She called for Henry – feebly at first, then louder, though she couldn’t bring herself to yell full-throat. It seemed ridiculous. She banged on the door, and the banging drowned her voice out, the tone of it, growing more exasperated now, as if this was all Henry’s fault for not listening closely enough. Was he still outside on the gravel? Had he gone to his shed?

‘You must have a way to open it,’ she said. ‘You and Claire, you must have had a way.’

But Tessa lay down and closed her eyes.

Joan heard the dim final sound of a car door slamming – the couple leaving, perhaps. Perhaps it had been stupid to evict them. That girl was the sort who’d write terrible reviews on all the websites she could find. But what was the point of owning your own business, if not to make things personal once in a while? It was not a power Joan had exercised often, but one she’d been glad to possess. A sort of silent compensation.

She tried to remember what she’d learned about the attic when they first moved in. This had been nineteen years ago, when Claire was five or six. She remembered it had needed insulation, a thick layer of fibreglass fluff the contractors laid down, because there were gaps all over the place, spaces for the house’s warm air to rise into, then escape between the orange tiles. Hadn’t there been some question of obstructing the eaves? The ceiling sloped sharply – the cupboard, the attic, was anvil-shaped – and Joan crawled into the narrowest part of the wedge until she felt cold air on her hands. The inside walls of the cupboard didn’t actually meet the external walls of the house. There was space, at the end, to squeeze through, and even to descend, stepping from joist to joist, wriggling down the cavity wall, then – what? Breaking through the plasterboard into the dining room? Making a mess? No, she would not go down. She’d go sideways, towards the other bedroom on the attic floor, which was hers and Henry’s.

The end wall scraped her ribs and cheek as she wriggled past; her head bumped a tile, though it didn’t fall. There was some kind of space, though it wasn’t the other cupboard: it was empty but for yellow insulation and hammocks of spiders’ webs and a few spokes of light picking out the disused chimney breast that fed the fireplace in her own room. Nearly there. She crawled across and touched the far wall and found her way to the end.