‘We cut all ties with Beth and Doug,’ Rose went on. ‘We all agreed it would be better that way,’ her voice rose imploringly as she looked from one to the other of their faces. ‘We got on with our lives, what else could we do? The police had rightly concluded Nadia’s death was suicide, assuming she’d died alone, and that … that … Lana had been lost to sea.’ She looked at Tom. ‘And later, when first you, then your brother came along, we just wanted to put the whole dreadful business behind us.’ She paused, seeming to shrink inside herself as she said in a low, fearful voice, ‘It wasn’t until seven years later that Beth suddenly contacted me out of the blue.’

‘What did she want?’ Clara asked.

‘She was hysterical, saying she wanted to go to the police, that we needed to confess everything. It was a horrible shock, as you can imagine, I had no idea why she was so upset. I tried to get her to calm down, but she became so worked up that in the end I agreed to meet her. When I got there she was still in a state, saying Hannah, as they’d named Lana, had become violent, that she was frightened of her. She said the child had started a fire at her babysitter’s, had hurt her son, that her marriage was falling apart because of it all. She was convinced Hannah was mentally ill – that she’d inherited her mother’s psychiatric issues and that now she – Beth – was somehow being punished for deceiving everyone the way we did. I tried to reason with her but she was beside herself, saying she wanted to go to the police, that she couldn’t stand the guilt any more and wanted to confess that they’d taken the child illegally. She kept talking about how Nadia had died, how wrong it had been to pass Hannah off as their own. Most of all, she believed Hannah needed professional help, that doctors would need her real medical history. The more I tried to talk her out of it, the more upset she became. I decided the best thing for me to do was to leave. And I told her not to contact me again.’

There was complete silence. Clara looked across the room to Oliver, who was still slumped in a chair, his head in his hands as his wife talked.

‘I thought,’ Rose continued, ‘or rather I hoped very much that would be an end to it. But it wasn’t, of course.’ She looked up and met Clara’s eye. ‘Because Hannah had been there all along, in the kitchen where we were talking, was hiding in the next room, listening to our conversation. She had heard everything Beth and I said. She was seven years old and she knew everything – who her real parents were, how her mother had died. Everything.’