But I shook my head. ‘You don’t have to be nice to me –’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘At least just come outside with me for a bit.’

We stepped out onto the street and Nassim held me. ‘You should have told me, Anna,’ he said. ‘You could have told me.’

And I leaned right into him and cried and cried and cried.

16

The big front door of Bromley Cairn shifted easily. I hadn’t expected that. That wouldn’t happen in a movie. But once inside, the wooden floor creaked just as it should.

I stood looking around, my nose registering the smells of dry dust and damp stone – an air that was both brittle and earthy all at once. It was a venerable, tempered smell – much better than fresh mouse.

When the top floor didn’t instantly cave in on me, I stepped further into the house and closed the door behind me. Immediately the outside sounds, the windy rushing of air, the mellifluous sing-songing of high-up birds, the lower down chipping and cawing of sparrows and crows, all stopped. It was perfectly silent. I breathed in and then out, inhaling the calm and the silence and the old settled smell.

I was standing in half-light in the little entrance hall. The boarded windows let in only choreographed slivers of light through the church-like dimness, spotlighting random items of abandonment littered across the floorboards – a shard of mirror, a crumpled beer can, a single torn sneaker, an ashtray – picking them out like holy objects. A shadowy wooden staircase rose in front of me. Everywhere else was dim except for the closed door to the room to my left. The frame around it glowed, like golden sunlight was trying to burst right through it.

I pushed the door inwards and stepped inside.

I squinted, instantly bathed in light. The sun had done its coming-out trick again and was throwing a big, window-shaped yellow square of light onto the floor. There was a large table placed under the bright window – the one ground-floor window still intact – and a single mattress was propped up against a wall. There was no other furniture in the room, and the wooden floorboards were dusty but free of rubbish. The whole place felt sparse and bright and clear.

I went straight back across to the little house and found Bette sitting in an armchair off the alcove, actually knitting like a grandmother from a fairytale, watching daytime soaps.

‘Grandma?’ I said.

‘Hmm?’ She angled her head towards me without actually taking her eyes off the television. Clearly I’d interrupted an important bit – a passionate embrace was playing out; someone was about to walk in, you could just feel it, and then of course they did: shocked face, long camera shot, prolonging the moment . . . I waited until it flicked to the ad break then tried again.

‘Grandma, do you know if there is actually power in the old house?’