He was tempted to ask her why not, but instead went for the big one.

‘What are you doing here?’ And, more to the point, why hadn’t his mother warned him that his daughter was there when she’d given him her keys?

‘Mum’s away on honeymoon with husband number three,’ she replied, as if that explained everything. ‘Where else would I go?’ Then, apparently realising that lying on her back she was at something of a disadvantage, she put her feet flat on the concrete and rose in one fluid, effortless movement that made him feel old.

‘And these days everyone calls me Xandra.’

‘Xandra,’ he repeated without comment. She’d been named, without reference to him, after her maternal grandmother, a woman who’d wanted him put up against a wall and shot for despoiling her little princess. It was probably just as well that at the time he’d been too numb with shock to laugh.

Indicating his approval, however, would almost certainly cause her to change back. Nothing he did was ever right. He’d tried so hard, loved her so much, but it had always been a battle between them. And, much as he’d have liked to blame her mother for that, he knew it wasn’t her fault. He simply had no idea how to be a dad. The kind that a little girl would smile at, run to.

‘I have no interest in your mother’s whereabouts,’ he said. ‘I want to know why you’re here instead of at school?’

She lifted her shoulders in an insolent shrug. ‘I’ve been suspended.’

‘Suspended?’

‘Indefinitely.’ Then with a second, epic, I-really-couldn’t-care-less shrug, ‘Until after Christmas, anyway. Not that it matters. I wouldn’t go back if they paid me.’

‘Unlikely, I’d have said.’

‘If you offered to build them a new science lab I bet they’d be keen enough.’

‘In that case I’d be the one paying them to take you back,’ he pointed out. ‘What has your mother done about it?’