The minute she switched it on she got the ‘message waiting’ icon.

There was a text from Lydia with just a single code word to reassure her that everything had gone exactly according to plan, that she’d reached the airport without problem-or, as she’d put it, being twigged as a ‘ringer’.

Even if they hadn’t agreed that contact between them should be on an emergency-only basis-you never knew who was tuned into a cellphone frequency-she’d still be in the air so she couldn’t call her and tell her everything that had happened, confess to having cut her hair, wrecking her car. Instead, she keyed in the agreed response, confirmation that she, too, was okay, and hit ‘send’.

There was, inevitably, a voicemail from her grandfather asking her to call and let him know when she’d touched down safely. Using any excuse to override her insistence that she wanted to be left completely alone while she was away.

‘You’ll have to call me at King’s Lacey,’ he said. ‘I’m going there tomorrow to start preparations for Christmas.’ Piling on yet more guilt. ‘And the Boxing Day shoot.’

As if he didn’t have a housekeeper, a gamekeeper, a houseful of staff who were perfectly capable of doing all that without him.

‘And of course there’s the Memorial Service. It will be twenty years this year and I want it to be special. You will be home for that?’

It was the unexpected touch of uncertainty in his voice that finally got to her.

‘I’ll be there,’ she murmured to herself, holding the phone to her chest long after the voicemail had ended.

It was twenty years since her parents had died in a hail of gunfire in the week before Christmas and every year she’d relived that terrible intermingling of grief and celebration that made the season an annual misery.

And worse, much worse, the centuries-old Boxing Day shoot that nothing was allowed to interfere with. Not even that first year. Cancelling it would have been letting her parents’ killers win, her grandfather had said when he’d found her hiding beneath the stairs, hands over her ears in terror as the guns had blasted away.