She was mollified to find that there were in fact two churches in the parish. One, St John’s, was a large Victorian building in an urban area of run-down streets, seventies developments and building sites which existed cheek by jowl with neat residential pockets and sprawling areas of student flats and bedsits. The other, St Hugh’s, from which the whole parish took its name, was a small medieval church on the very edge of the countryside, an area, if the plans were to be believed, soon to be covered in its turn with new developments. For now, though, it retained its quiet rural presence. Abi loved this little church from the first time she visited it and secretly, longingly, almost guiltily, thought of it as, at least potentially, her own.

Kieran Scott, the resident rector and in a sense her new boss, was based at the larger church of St John’s. At their first meeting she had liked him immediately. He was a stocky, good-looking man in his early forties, hugely charming, his reddish hair cut to flop attractively across his forehead, his eyes bright and inquisitive, his taste in clothes conservative without being dowdy. He was, she guessed almost at once, a superb administrator, clearly destined for promotion to the upper hierarchy of the church and probably wildly attractive to his female parishioners. He was even attractive, she had to admit, to his new curate, who happened at the moment to be without a man.

On her first day she was greeted at the front door of the Rectory, a three-storey, detached Victorian house next to St John’s, by a youngish woman with short fair hair, her slimness accentuated by her close-fitting jeans and a pink floral blouse. ‘Hi, Abi. I’m Sandra. Sandra Lang. Kier asked me to be here when you arrived and see you in.’ She smiled at Abi with genuine warmth as she helped her up the front steps with her suitcases.