Over all those years she had gradually become less scared that her attacker would find her and finish what – for reasons totally unknown to anybody apart from himself – he had started that night when he took her from her London home.

These fears had waned, but they were never far from the surface. A part of her, she knew, would never stop worrying. The nightmares would never completely leave her alone – in fact they’d flared up again recently, since the break-in; the severed dahlias. It didn’t take much.

And it was pretty isolated here – a five-minute drive to the nearest inhabited houses and, if the house was closed, apart from the security guards she was the only person on the whole fifteen-hundred-acre estate. Conversely, of course, during summer opening hours she could literally be pushing her way through the crowds of people admiring the vegetable gardens to get to her front gate.

The staff car park was just visible behind her cottage, up a small flight of stone steps.

‘Let’s just check if his car’s still here.’

They ascended the steps. The car park was almost empty, just Meredith’s car, Leonard’s – and Ralph’s, in the far corner. Meredith pointed at it. ‘There it is. Shit. That’s not a good sign.’

‘Come on,’ Pete said, seeing her face. ‘No point in panicking till we know what’s going on.’

He held out his hand and she took it gratefully.

She felt detached, as if she was looking down on herself and Pete as they walked back down the steps and opened the creaky front gate of the cottage. Of all the extraordinary, freaky things that had happened in her life, this had to be the worst.

The second worst.

She handed Pete the front-door key, not trusting herself with even the simple task of fitting it in the lock. As he jiggled it, he kept asking her over and over if she was sure Ralph really had been dead, until she felt like kicking him in the shin out of frustration and confusion, like she used to when they were kids.

‘Stop it Pete! He was dead as a frigging dodo. I told you, I did CPR on him for ages – ten minutes at least. He had no pulse, before or after. I don’t know how else to say it. Someone must have moved him. Just get the sodding door open.’

Stress was making her scratchy.

‘All right, all right! Chill out.’

Meredith scowled at him and jammed her hands in her skirt pockets. The door finally yielded and they crowded into the cool, dark flagstoned porch. She breathed in its familiar scent of lavender wax polish, dusty old cushions, mouldy umbrellas and the permanent faint whiff of woodsmoke, desperate for the combination to soothe her.