Gabriel put a coffee mug on the table in front of Marnie, pulled up a chair and sat opposite. Mister lay on the floor beside the heater with his chin on his paws, watching. Marnie had taken off his muzzle. Mister had never bitten a human being, so far as she knew. She wouldn’t trust him with two teenage girls, but here in this quiet room with her and Gabriel she was sure he’d be all right.

‘Go on then,’ Gabriel said. ‘Look in the tin. The suspense is killing me.’

Marnie glanced at him. He looked back at her, registered her unease.

‘Shall I do it for you?’

She pushed the tin two inches towards him. He sat up and reached inside. He took out a book. ‘A Souvenir History of the Channel View Holiday Park,’ he read. He turned the cover to Marnie, who recognised it. It was the book Guy deVillars had given to Alice with the old photographs inside; the same book as the one her father used to have. How strange that Alice should have thought it important enough to put in her tin.

Gabriel laid the book on the surface of the desk. Next he picked up an unsealed envelope.

‘Shall I open it?’

She nodded.

He lifted the flap, took out a photograph and passed it to Marnie.

It was an old photograph, in colour, but with a white frame around the edge. Marnie had never seen it before, although part of it was familiar. Why did Alice have it? Why was it in the tin?

The photograph showed Marnie’s mother, Denise, as a teenager, little older than Lucy was now. She was wearing a black polo-neck jumper and a kilt. Socks. Lace-up shoes. Her face was wan. In her arms was a baby. Marnie recognised the baby. It had its eyes closed, scrunched shut, its fists clenched on either side of its head, the tip of one little thumb sticking out between its third and fourth finger. It was sucking a pink dummy. There was a spot on its forehead where there must have been a mark on the camera lens.

Marnie made a frame for the baby’s face with her two forefingers. It was the same baby whose picture was in her locket: a print of the same photograph, the same spot on the forehead.

Which meant that the baby in the locket couldn’t be Marnie after all. Denise had been in her late twenties when Marnie was born. In this picture she was barely more than a child.

Marnie reached for the envelope that had contained the picture. Written on the front, in pencil, in Denise’s handwriting were the words: ‘To baby Alice. From your Mummy xxx.’