Bella arrives, flustered as usual. From where she lives on the other side of Colchester, the traffic is often unpredictable. The journey leaves her edgy and impatient, and she usually spends the first half-hour rushing about, clearing or cleaning, making the bed, taking an inventory of the fridge and the kitchen store-cupboard, wiping the worktops – busy, busy, busy – when all Molly wants is for her to sit down with a cup of tea to chat about life’s joys and woes, about her troubled, troublesome clients and Lewis’s latest sporting triumphs. She depends on her daughter to reconnect with the world outside.

Today is different. Bella takes off her coat, puts on the kettle, kisses her mother on the cheek and immediately draws up a chair. ‘Whatever mischief have you been up to now, Mum?’ she says, without preamble. ‘What’s all this about the police wanting to question you?’

Molly shakes her head. There’s no point in trying to explain, when she doesn’t even know what the police want to ask her. And she has already decided not to tell them much, so why alert Bella to the fact that she knows more?

‘No idea, love. How would you like to make some tea?’

Half an hour later a car, garishly decorated in chequered dayglo yellow and blue, enters the gates and stops outside the lodge. Two people climb out, a girl who looks barely out of her teens, the man older, bearded. He hoicks up his trousers and the woman smooths her rather too-tight skirt as they glance around before approaching the warden’s door and ringing the bell.

Soon enough they’re following Gillian up to the bungalow, being invited inside and introduced to everyone. The room feels suddenly very small. At least they are not PC Stubby and his mate, Weasel Face, Molly thinks. How could she forget them, with their sorry-sad expressions and the persistent grilling that made her feel as though it was all somehow her fault, when she could barely think straight for worry and lack of sleep?

Neither of these present-day coppers wears Dixon of Dock Green helmets and she can see no sign of truncheons or handcuffs, although they are garlanded with technology: phones, cameras, walkie-talkies. She supposes they’re assuming that an eighty-four-year-old will go quietly, and is briefly diverted trying to picture the scene, should she choose to resist arrest. Imagine the scandal! What a treat it would be for all the other residents watching from their windows: an old woman being manhandled down the pathway by a burly copper.

Bella offers tea or coffee, the warden excuses herself and leaves. ‘Let me know if you need anything,’ she says. Finally they are all settled.