Then Holly knocked. Called out: ‘Freida? It’s me. It’s Holly.’

Nothing.

Eva pushed on the door, gently. There was no handle – she couldn’t see how to get in. She pushed again, harder. Then Piotr leaned against it, gingerly at first, then using all his weight. He stepped back, took a short run at it.

‘Ouch,’ he said.

The door, of course, hadn’t budged.

‘I’ll need to take a longer run-up.’

‘Piotr,’ Eva said, touching him gently on the shoulder, ‘look.’

She pointed, and they all looked beyond the lighthouse to the low building nestling behind it in the shadows. The cottage of the lighthouse keeper.

‘That’s where someone would live,’ Eva said. She walked up to the door and pushed it. It opened.

She stepped into a tiled porch, through an inner door of dirty yellow glass and peeling woodwork, to find herself standing in a small, dark hallway. To her surprise, the light overhead came on as soon as she tried the switch. A door to the left was open, and inside it, on the wall facing them, was a large framed photograph that had been cut out from a newspaper article. It showed a young, happy Holly holding her newborn daughter. Eva knew what it said. The picture was familiar to everybody: The first couple to give birth using the new and still controversial baby pouch.

‘Good heavens, not here too,’ Holly pronounced, as she strode past Eva and knocked the frame off the wall with her walking stick. ‘What on earth is going on?’

Daphne opened the door to a room that had been many different rooms over the years. It had been her bedroom, when she was a child, painted bright purple and filled with picture books. Then her dad’s study, his white bookshelves double-stacked with biographies and novels. They were the readers of the family, Daphne and her dad. Everyone else liked to be out, doing, playing, but Daphne and her dad preferred to be inside reading. Then it became the empty room, for a while, after her dad died, after she and her mum had found the collective strength to go through everything on those bookshelves, save what they couldn’t let go and donate the rest to charity. But for the past nine months it had been the baby’s room, and she had decorated it herself, for the party, for the moment that never came.

The balloons had lost their lift, each of them by slightly different amounts, so now they were hanging around the floor or bobbing below the windowsill. One was lying on the small chest of drawers like a deflated skin. She would have to throw them away, but there was too much air in them to fit them in a black bag. They needed to be popped first. So, collecting a needle from her own room along the hall, that was what she did.