There’d be a list of jobs for the girls and an envelope of cash in the kitchen. He didn’t get many visitors, and although he wasn’t the tidiest or cleanest man, sometimes it was odd to be cleaning and scrubbing floors and sinks and toilets that hadn’t had any use in the week since they’d last been there. They could have closed the door of each room and sat filing their nails, squirted a dose of polish into the air and left. No one would have been any the wiser. But they were all secretly a little scared of David, with his security systems and electronic gates, his camera mounted over the front door. So they played it safe and cleaned the place whether it needed doing or not.

The women set to work. The carpets were thick, wall to wall, in shades of blue and pink. Highly polished brass candelabra fittings hung on every wall and each window was pelmeted and dressed with swagged, fringed curtains in lush blue or gold silk. Everything needed to be dusted. There were two wings, each joined by corridors to the heart of the house where the kitchen and living areas were. The Polish girls took a wing each, while Sally got started with the ironing in the utility room.

There was always a pile of the pinstriped poplin shirts David wore, in a range of pastel colours, pink and peppermint and primrose. They all had handstitched labels with ‘Ede & Ravenscroft’ written in curlicue script. Missing, she thought, as she filled the steam iron and laid out the first shirt. Missing was never good. Not if it was a teenage girl from a nice family. And then she wondered if the police would have to interview her. She wondered if a man in a uniform would be sent out to the cottage. If, perhaps, he’d notice the way Millie and Sally were living these days and report it back to Zoë. Who wouldn’t be remotely surprised that her dimwit sister with the hopeful smile and the dopey stars in her eyes had at last got her comeuppance from the world and been put where she belonged.