At least, it was a red-brick building. By the time I reached the end of the path, which led onto an overgrown expanse of gravel, I’d seen it was a derelict hotel. Every window was boarded up. From the remnants of the sign above the awning, a wrought-iron structure barbed with shards of glass, I gathered that the small hotel had been the Little Imperial, though at first I misread some of the remaining letters as IMP REAL. On the far side of the gravel the path continued through another mass of trees, and I made for Bella’s house.

I hadn’t struggled far through the tangle of trees when I was rewarded by the glint of a window ahead – indeed, several. The effort of advancing further prevented me at first from seeing my mistake. The light was reflecting not from glass but from water, and the choked path led to a viewing platform above the river. The handrails had mostly rotted away, and sections were strewn down a slope twice the height of the three-storey hotel. I could see both ways along the riverbank without venturing onto the decayed platform. I took some time to peer in each direction, shading my eyes and then straining them until they stung, but it made no difference. The only building on this side of the road was the abandoned hotel.

While I made my way back through the trees I stared about as though a house might be persuaded to appear among them or take shape from them or otherwise prove to have been overlooked, but nothing like a fairy tale took place. I emerged from the silent gloom onto the gravel, to be confronted by the uselessly unhelpful hotel, which was as long as several of the nearby houses stuck together. Beneath a steep slate roof sprouting four enormous chimneys, the boarded windows left the frontage so anonymous that the remnants of the sign suggested at best a failed attempt to lend it an identity. The door under the awning was covered up as well, and I was making for the road without a coherent idea in my head when I saw those boards weren’t entirely secured. The door was furtively ajar.

Only frustration and aimlessness made me go closer. Glass crunched underfoot as I stepped on the concrete threshold, and one of the slates that had smashed the panes of the awning splintered as I trod on it. Though the boards had been prised away from the doorframe, where the nails had left rusty stains, the door wasn’t open wide enough for even a child to slip through. I made a token bid to shove it wider, but it didn’t budge. I was about to turn away when I noticed a faint trail leading into the darkness inside the hotel.