The boat had turned out to be a godsend, providing a bolthole to retreat to after she’d completed her prison sentence. It was berthed in a marina that hugged the west bank of the river Plym. A collection of decaying pontoons and equally decaying yachts sat opposite an industrial quay where aggregate rumbled along conveyors from ship to shore pretty much 24/7. Freddie, the security guard who lived on the marina site in a Portakabin, was pushing seventy, but assured her he was more than a match for men half his age. He had two Dobermanns to help him but their natures could be deduced from their names: Beauty and Cinders. More often than not the dogs could be found curled up at Freddie’s feet in the cabin, while he worked his way through an ArrowWords puzzle magazine, only occasionally glancing at the CCTV monitors. Still, the haphazard set-up suited Silva. Nobody came down the pontoon to chat to her; nobody, aside from Freddie, knew her name.

The last thing she wanted to do was visit her father. They weren’t close and never had been. He was all stiff upper lip and polish your boots until you could see your face. What was on the surface was what the world saw and what was inside you kept private. Somewhere deep down there might have been some sort of love and affection for her, but if there was she’d never seen any sign of it. Her mother had been the polar opposite, wearing her heart on her sleeve, baring her soul, always telling Silva how much she loved her.

Silva sighed to herself. She owed it to her mother to go and see what her father wanted. Hard as it was to imagine, at some point her parents had cared for each other and Silva was a direct result of their union.

The next morning she called in sick. Said her first day back had been too stressful and she needed a little while longer to recover. She took her motorbike and rode hard up-country towards London. Her father lived an hour west of the city in a big old house inherited from his own father. Silva remembered the place from childhood visits to her grandparents, but she’d never lived there. Several acres of garden surrounded the house, a winding drive curling past a lake to an expanse of gravel. She followed the drive and parked up alongside a black Range Rover with smoked-glass windows. She got off her bike, removed her leather jacket, her helmet and gloves, and stood by the Range Rover for a while. She wondered if her father had all of a sudden given up his miserliness and decided to splash out on the smart new vehicle. Silva shrugged and went to the house.