Today though, the hotel was quiet, the sounds of normal routine muffled, as though a shroud had been laid over the whole building. Guests moved hesitantly about almost on tiptoe, and even those who hadn’t known Anna Harte, or had only met her once, felt an unaccountable sense of nostalgia, of missing something they didn’t quite know how to describe.

Penny could have told them what it was: if the hotel was the heart of Mulberry Bay, Anna had been its welcoming, wide-stretched arms.

She was in one of the back rooms of the property that served as the family quarters, looking out over the hotel’s large gardens, still numbed by what had happened in the early hours of that morning.

Her beloved mother was gone. In the middle of the night, Anna had awoken with chest pains and collapsed. She had died before the ambulance arrived to take her to the hospital.

She didn’t know where her father had got to. Following the shock of Anna’s utterly unexpected collapse, Ned Harte had barely been sighted. He had been with Anna when she died, and all he’d said to Penny about it afterwards was: ‘It was like she’d been hit by a bullet.’ Penny winced at the description, though it detailed pretty much how she felt right then, as though she too had been shot through the heart, but by some cruel fate had gone on living. She suspected her dad felt exactly the same, but there was no point in asking, because Ned would never in a million years reveal anything of such a personal nature.

Penny guessed he was taking long walks on the beach, avoiding the well-meaning sympathies of the locals. And avoiding her. She knew that keeping his feelings to himself, locked away, until he hit on a phrase or a line from a song to express them was just Ned’s way, but at a time like this she wished that there was some way they could comfort one another. She often wondered if Ned was quiet because he was afraid of saying too much, letting out some feeling that once spoken, could not be drawn back in. Her mother was the only one who seemed to instinctively know how to handle him, how to reach him, and now with Anna gone, Penny would be at more of a loss than ever. It was almost like losing both parents at once.

She was going through her mother’s things in their bedroom, trying to obscure – for her father’s sake – all immediate signs of his wife that would make the pain of her recent death all the more vivid: the half-read biography of Katharine Hepburn on the bedside table, the lemon lozenges she liked to chew in bed, the little scraps of notes Anna wrote to herself all day long and then promptly forgot about.