‘This trip is totally unnecessary, given that we will not be evicting anyone, but as we seem to be going anyway let’s just see if we can all get along, shall we?’ said Grace, adopting the tone she had used when the pair of them had been squabbling children.

She sat back in her seat and watched the now-familiar scenery slide by. Hector had put the address into the sat nav system and cursed each time a manoeuvre needed to be made. Grace said nothing, fearful that if she spoke she might give something away. She could take them directly to the house without the need for a digital assistant, but that was something the others didn’t need to know just yet.

As the car pulled into the road, Grace felt her chest tighten and she put a hand to her heart as if to reassure it that there was no need to panic. What was the best way to approach this? If she stayed in the car, she wouldn’t be able to protect Leah from whatever Hector was planning to unleash on her, but if she got out, Leah would recognise her immediately as Mrs Newman, the lady from the church. Of course, she was neither Mrs Newman nor from the church, and any explanation that followed would make it inevitable that Charles’s sordid double life that she had kept hidden from her children for so long would all come spilling out.

‘Will you go to the door with your brother, please, Clio,’ Grace said.

This was surely the best compromise. At least with Clio there, Hector might be contained.

Clio pulled a face. ‘I’m not sure,’ she mumbled. ‘Maybe if . . .’

But Hector wasn’t listening.

‘I’ve been here before,’ he said, cutting right across her.

Grace’s world shifted beneath her feet.

‘You can’t have been,’ she said. ‘You must be confusing it with somewhere else.’

But Hector was shaking his head as he scanned the street first one way and then the other. ‘It’s that house there, isn’t it?’ he said, pointing directly at number 5. ‘Dad brought us here for the day when we were small. I don’t know where you were, Mum. Maybe you’d gone to Auntie Charlotte’s? We had ice cream on the beach and chips for tea. And is there a lighthouse?’

Clio was nodding. How did she know? Did she remember coming too?