‘Frank,’ she said, ‘why are you bothering to help me like this? You don’t know me.’

He turned from the road and looked at her gravely, before replying.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If you want the honest answer.’

After a while they pulled up in front of a terraced house with a slightly tatty sign that said ‘The Squirrels’, with a picture of a rather sinister-looking red squirrel scowling from it and a ‘Vacancies’ notice beneath.

They were high up in the cliffs now and the sea was a dismal grey skein, the sky white and oppressive. It felt as though the air itself was weighted, pressing down on Irene’s scalp. She had a headache. She asked Frank to wait in the car then forced her weary limbs to carry her to the front door, where she rang the doorbell.

A few moments later a man in his fifties with a moustache and a military sort of bearing opened the door and frowned at her.

‘Are you that man’s mother?’ he said, in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. Irene was only able to nod. There was clearly going to be no small talk, which was a blessing in its own way. She came into the dim interior of the hallway, where a narrow hall table was covered in a lace runner and a blaze of coloured tourist leaflets, and the man regarded her with droopy, heavy-lidded eyes.

‘I’m sorry about it all,’ he said, then quickly, ‘Anyway, it’s this way.’

She was led up some stairs that had a worn carpet runner in faded reds and golds and up to a first-floor landing. The property smelled strongly of sickly pine air freshener that tickled Irene’s nose.

The man opened a room on the right of the corridor.

‘This is where he was staying,’ he said. ‘Then he just sort of … disappeared. It’s lucky we’re quiet or we’d have had to get rid of his stuff. I’m sure you understand that we are a business.’

Now he had started speaking he barely seemed able to shut up. Irene suddenly felt very weary and merely mumbled a reply as she looked around the room, which was surprisingly cheerful after the unprepossessing hallway and its owner.

The walls were painted a sunny yellow and the curtains were white with little blue flowers on them. A dresser, a desk and a chest of drawers all matched the pale wood of the single bed, on which there was a small suitcase with items spilling out. Irene immediately recognized a fleecy gilet of Michael’s and suddenly found she was sitting on the bed, rather than standing by it, just as though someone had taken her out behind the knees.

‘Are you going to be alright?’ the man flapped next to her. ‘Only my wife is at a hospital appointment and she usually deals with the guests.’