She let the top fall, as if her revelation hadn’t happened, and went on to something else, some tale about how Scarlet had painted an extra numeral on the clock face between nine and ten, and when it chimed we’d be imprisoned for ever in a make-believe hour, never getting any older than we were, and her parents would never return.

‘Who’s Scarlet?’

‘She’s a spy – sort of a spy. She’s a girl. She doesn’t follow any rules and she’s very, very dangerous. She kidnapped Mary-Bell, and we have to get her back, but we have to go in disguise …’

She was radiant, imperious, revolting. Her breath smelled like sausages – dinner, or tonsillitis? Was she feverish? Was she ill? She started pulling old hats and coats from a basket and thrusting them towards me. My mother had told me Dr Harmer had a son, much older, from his first marriage, but that the son lived in Vancouver now and never came to visit, so Elizabeth was basically an only child. Feeling sorry for her, I took a hat, a floppy velvet thing, and put it on.

My favourite babysitter had been a girl called Nerys, with beautifully clear skin – she’d let me touch her cheek sometimes, so moist it was tacky – and a brusque, dismissive manner that was not unkind. Nerys would never join in with games. She stayed on the sofa, drinking cherry Coke, reading fashion magazines with the TV on. Sometimes she talked a bit about boys, or clubs, amused I’d asked. Her thudding answers were not interesting in themselves but because they seemed absolutely truthful. Yes, she had boyfriends. Yes, she went out. Yes, she drank, but it wasn’t that nice.

She fell out, once, spectacularly, with her mother. She left home, and only kept sitting for me because she needed the money. My mother kept booking her so she could ring up Nerys’s mother afterwards and tell her how Nerys was doing. I’d confessed this once to Nerys: that my mother was spying on her, reporting on her. I thought she’d be shocked, but she wasn’t. She told me to mind my own business. I didn’t get to touch her cheek that night. Then she went away to university, and my mother and Nerys’s mother lost touch. Most of my mother’s friends were like that: people with whom she had some structural reason to stay in contact, who drifted at the structure’s end.