‘Need sweetening up, eh?’ he says, stirring in the milk. He smiles as he puts it down in front of her and Chloe swallows though she hasn’t yet taken a sip. He pulls out a chair nearer to her than the one he had been using, and sits down. She coughs, shifting her chair back a little as she does.

Patrick takes a long sip of his tea, watching her over his cup. She looks down into her own drink.

‘Too hot for you?’ he asks.

‘Yes, I add a bit of cold in the top usually.’

‘Ah, so you do. Maureen would have known that,’ he says.

Chloe nods.

‘She likes to spoil you, eh?’

Chloe looks up at him, unsure how she is meant to answer, or if it’s even a question.

‘Yes, that’s my Maureen, not happy unless she’s fussing over someone.’ He smiles as he says it. ‘She’s been the same since I’ve known her – thirty-six years this year.’

‘Wow,’ Chloe says.

‘You’d get less for murder,’ he says.

Chloe looks down at her tea.

‘She was the last of her brothers and sisters living at home,’ Patrick says, ‘big Irish family like mine. You can just imagine it, can’t you? She would have rather them come to live with us than leave, but then we had Angie and we got that little house just round the corner. Life goes on, doesn’t it?’

Chloe tries her drink now, and nods.

‘She’s not very good with change, Maureen,’ he says. ‘Wasn’t good leaving her mammy and daddy, and she found it hard at first, what with a new babby . . . Still, she was a good little mam – doted on our Angie she did. That kid wanted for nothing.’

Chloe listens, afraid to put her mug down, to break the spell. This is the most Patrick has ever spoken to her.

‘Maureen was lost when she . . . when Angie . . . well, you know, when she went missing, like. I thought I’d lost her as well as Angie. I thought . . .’ He trails off. ‘Well, anyway, no point going over those times. Ent gonna bring her back, is it?’

He looks up at Chloe. She stares at him over the rim of her mug.

‘I think what I’m trying to say is that she finds change, uncertainty . . . difficult. Moving here was a wrench for her, leaving that house. She had everything just’ – he holds out his hands to demonstrate – ‘just so. She even kept Angie’s room, all her little toys, everything, just the way it was. The only way for her to get through it was to convince herself that Angie was coming home.’

Chloe nods.