In the end, everyone said Jimmy must have drowned, but no one had ever explained why his body was never found. At fifteen, she’d read enough crime stories to know that bodies always surfaced somewhere, possibly months later, unless they were weighted down, in which case it had obviously not been an accident. But who would do such a thing to a small, harmless boy? And even if he’d just got caught somewhere, in branches or tree roots, why had the police divers never discovered him?

‘Let’s go,’ she says, suddenly. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

Back up the hill, outside the church, the cars have mostly disappeared.

‘Nearly time for lunch,’ Bella says.

‘Good idea. Shall we take a look inside first, now the service has finished?’

Bella pulls up the car. ‘That path looks reasonable for your chair. Let’s try it. Then lunch?’

‘Then lunch.’

It is the smell of the church, rather than the sight of the interior, that takes her back: old prayer books, furniture polish and dust, the cloying scent of lilies dying in their vases. She is immediately transported back to her teenage self, wriggling uncomfortably on the hard wooden choir stall, listening to Pa droning on about parish notices, jumble sales and whist drives, not to mention the endless readings from the Bible and, worst of all, his interminable sermons.

He would usually start promisingly, with a story about something that had happened to him or to an acquaintance, or something he’d read in a book or seen in the newspapers. But about five minutes in, with dreary inevitability, the topic would revert to the religious text. He would quote a passage from the Bible, or a psalm, and then he’d be off for the next twenty minutes, explaining what the passage meant and what we should learn from it.

‘Can’t you make your sermons a bit shorter?’ she’d asked him once. ‘Or even tell a joke or two?’

‘Believe me, I would if I could get away with it,’ was his answer. ‘But if I try lopping off even five minutes, someone always complains they’re not getting their money’s worth. And I’ve come a cropper in the past, telling jokes. Believe me, some people have no sense of humour.’

Another time she asked him if he really believed – as he’d claimed in his sermon the previous day – that all human beings are essentially good.

He’d paused for a moment before replying, ‘I think we’re born good, sweetheart, but our lives shape us, and sometimes not always for the better.’

‘Like Mr Blackman?’

He gave a curious hollow laugh. ‘Yes, even someone like him was good, once upon a time.’

‘I hate him,’ she’d said. ‘I hope he goes to hell.’