‘Hold on,’ said Alice. She disappeared into the bedroom and returned a moment later with a hairband. ‘Here,’ she said, and she fastened the band around Marnie’s head, so that there was a bow at the top and to the left, exactly the same as the band on Alice’s hair. ‘There,’ she said, holding her face so close to Marnie’s that their cheeks touched. ‘Look at the two of us now!’

* * *

Marnie pushed herself to her feet and took the mug back inside the caretaker’s cottage, swilled it beneath the tap and left it upended on the drainer. She stood for a moment in the kitchen, listening to the silence.

She’d been here many times since her father moved out, mainly not venturing beyond the kitchen, although once, caught out by a sudden thunderstorm, she, Lucy and Tessy had sheltered in the living room until the hammering of hail on the windowpanes had eased. Marnie had made a fire and it had been cosy, cuddled on the couch, although Marnie had kept her eyes away from the alcove where her mother used to keep her books. After they were damaged by damp, Denise had glued woodchip wallpaper into the alcove. She’d painted it with anti-moisture paint, egg-yolk yellow. It hadn’t worked. Black spores bloomed on the wallpaper which had long since peeled from the wet old plaster behind.

When the storm passed, and the time had come to leave, Marnie had been afraid of opening the living-room door; afraid of the darkness gathering and what lay beyond. She knew, rationally, that it was nothing more sinister than a small, damp building, with small, cold memories, but her fear had been visceral. She hadn’t gone back into her memories to try to track the fear back to its root. She hadn’t wanted to do that.

Now, it being a clear day, Marnie opened the kitchen door and went into the narrow hallway beyond. The dresser was still there, a cheap, pine thing from B&Q, the wood yellowed beneath its old gloss, covered in dust. Marnie put one hand on the newel post and looked up the stairs. She hadn’t been up to her old room since her father moved out. Why not? What was stopping her?

Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, a refusal to be cowed by superstition, she began to climb, the sixth step sagging and groaning as ever. Denise had asked John to fix that step right up to her death and he’d always said: ‘It’s next on my list,’ but the step still hadn’t been fixed. It had creaked and sagged for almost the whole of Marnie’s life.