Elise nodded.

Bell bent down and gently wiped a lick of jam off the girl’s pudgy cheek with a finger. She showed it to her with one of her famous bemused looks. ‘Have you?’

Elise gasped and ran from the room, scarcely able to believe she’d been rumbled.

‘She’s a rascal,’ Hanna chuckled as she grabbed her slim leather file case off the kitchen stool. ‘So, you remember Max won’t be back for dinner tonight?’

‘Yes. I’m making meatballs, so I’ll freeze whatever’s left over,’ Bell said, looking in the fridge to make sure she had all the ingredients. It looked like they were low on lingonberry jam.

‘Great. And I was supposed to get to the parents’ meeting with Linus’s teacher this evening, but this emergency might throw the whole schedule out the window. Can we play it by ear and, worst case, you can get over there for me?’

‘Oh –’ She was supposed to be seeing Ivan again tonight. It was going to be their third date and, she expected, the night. Bell looked across at the nine-year-old watching them both from the kitchen table. He had the face of an angel – softly curled muddy-blonde hair and wide grey-green eyes, a smudge of freckles across his nose. He had a gentle manner, manifested in a love for animals and the outdoors, but a mischievous sense of humour often winked through his eyes too, and the first hints of pubescence were beginning to show themselves: wanting a skateboard, cooler trainers, a Snapchat account . . .

Bell winked at him. ‘Sure, no problem.’

She watched as Hanna skittered over to him and gave him a noisy kiss on his cheek, making him scrunch his face in a look of delighted disdain. ‘I love you, my Liney . . . And thanks, Bell, you are a lifesaver!’ she said with an appreciative point of her finger, before throwing Linus another kiss from across the room and exiting through the back door in an elegant streak.

It clicked shut behind her, but not before Blofeld, the family’s other cat, slipped in and trotted across the kitchen floor. Bell looked across at Linus again, seeing how he watched until Hanna disappeared from sight down the steps. A room always felt different when she left it, as though the oxygen–nitrogen balance of the air itself changed; she was somehow all things – elegant yet chaotic, softly spoken yet commanding.

‘Right, champ, you just about ready to shoot? One of us overslept her alarm this morning, and you’ve got your maths quiz today. We don’t want to be late,’ she said, immediately setting about gathering the dirty plates off the kitchen table and putting them in the sink – out of sight until she could deal with them later.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he said, watching as Bell wiped a blob of honey off the worktop with a tear of kitchen paper.

‘Sure you do.’ It was the same every Wednesday morning, maths not being his strong point. ‘What’s eight times four?’