She smiles. ‘Thanks, but no, the estate agent was thorough. Anyway, weren’t you on your way out?’

‘Pint at the local. Want to come?’

Marina indicates the mouldy wall. ‘I should stay and attack this.’

He shrugs. ‘OK. Let me know, though . . . about the bleach, I mean.’

She closes the door behind him and surveys the room. A sense of audacity threatens to overwhelm her and she suddenly laughs out loud. The thought of it . . . moving into the place where she began. Might have begun. The correction sobers her. She steadies herself and takes in the reality instead. A grubby, neglected flat. A lonely quest to find her mother. A perfectly loving family left behind.

The bedroom is at the rear of the house. It’s stuffy and smells of dust. Marina pulls the net curtains aside and peers out. Ahead of her is a walled garden, edged with fruit trees and shrubs and an overgrown magnolia. It’s not well kept, but it’s not shocking either. The lawn is mowed; the borders neat. At the far end is a section partially obscured by overgrown bushes.

The grey stone church rises beyond like a spectre. No wonder people were reluctant to rent this place with a graveyard practically in the garden. A man dying in the flat itself and bodies in the backyard is macabre, not to mention the neglected state of the place. Still, she won’t let a small issue like dirt and death put her off. She has a mission: to find those who were here in 1964, and who might remember a baby abandoned in a hallway.

The devil is in the detail. The saying comes to her as she unhooks the net curtains and rolls them into a grubby ball. What does it mean exactly? Small clues that make a difference. But do those clues complicate or reveal? She isn’t sure.

In the kitchen, she unpacks cleaning materials and scrubs the cupboards that date from the fifties. The lingering scent of disinfectant suggests an effort has been made, but still she unpicks bits of old food from the corners, gathers up dead flies and earwigs, sweeps away the cobwebs.