The musty scent of unused places clogged her nose and Diana sneezed. This end of the house, with the large kitchen and larder, echoed as she walked around seeking a trigger to memories. The smallest of things could elicit one: the scent of spice, the angle of sunlight, the sound of a note played on an Afghan rubab. But memories not recalled for decades had often faded to beige, like a washed-out photograph with the detail lost and open to reinvention. Boskenna was the house of her dreams yet she hadn’t slept in it for fifty-six years until last night, when she dreamed again.

Fate had twisted things with the days and the dates aligning. Her mother was dying, and her father had died here the same weekend in 1962. The story-hunter’s instinct in her twitched – maybe it was a cruel form of symmetry. She must have walked these floors so many years ago not knowing that by Sunday morning her father would be dead, and her world as she knew it gone too, almost as if it had never existed. Yet the artefacts of her life were in front of her.

The large table was scrubbed but a fine layer of dust covered her fingers when she touched it. Looking up, she followed the cobwebs from the ceiling light to the row of bells high on the wall. Smoking room, dining room, drawing room . . . She stepped closer, looking at a relic from a long-forgotten world. The odd thing was she could picture Edwardian ladies with parasols on the lawn but not see her own time here despite the photos she’d found.

She’d tucked the memories to the back of her mind to examine later. Now it felt right to delve into those dark spaces because for all those years it had haunted her. No, not haunted, troubled her. The time had come for the adult Diana to look back, back through those elusive memories. She was not sure how to do this. Her slow walk through the house had showed her nothing of his. Allan Trewin had been erased from Boskenna. All that was left was his gravestone, which someone remembered. Images of the deep blues and sharp reds of the flowers at the grave swirled in her head as she touched the solid walls of the kitchen. The answers were here, she was sure of it. It was just a matter of asking the right question.