After all these months, it still felt like her mum had recently been in it. Sometimes that caused her to weep again and sometimes it was a comfort, but either way it was a feeling she wouldn’t be without.

She unlatched the gate and dragged it open, revealing a single track of compacted dirt. It led through a short belt of mature woodland, then opened out to reveal a large house across an expanse of coarse but well-managed grass.

It was a gloomy and forbidding structure, too big to be the home of an individual or even a family, surely, but insufficiently grandiose to constitute any kind of stately manor. The word ‘convent’ came to mind, but only because it was the first one she could think of to dislodge its predecessor, which was ‘asylum’. It certainly looked like the kind of place that would have a mad woman in the attic, though this thought was probably coloured by having seen signs for Rochester on the drive here. Her impressions were doubtless also coloured by the awareness – wilfully suppressed for most of the journey but growing irresistible over the final miles – that she was approaching this place in order to doorstep someone who was somehow connected to an infamously brutal and prolifically murderous criminal.

What kind of person lived in a place like this? she asked herself as she stopped the Honda, trying not to dwell upon how much ‘a deranged serial killer’ sounded like the right answer. It really didn’t help that she could hear a mechanical buzzing from somewhere beyond the building that could well have been a hedge-trimmer, but in her imagination was undoubtedly a chainsaw.

As she walked up the steps to the front door, it occurred to her that nobody knew she was here. She could be murdered and buried in the grounds by teatime – right alongside Jim, perhaps.

She rang the doorbell and felt an enveloping sense of relief when she heard a rapid beating of feet accompanied by the exuberant energy of children’s voices. They sounded Scouse. Jasmine had a keen and reliable ear for accents, and could often detect traces of multiple dialects in just a few moments of conversation, not that such subtleties were required for the voices behind the door.

She heard them called back from the entrance and told to go upstairs by an older-sounding woman with a more neutral middle-class English accent, though Jasmine detected a base of Brummie lightly flavoured with a more local hint of Tyneside.

She waited as the sounds of the children’s voices receded. They weren’t just being told to keep their distance; the woman was waiting until they were well gone before opening the door. Jasmine was reminded of a friend’s house where the family’s Alsatian had to be locked in the back room before they could let in any visitors. In this case, however, she soon understood whose protection the exclusion was in aid of.