Chrissy was a local girl, the daughter of one of the village worthies; her folks, the Foster family, always attended church on Sunday. Thinking of the whole terrible thing now, Nula knew they should have got a proper trained woman, a Norland nanny maybe. For fuck’s sake, they could afford it! But no. They had still been trying to ‘fit in’ out in the sticks when they had hired Chrissy to watch over Milly, Harlan and newborn Jake.

At that point they had still been trying to be one of the ‘country set’. Joining in shooting parties and wearing the wrong gear and feeling like a couple of pricks. What a total waste of time all that had been. But Chrissy had seemed a nice sort of girl: conscientious, never flashy. And so they’d hired her to live in and look after the kids, and the worst imaginable thing had happened.

But how was that Chrissy’s fault, really?

Cot death. It was a horrible thing to even imagine. When it happened to you, you were hit by a steamroller of grief. Of course she and Charlie had kicked off, blamed the girl for it. They’d both been wrecked by the loss of their only real son.

Harlan had been in the nursery at four in the morning. Doing what?

Nula thought that maybe she was still out of her mind with the horror of it all. The baby’s death, the police investigation, the autopsy . . . ah Christ, the sheer torturous hell of that, of seeing the Y-shaped incision on her tiny little boy’s pale body when she had clothed him in his christening gown once more to prepare him for burial.

Now she was thinking terrible thoughts, thinking . . . oh God yes, how could she deny it? She was thinking that Harlan – the boy they had invited into their home, cared for, clothed and fed – had done something awful to Jake.

Day after day Nula sat and mulled it over. Charlie didn’t come near. He was out, about, drowning his grief by keeping busy or messing about down in his ever-expanding ‘menagerie’ beyond the orchard, which still gave Nula the creeps but seemed somehow to soothe him.

It couldn’t be right, what she was thinking. She watched him, cool grey-eyed little Harlan with his neatly brushed straight honey-coloured hair, playing with his games out in the hallway, absorbed in his own little private world or giggling in corners with that oik Nipper.

It couldn’t be right.