Bren’s recipe book should be a similar heirloom, and Anna made a mental note to make sure it made its way back to ‘Old Robbie’. Perhaps he had children and grandchildren who could cook from it together and in so doing remember the woman who had owned the notebook. It seemed a shame that recipes compiled so carefully should be lost. In some places there were little sketches that must have been done by Bren herself, and in others, tiny notes in an even smaller, neater hand, annotating the recipes. The notebook was a beautiful thing, and deserved to be looked after. Anna put it on the coffee table and finished her toast.

Feeling drained and fuzzy but aware there wasn’t much chance she’d sleep again, Anna decided to go for a walk. The front door would be fine on the latch for ten minutes, which was all she was going to need to traverse the length of the village and back again. Besides, the inner door had a key that she could turn and take with her.

Outside, Anna paused on the step and let the brisk wind snatch at her face and hair as she decided whether to start left or right. Left was what she chose, on the basis that it led to the end of Crovie she had yet to visit. The morning light, which in London would be a dirty, cloying grey even this early in the day, was crisp and bright, though half the village was still in the heavy shadow of the cliff. The tide had come in and was lapping high against the sea wall, tinted somewhere between azure and turquoise, its power shrouded in the quiet wash of waves. Anna took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the salted air, and struck out. She had always been an early riser, a fortunate trait in her line of work. She looked at her watch again and realized that in that other life she would have been on her way to the restaurant by now, ready to spend another long split-shift at her station, the only glimpse of the outside world the infrequent five-minute breaks snatched in the alley where they kept the bins. But she wasn’t there, and never would be again.