It was sensational, but not at all what she had expected of 007. It wasn’t a show space – all clipped box and clever topiary – but rather an old-fashioned garden, the sort that seemed to have fallen out of style. A real-life chintz, somewhat scruffy and overblown, it was as unlikely a thing to find in this landscape as a giraffe on an iceberg. Clover and daisies and buttercups speckled the grass, a few mature specimen trees dotted around, old flowerbeds a riotous jumble of colour with butterflies flocking to agapanthus and buddleia stems, towers of frothy pale blue delphiniums nodding in the breeze, pink and yellow roses rambling wildly up arched trellises, an old oak swing dangling from a four-metre length of thick nautical hemp rope.

The long, gently sloping lawn was fringed by the dense wood, hiding this garden and home from the curious gazes on passing boats. The house itself matched the garden, like a glove to a coat – wide and two storeys high, with a columned portico in the centre and a mansard roof, a row of seven large rectangular windows winking back at them. It was grand, but nonetheless stamped as an island house by the vertically grooved wooden walls that were the vernacular of properties in the archipelago. Those were usually a brownish-red (and significantly smaller) but this was a bold, juicy tangerine. A Bond villain’s lair it was not. Dr No wouldn’t have been seen dead in an orange house. It was far too . . . cheery.

Bell wished she didn’t like it. She wished she hated all of it – the gracious, somewhat tired-looking house, the enchanting, overgrown, blowsy gardens. ‘It’s going to be a nightmare playing football on that lawn,’ she muttered to Linus.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he breathed back.

‘Dibs I get to play downhill.’

‘That’s not fair!’

‘Yes it is. I’m way older than you. You’ve got youth on your side.’

He looked at her through narrowed eyes, wanting to lose himself in their game, but she could see the glint of fear in them and knew he was faking it as much as her.

Hanna looked across at them both, seeming baffled by their role-play as a tiny frown puckered her brow. She turned to Linus and crouched down so that her knees dipped into the cool grass. ‘Do you see how lovely it is, darling?’

Linus hesitated, then nodded.

‘This is your daddy’s home. Which means it’s yours too. All this is yours, isn’t that wonderful?’ He stared at her. ‘You can play in this garden – there’s not another island in the archipelago with a garden like this, did you know that? Not a single one. You’re going to have so much fun. And you can climb on the rocks, find the hidden beach –’

‘The hidden beach is here?’ he gasped.

‘I want to go to the hidden beach!’ Elise interjected, but Bell silenced her with a reproving look that seemed to work for once. The girls instinctively understood that nothing today was quite as it seemed. This wasn’t just any boat ride, any island, any garden . . .