Faded gold wallpaper peels from high walls. Cobwebs cling to every surface. The parquet flooring, once beautiful Jan imagines, is scratched, lifting in places, pieces missing, never to be found.

Her gaze glides to a faded framed poster, hanging on a slant. It advertises a performance at The London Palladium. The man in the picture is in his twenties, dressed in a yellow and blue striped jacket, his black hair oiled back from his forehead.

‘Felix Flynn,’ she says, eyes narrowing. The man is holding a ventriloquist puppet, an exact replica of him, right down to the striped jacket, and oiled-back hair. ‘A puppeteer, apparently.’

‘Really not helping.’ James moves across the hallway, reaches her side – so close she senses him shiver.

A rat darts from the shadows, claws scratching the flooring.

‘Jeez!’ Jan’s heart thuds beneath her fingers, as it disappears into the gloom of a far corner. Clearly, James’s nervousness is catching. ‘This place is going to need some makeover.’

There’s no doubting Flynn House in Suffolk was once a grand property, and Jan knows her company can restore it to the stunning Gothic building it once was. But James is right, there’s a foreboding about the place, as though it’s crying out to be left alone to decay.

It was built in the late eighteenth century on Seafield Island and can only be reached along a causeway at certain times of day. If she decides to ignore the silent pleas of the house to be left in peace, and takes on the renovation, she’ll need to take that into account. The hope is to transform the place into a Gothic boutique hotel for visitors looking for something different, but going by the way James’s wide eyes flick over the ground floor, the tenseness of his body language, she knows her team will take some convincing.

‘So nobody’s lived here for years?’

Jan shakes her head. ‘The owner alternates between staying in a cottage on the island and living abroad. Rarely comes to the house.’

They continue to look around the ground floor. A huge room looks out through grubby, cracked windows onto a garden over-run by weeds. The view of the sea is stunning. There’s a downstairs bathroom that could be renovated to accommodate guests, a dining area and a run-down kitchen.

Jan turns. ‘We should look upstairs.’

‘You sure?’

‘Don’t be a wimp, James. There’s nobody here.’ She heads towards the stairs. Takes them two at a time, hears James’s reluctant footfalls behind her.

There are six rooms on the first floor, set off a narrow corridor, the door to each standing ajar. Jan pokes her head round each one in turn. ‘There’s a fair amount of work, but the layout is perfect,’ she says.

She heads up a further set of stairs, taking in two more bedrooms. ‘James?’ she calls.