She sighed, taking a sip, the cup held lightly in her slender fingers. ‘He was looking for someone like me. Things happened around me, you see, that couldn’t be explained.’

‘What kind of things?’

Zita glanced at Tom with her dark eyes, and once more he felt a frisson of something electric ripple through his entire body.

‘Promise not to hate me, darling?’ She pouted.

‘I promise.’ How could I? thought Tom. How could I hate you?

‘There was a man in the village who kept budgerigars – about twenty of them, in a cage. He would let you in to see them, and Nanny and I would often go and feed them. They were rather sweet little things, all flying up and down, and then they’d sit on their perches with their heads on one side, as if studying you. But I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand to see them in that cage.’ Leana stretched her limbs on her bed, and Zita absently reached out to stroke her.

‘One night, before I went to bed, I knelt down by my bedside. At first I was just praying – we’d always been taught to pray, you know. God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy, God bless Archie at school and God bless Nanny … and there, normally, I would stop. I kept going, thinking about the birds. And the prayer started to become something else.

‘Suddenly I wasn’t in the nursery, and Nanny wasn’t sitting behind me in her armchair. I was in the man’s house in the village, and I could really see the cage. It was dark – and of course when I’d been there earlier it hadn’t been dark at all.

‘And all the birds saw me, and none of them made the slightest sound, as if they’d almost been expecting me. So naturally I lifted the latch, and they still all sat there, and then I realised I’d have to open the window as well.’

She paused and fiddled with her teaspoon.

‘And when I did, out they all flew, in a perfect little stream. Then I pictured my bed, and there I was again. Of course I thought it had been a dream. But the next morning, when I woke up, I felt sick. Really sick, with a terrible pain in my stomach and a feverish mind. I could hardly move, either. As I lay there, with a black-coated doctor fussing over me, his big leather bag open on the bed, and Nanny flapping around getting in the way, a little budgerigar hopped onto my windowsill. It looked at me sideways and then flew away. And I knew. I knew I’d done it.’

‘That was the first time you did it. And Jack found you that way?’