He pushed his glasses up his nose, eyes swimming with tears once more. ‘Joyce said they’d write with their new address but damn if they ever did. There was something Joyce and Vicky had in common – they felt I knew too much. They shut me out.’

By the time Ursula pointed the car back towards Brighton it was rush hour and Zia felt as limp as last month’s lettuce.

They’d eventually enjoyed a tea shop lunch with Harry then spent the rest of the afternoon in his sunny cabin, filling in Zia’s timeline. Harry had given her four old, tatty photograph albums. ‘These are Vicky’s own,’ he’d said, turning the old, board-like pages with glue going brown beneath the film. ‘On one of my last visits to you both she asked me to keep them for her. Said they were too painful to look through and you were getting old enough to find them and ask tricky questions. Said she’d kept a few other things of Tori’s.’

Zia nodded. ‘Like school reports? We didn’t understand why there were so many at first. Then we realised they belonged to two different Victoria Chalmers.’

Harry managed a smile as he closed the last album and gave it a last pat before handing it over. ‘Were Tori’s good and Vicky’s full of exasperated comments?’

Zia had laughed, though her eyes stung with tears. ‘Actually, yes.’ Throat tight, she leafed through Vicky’s albums, poring over images of Tori in her carrycot, her high chair, at school, laughing during a family day on the beach or beaming from within a group of friends.

The icing on the emotional cake had come when Harry’s daughter Mandy arrived home from work, a coiffed woman in her fifties driving a Lexus. The moment Harry explained who Zia was Mandy had dragged her into a hug. ‘I loved Tori and Vicky so much. Tori was like my sister and Vicky was just the most wonderful, warm human being. My brother Leon will hate that he wasn’t here for this. Are you really Tori’s darling little baby?’

Her words had wrenched a sob from Zia that dragged at her heart.

Now, exhausted by emotion, she gave a great yawn and Ursula sent her a quick look. They were in a queue of cars waiting to get onto the A27 so she didn’t need to concentrate on the road. ‘Take a nap. You look like crap.’

‘Thanks,’ Zia said drily.

Ursula put the car in gear as the vehicle in front inched forward before its brake lights came on again. ‘I never appreciated quite how hard all the moving around was on you as a kid till I heard you telling Harry.’

‘Don’t know about “hard”.’ Zia felt disloyal to Vicky if she’d made it sound that way. ‘I just couldn’t make lasting friends.’