‘Not the point of the story, Evie. But – yeah, mostly.’ She released Evie’s hand, opened her notebook, smoothed down the page.

‘You think this guy losing his phone is connected to your dad dying?’

‘You sound like Ty.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I just wonder,’ said Kym, ‘what they heard and if it’s . . . I wanted to talk to this guy – Pete – myself but Ty clammed up, wouldn’t ask his uncle to pass on my number. So I started researching the house, because there’s something about it, some-thing – odd.’

‘It’s just a house.’

‘Evie, you have to look at it every day. Come on.’

And the thing was, she was right, it was an odd house. More than that, it was – Evie thought about the drying ground and Flossie’s whining refusal to go inside – wrong. ‘Tell me what you got, then,’ she said.

*

The video had been much less professional, hand-held, and presumably filmed by someone taking the tour; the segment filmed in Bishops Yard had been frustratingly brief, and Nell played it through several times.

A crowd gathered at the foot of the steps, looking up at the Man in Grey, the house filling the screen behind him.

‘In the summer of 1889, Elder House was occupied by one Dr Frederick Bishop and his family.’ The young man had a pleasant voice, calm, authoritative, and his audience were listening intently. ‘One afternoon, he was called from his practice to his house, where it transpired his youngest child – a much longed for son, after the birth of four daughters – had gone missing. As you can imagine, the house was in disarray, the doctor’s wife was distraught – it was a scene of confusion, and fear.

‘The child had been left to his own devices by one of the maids, playing with his toy soldiers in the nursery, and after searching the yard and nearby streets – for it was assumed the boy had left the house and wandered off – it was decided to search the house one more time from top to bottom.’ He paused. ‘The child was found in the attic, unconscious, his mouth bloody. He was dead.’

There was an appreciative gasp off-camera.

‘He was assumed,’ the tour guide went on, ‘to have suffered some sort of fit, but the truth was far stranger—’

‘What are you doing?’ Nell had been so absorbed she hadn’t heard Maude come in, swiftly, she exited the site, sat back in her seat.

‘Nothing. Do you want some juice? Some lemonade?’

‘Are you stalking Carolyn?’

The poor child was found to have choked on a pin.

Nell could feel it, a scrape, a prickle in her throat. She dragged her attention back to her stepdaughter.

‘I’m not stalking anyone.’

‘Yeah, right. You should friend her, on Facebook.’

‘We’ve been through this, I don’t have an account.’

‘I know. But the gallery does,’ Maude said, sitting at the table. ‘I could do it for you, if you like.’