When Pa was sent off to hospital Mrs D took charge, looking after everything until Aunt Mary arrived. The police continued their search for Jimmy, but they seemed convinced Eli was the most likely suspect, and after his suicide all they would say was that they were ‘pursuing a specific line of enquiry’. Whether they’d told her aunt, or anyone else, what that line of enquiry consisted of, Molly never discovered, but they didn’t interview her again, or consult her. And they never found Jimmy.

When she tries to remember what she felt, those following days and weeks, her mind goes into a blur. Dr Mortimer prescribed more pills and made Aunt Mary promise to make sure that Molly took them. She’d slept like the dead, and one day followed another in a haze, as though the feelings of utter misery and despair belonged to someone else, not her. Looking back, she recalls it as a dark tunnel, knowing that you have no choice but to move forward, even though there is no reassuring light in the distance to draw you on.

She remembers being told that Sarge had been found, and being ridiculously pleased at this small piece of good news. The dog was half-starved and dehydrated, refusing to leave the woodland glade and growling at anyone who came near, and they’d had to call in a vet to tranquillise him before he could be retrieved. George Diamond told them that Eli’s friends ‘down Bures way’ had taken Sarge in.

Each week she and her aunt would take the bus to visit Pa in a vast, gloomy Victorian mental hospital on the outskirts of Colchester. The first time was a ghastly shock: he looked about a hundred years old and barely recognised them. But as the weeks went by, he regained something of his old personality and at last, after about two months, he was discharged. They took the train to Buckinghamshire and stayed with Aunt Mary for the rest of the year. Mrs D had cried, her husband by her side, when they left. What good people they were. They’d exchanged letters at first, but it tailed off after a while.

‘Those first few months were very hard,’ Molly admits to Bella. Auntie Mary had reminded her so much of Mum, like her sister both in looks and gestures, which served as a constant reminder: a phrase, a tone of voice, a tilt of the head. Molly went to the local school for the autumn term and hated having to be the new girl all over again.

‘Poor you. Such a lot of tragedy in your short life.’