‘I said, a minute, all right? I’m coming.’ No one there, she reminded herself, glancing around the empty kitchen. She’d checked upstairs and they were quite alone. She walked back into the hall.

Maude was leaning against the front door, pale and wide-eyed. ‘God. Nell. Your face.’

Nell raised her hand to her mouth, her fingers, when they came away were daubed with red. ‘It’s OK.’ She walked towards Maude, something cracking and splintering underneath her feet, pebbles, she thought, gravel or . . . Maude slid slowly down to the ground, hugging her knee, lifting, cradling her foot . . . Glass, Nell realised. Broken glass. The last of the water pooling on the parquet blocks, thin and reddish. Nell lifted her fingers to her face again, her lip was sore, swollen, and she could taste metal, but it wasn’t her blood on the floor. It was Maude’s.

Everything seemed too slow – to take too much time, running back into the kitchen and grabbing something, a tea towel to press against the wound, getting back to Maude and kneeling down next to her.

The cut extended the length of the arch of her foot. As far as Nell could see, it was clean. It was also deep. ‘Can you wiggle your toes for me, sweetie?’

‘It hurts.’

‘I know.’

Maude moved her toes, and tears, heavy, sad, self-pitying, rolled down her face. Nell pressed the tea towel back into place, more firmly now she was confident there was no glass in the wound, but still concerned that the bleeding didn’t seem to be easing.

‘Right,’ she said, ‘I think we need to get this looked at properly, OK?’

*

Evie sat in the armchair by her window and took a good long look at Elder House.

It didn’t much resemble the other holiday cottages in the yard. There were no flowers in front of it; there had been no attempt to soften or prettify the stone facade of the building with its dark leaded windows. Maybe the owners thought the house itself, which looked solid, serious, old, was enough. She wondered if they’d even seen it since spending all that money on it, what Kym felt every time she walked past it, what Gina felt too – knowing what she did about Kym’s dad, Robin, and what had happened to him there.

It was hard to remember, sometimes, that Nell Galilee and her family weren’t the owners, and that they weren’t going to stay.

Her mother certainly seemed to have a problem hanging on to that idea. Ever since the house had been occupied, she’d been going on again about the drying ground – which wouldn’t do anybody any good; there was something off about it, some-thing – not right. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to claim it.