We did while Monks Cross fell behind, despite a sluggish tailback that made me wish we could take off like the vehicles in Thelma’s painting. By the time we picked up speed Orfeo had looked back, inadvertently returning Euridice to the underworld. I would have been happier with the distance I was putting between us and Monks Cross if the mirror hadn’t kept reminding me of Bella’s relic, even though it was hidden in her bag. Shades from Hades brought the act to an end with a chorus, declaring that virtue was immune from the passage of time, and Bella caught me glancing at the bag. “Would you like to have it by you, Patrick?”

“I’d rather not have it anywhere.”

She’d provoked a response I should have known Roy wouldn’t like. Orfeo reappeared to perform a lament answered by an echo – a bid to borrow aspects of the human – before Apollo raised him to the stars to be rewarded for his sufferings, though only with an image of his lost love in the sky. “We never really go away,” Bella told Roy. “There’s always a trace if you search.”

Since he didn’t answer I said “You’re talking about the likes of Monks Cross.”

“What else could I be, Patrick?”

I heard a question, not the confirmation Roy plainly took it for. I was overtaking a parade of elongated lorries while outdistancing an impatient truck three times the height of the car, and couldn’t risk meeting her eyes in the mirror. Some Mickey Mouse music by Dukas struck up as I managed to return to the inner lane. Bella was looking somnolently innocent, even more so when I held her gaze. “Did you want to ask me something?” she said.

A shiver seemed to waken Roy from dozing. “Like what, Bell?”

“I know you don’t. I was asking Patrick.”

“I heard you telling Roy about Monks Cross,” I said.

“You mean you were spying on us,” Roy objected.

“Was there anything to spy on?” When nobody answered I said “You seemed to know a lot about it, Bella.”

“She read about it in the library.”

“Didn’t you as well, Roy? Why would you need to be told?”

“Because Bell read more than me. She went back.”

I remembered hearing her return when I’d phoned him at the library the day my parents died. I felt as if my attempt to trip her up had sent me sprawling instead, but there was more I ought to question. “Bella, you said I knew about places like Monks Cross before Roy did.”

“It’s true, isn’t it? You had Thelma’s journal.”

“No, I mean you didn’t say I’d known before you did.”

“She meant us both, dad.”

“That’s how I think of us. I didn’t think I had to specify myself.”