holding the mobile away from her ear as though it was some sort of alien object. Jules and her siblings had grown up on a farm surrounded by animals, two loving parents and lots of happiness. Her upbringing was about as far away from Lizzie’s as could be imagined. She was also a partner in a legal firm with chambers in Clerkenwell and was a razor-sharp lawyer.

“We’ve only just got back to Arreau and heard that you were in trouble!” Jules bellowed. “What the hell’s going on? Why didn’t you tell me? I looked at the internet, well, as much as you can get it up here with no signal, and I saw the stories about that wife of Dudley’s and how he’s supposed to have murdered her and how you’re to blame. Absolute tosh! About you, I mean, not Dudley. He’s definitely a candidate for arrest, if you ask me! I’ve always said—”

“How was the camping?” Lizzie interrupted, anticipating a diatribe. Dudley and Juliet had never got on.

“Yeah, great,” Jules said, “except for the rain and the insects. The kids loved it. They want to go on to the Sierra Nevada now for a couple of weeks but I’ve said we’re coming home to see you. You need us.”

Lizzie felt a rush of affection. “That’s so kind,” she said. “I’m really lucky to have such a great cousin.”