Jess glances about the other tastefully framed photographs and quickly deduces that this is a shrine to a happy mother and her two children who once lived at the vicarage. Their apparel suggests the 1960s to the early ‘70s.

No father is visible anywhere. The little girl, however, appears to occupy centre stage in every photograph. A beautiful and bashful but ever smiling girl, captured here from infancy to around the age of twelve. In contrast, her older brother appears dour and self-absorbed. Of him there are fewer pictures, and, as with his sister, nothing of him beyond his juvenile years.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Like gunshots, furious crashes from downstairs pierce the silence of Nerthus House. Doors being slammed. Quickly followed by the noise of utensils dropping and scattering upon a hard floor.

Jess turns and races from the bedroom. Breathless, and precipitating a landslide of plastic bags upon the stairs, she bolts through the house to reach the living room. Only to find Flo sat in her chair awake but merely staring at the blank television screen.

Jess runs from the living room, crosses the hall and inspects the kitchen.

Her ransacked shoulder bag lies upside down on the floor, her personal belongings scattered to the four corners of the room. Bewildered, she gapes at the mess at her feet, then briefly peers at the three cupboard doors that hang open.

By the time she’s back inside the living room, she’s breathing hard to steady her nerves and control her voice. ‘Flo. You . . . My bag?’

Flo ignores Jess but begins to rock back and forth while staring at the dead television screen.

Jess returns to the kitchen, falls to her knees and begins gathering her scattered possessions before throwing them into her bag.

SCRAPE.

At the sounds of a key thrust into the front door lock, she flinches and clutches at her heart. ‘Christ alive!’

Morag’s entrance into the vicarage is as abrupt as it is noisy. Without a glance at Jess, the night worker bustles into the hall. ‘Barely had a wink of sleep. You owe me big time.’

Before the woman can unzip her quilted coat, Jess is in her face, her words taut with suppressed anger. ‘You think it’s funny?’

‘What you on about?’

‘Give you pleasure, does it? Have a laugh, did you?’

‘Eh?’

‘Keeping me in the bloody dark. There’s nothing in the notes about . . . Any surprise she’s so bloody disturbed with all the curtains shut?’

‘You ain’t fillin’ me with much confidence, if this is how you is first day.’

‘Bloody cheek!’

‘What else she done?’

‘Threw her lunch all over the floor for starters. And spat in my bloody face! In the garden, she . . .’

Morag performs a poor show of stifling laughter. ‘She don’t eat nothing but biscuits and kippers.’

‘There, that! What kind of diet is that?’

‘What she likes.’