It had stuck in Sally’s mind, that exchange, and it came back to her now as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. She’d never heard anyone say it was a disadvantage to have a brother or a sister before. Maybe people thought it, but she’d never heard anyone actually voice it.

‘I wish they wouldn’t do that.’ Sally looked up. Isabelle was standing in the window, frowning out at the garden. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told them.’

Sally got up and joined her. The garden was long, planted with fruit trees and surrounded by huge poplars that rustled and bent when so much as a breath of wind came through. ‘Where are they all?’

Isabelle pointed. ‘See? At the end. Sitting on the stile. I know what they’re thinking.’

‘Do you?’

‘Oh, yes. Pollock’s Farm. They’re wondering if they can get down there before we notice.’

Isabelle’s house was a mile to the north of Bath on the escarpment where the steep slopes of Lansdown levelled out. To the north-west were the lowlands and the golf courses; to the east, and butting up to Isabelle’s garden, was Pollock’s Farm. It had been derelict for three years since the owner, old man Pollock, had gone mad and had started, so people said, drinking sheep dip. The crops stood dead in the field, weed-choked; dead brown maize heads drooped on their stems. Half-dismantled machinery rusted along the tracks, pig troughs filled with stagnant rainwater, and the decomposing pyramids of silage had been broken into by rats and gnawed until they seemed like the crumbling ruins of a forgotten civilization. The place was notoriously dangerous – not just for the hazards in the fields, but for the way the land stopped abruptly in the middle, interrupted by an ancient quarry that had cut a steep drop into the hillside. The farmhouse was at the bottom of the quarry – you could stand in the top fields and look down through the trees on to its roof. It was where old man Pollock had died – in his armchair in front of the television. He’d sat there for months, while the seasons changed, the house decayed and the electricity was turned off, until he’d been discovered by a meths addict searching for privacy.