‘None taken. It doesn’t work like that, though. Jim wouldn’t string anybody along.’

Jasmine almost skipped a beat, realising she’d had to check her tense and hoping it hadn’t been noticeable.

‘I know. He came recommended. Anne asked around her own law firm and a couple of others. We decided we’d spend what we had previously been paying for Megan’s nursery fees on hiring him. Anne agreed we would give it a few weeks but not get hung up on the whole thing. It was kind of symbolic, almost: like we were paying somebody else to worry about it so that we could enjoy this time.’

‘But then Jim told her he would have some news for her this week.’

Neil nodded stoically. This development had clearly precipitated a whole new storm of hurt and frustration: aggravating everything it had been supposed to salve.

‘Anne said she wouldn’t have any expectations, but hopes are something else. She stopped believing in miracles a very long time ago, but she’s spent her whole life looking for something that would give her soul peace. She even went to see this Bain guy a few years back, not long after Megan was born. Being a mother unleashed a whole lot of emotions for her. I don’t know what she was hoping to get from him, but it became important to her that she have contact with the last person ever to see her family.

‘I went with her. It was horribly awkward. Kind of embarrassing. The guy really had nothing he could tell her, but at least he was honest about it. Unlike the psychics: we’ve had a few of those sniffing around over the years. They really are the scum of the earth. I’m telling you this so that you understand my position. I know part of Anne is still on a quest, but it’s my role to protect her from anyone who would exploit that.’

Making her way back along the short garden path, the box file under her arm, Jasmine felt a liberated relief at being out of the house. On the surface it looked like the perfect family home, inhabited by the perfect family, but there was something stifling about the place, like Anne and Neil were fairy-tale characters gripped in temporal stasis by an evil spell. Time went on around them, but they were trapped for ever, unable to escape this thing that held them.

She thought of her own mum and perhaps for the first time, instead of merely missing her, she felt grateful that she’d got to have twenty years of her company, her love. She felt grateful also that she’d had the time to mourn, and appreciated as a blessing the certainty that her mother was gone.

As she climbed into the car, Ingrams held up a small square slip of paper, like a tear-off sheet from a telephone notepad.