‘But . . . you must have us on record. Mr and Mrs Stone. We adopted a little boy. Harlan. Maybe there’s someone else there I could talk to about this . . . ?’ And then another name sprang into her tired brain. ‘Wait! There was another woman, this Bushell person said she’d taken over from her, a Mrs Mulville. You must remember her, Mrs Bushell said Mrs Mulville had been with the agency a long time.’

‘You must be mistaken.’

‘What?’

‘As I told you, I’ve been here for twenty years. And there has never, to my knowledge, been a Mrs Mulville working here.’

‘No. No! You’re mistaken.’

‘Mrs Stone, please leave me your telephone number and your address, and I will have someone contact you.’

Nula didn’t bother. She put the phone down in a daze.

‘Mrs Stone?’

Nula was so startled by the voice that she almost shrieked. She looked up and there was the new au pair, Chrissy’s replacement.

‘Sorry, did I make you jump?’ Fern was a meaty, motherly girl, dark-haired and broad-hipped. ‘I was about to take the kids up, if you want to come . . . ?’

‘No.’ Nula levered herself to her feet. Her legs felt like rubber. ‘You go ahead.’

The au pair went off upstairs. Nula walked through to the sitting room and slumped onto the couch, gazing out of the window at the flat open fields. It was pretty here and now she hated it. She wanted to be back in London, in the thick of the action, where things always seemed to make much more sense. Where she had once belonged.

She sat there until the light started to fade from the sky. The sun set in a burning blaze of apricot and gold on the far horizon, and then the evening star winked on and night started to fall. She supposed she ought to go to bed. She never slept well, not any more. Her marriage was a joke, her life a disaster. Tiredly she pushed herself to her feet. Not bothering to switch on the lights, she walked the familiar path across the big hallway and up the rounded sweep of the stairs.

For once she slept deeply, but it was a bad sleep, wracked with nightmares. She dreamed of dead babies and cool, oily black pools that she fell into and drowned in. But Jake was in there, and he was alive, he was OK. She held him and stroked his face, and felt a breathtaking happiness, such a huge sense of relief. He was alive! And then it was morning and she woke up and realized all over again that her baby was dead, gone forever.

Tiredly, she slipped on her dressing gown and her fluffy pink mules and, not bothering to shower, went downstairs in search of coffee. Then she heard it.

A baby, crying.

Jake?

She could hear Jake, crying. She could.