Leonard was night security at the house, and was older than some of the antique furniture. He and George had a decade-long simmering feud as to which of them was the more efficient – or as everyone else had long ago decided, the least useless. Nobody could understand why the Earl kept them on. He must have promised them both jobs for life, preferring for his own reasons to update the security technology rather than the technicians themselves. Ralph, as estates manager, was always grumbling about both of them.

Meredith sat down behind the counter, still feeling shaken and a bit nauseous. She gulped in air, then picked up the internal phone again.

‘Hi, Ralph. Some shit’s broken into the shop and smashed it up a bit, but nothing seems to be missing. George is calling the police.’

‘What? Good grief. I’ll be right down,’ he said immediately, and she felt a tiny bit better. There were people who cared, about her and the shop. People she could ring and who would come, even though they didn’t know what had happened to her before.

There’d been nobody I could ring that night and nobody to come.

Ralph arrived before George, panting slightly from sprinting down the stairs in the main house and across the wide cobbled courtyard. Through the plate-glass window, Meredith saw him just about avoid crashing into the iron racks of pot plants for sale outside the shop door, such was his haste. He came in and walked straight over to the counter, almost knocking down a hat stand draped with hand-dyed silk scarves, and gave Meredith a huge avuncular hug, wrapping his arms around her and pressing her face into his barrel chest so she could barely breathe.

‘Well, this is all a bit shit, isn’t it? Who the hell would do this and not even bother to nick anything? Are you sure nothing’s gone?’

He sounded jovial, but Meredith, once she’d extricated herself from his embrace, could see from his eyes that he was worried. Despite the combined age of its security guards, Minstead House had never been burgled before.

‘I’ll have to have a word with the Earl,’ he said, his voice now sombre, and she knew he meant about Leonard.

‘Maybe Horace is back,’ she said, turning her back to him as she went to make tea. Horace was the house’s once-active poltergeist. She wasn’t joking – she did hope it was him. The thought of a ghost was a lot less unnerving than a human intruder.