With the ceiling light refreshed, for the second time that evening she stands amazed. Her upturned face takes in a squadron of kit-set military aircraft, dusty but artfully assembled and painted, all hanging from the ceiling. Scores of them. Turning about, she surveys more of a space made orderly with a military precision. The walls are filled with photographs and detailed line drawings of RAF aircraft from the Second World War to the jets of the 1970s. A bed that would pass muster in a barracks fits neatly against one wall. The contents atop the small desk are as neat as the boy must have been when he occupied the room decades hence. A butterfly collection and a library of well-looked-after books and annuals from a younger world are all coated with dust, though lightly. As with the girl’s room, the area has been maintained until recently.

Upon the desk, a photograph features the boy from the family portraits in Flo’s room. He’s wearing an air cadet uniform and receiving an award from a smiling adult officer. That very certificate, awarded to a Phillip Gardner in 1978, remains tacked beside the photograph.

Becoming uncomfortable within a room as cold and clinical as a cell for a military obsessive, Jess withdraws and turns off the light as she leaves.

* * *

Carefully opening the top drawer of the dresser in Flo’s bedroom, Jess’s eyes immediately find two transparent sachets containing locks of hair – blonde and black. They are dated: Charlotte, 1972. Phillip, 1972. Stacked wallets of photographs form a dais beneath the sachets of hair.

Jess raises and leafs through the top wallet, her attention gripped by the very first picture, in which a much younger Flo sits beside her little girl, Charlotte. The two of them flank a record player in the vicarage lounge, a room captured in better days.

The remaining pictures in the envelope feature Flo with the sombre, awkward Phillip and beaming Charlotte. Somewhere in the Mediterranean. Holiday snaps.

Jess rummages deeper inside the drawer and withdraws a second wallet from near the bottom of the pile. These photographs are also old but their vintage is more recent than the preceding family portraits.

Behind her back, without so much of a creak of a bedspring, Flo spreads her arms and pulls herself upright.

Jess is engrossed with the photograph she has selected and withdrawn from the deck. A sun-blanched picture, the tones diluted orange, that features a group of women of varying ages, half a dozen, some elderly, who are seated on blankets around a pond in a wooded grove. It might be a picture of a study group, or a women’s group. The arrangement suggests a self-help ensemble.