She takes a seat on Flo’s bed with the sheaf of papers and browses until she finds a wallet containing a marriage certificate for FLORENCE HARRIET GARDNER and ALGERNON WILFRED GARDNER.

Jess sets the paper aside and retrieves two more official-looking documents. Birth certificates. Two of them. One each for CHARLOTTE ISADORA GARDNER and PHILLIP ARTHUR GARDNER.

Jess takes a moment to peer at a picture of Flo with her two children, taken in the garden decades before. ‘Charlotte and Phillip.’

Beneath the birth certificates lies a death certificate. Jess pulls it free and reads the scant details of Algernon Gardner’s demise. A civil registry document accompanies the certificate and declares the man dead after being missing for seven years. Dated 1980.

Other documents in the same wallet reveal Flo to be the recipient of an RAF pension. Inside another slim leather wallet, Jess ferrets out an old RAF warrant card and a passport-sized picture of a man in uniform.

The sight of him forces her to gasp and she cannot prevent a slight palsy in her fingers as she raises the picture and brings it closer to her eyes. Her scrutiny confirms that this is the mutilated man who has appeared in her dreams. Flo’s husband. In the picture he’s dressed in an RAF uniform but there can be no mistake: this is the man she sees when she sleeps.

Jess slips the wallet back inside the folder, lurches across to the bureau and stuffs the folder back inside the drawer as if it’s toxic.

She steps away. Bites her bottom lip until the flesh whitens. Then returns and extracts another elegant folder from the open drawer. This one is made from card and secured by a red ribbon. Jess retakes her seat on the bed and unties the bow.

* * *

Outside, an absolute silence thickens about Flo and her wheelchair upon the lawn. And, as if wary of being observed from on high, she turns her head to face the vicarage.

Her eyes fix upon the bedroom window.

* * *

From inside the card folder, Jess removes a second death certificate. The words swim and she has to read them three times to make sense of what she is looking at. CHARLOTTE GARDNER, aged 12, died in 1973. The cause of death is listed as ACCIDENTAL. ‘Oh, Flo. You poor love.’