…Instead of counselling, I go to a church in Hampstead for a couple of hours every other day. It’s cool and quiet and has its own car park. No one troubles me much. They seem to feel it’s bad form to question why anyone would want to sit there. Perhaps they think I’m talking to God…

IN ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES I wouldn’t have met Jess Derbyshire. She was so reclusive that only a handful of people in Winterbourne Barton had seen inside her house; and the rest were happy to spread the rumour that the local policeman went in once a month to check she was still alive. He didn’t, of course. He was as scared of her dogs as everyone else, and he took the view that the postman would notice if she wasn’t collecting her mail from the American-style box at her gate. She owned and managed Barton Farm, which lay to the south-west of the village, and her house was even more detached from the community than mine.

I discovered very quickly that Jess was both the most invisible resident of Winterbourne Valley, and the most talked-about. The first thing any newcomer learnt was that her immediate family had been killed in a car crash in 1992. She’d had a younger brother and sister, and two thoroughly nice parents, until a drunk in a Range-Rover ploughed into her father’s ancient Peugeot at seventy miles an hour on the Dorchester bypass. The second, that she was twenty when it happened, making her older than she looked; and the third, that she’d turned her family home into a shrine to the dead.

There’s no question she had an uncongenial personality, something she was happy to foster with her pack of thirty-inch high, hundred-and-eighty-pound mastiffs. It showed itself most obviously in her unfriendly stares and curt way of speaking, but it was the close relationship between her immature looks-“arrested development”-and her morbid interest in her dead family-“refusal to move forward”-that most people felt explained her peculiarity. Her “loner” status made them wary, even though few seemed to know her.

My own first impression was no different-I thought her very strange-and when I opened my eyes I was relieved to find she’d gone. I do remember wondering if she’d set her dogs on me deliberately, and what kind of person would abandon another who was so obviously distressed, but it reawakened too many memories of Iraq and I pushed her from my mind. It meant I wasn’t prepared for her return. When she drove her Land Rover through Barton House gates fifteen minutes later and deliberately blocked my exit, alarm immediately coursed through my system again.

In my rear-view mirror I watched her climb out with a metal toolbox in her hand. She walked to the front of the Mini and examined me through the windscreen, apparently to satisfy herself that I was still alive. Her flat, narrow face was so impassive, and the intrusive stare so unwelcome, that I closed my eyes to blot her out. I could cope with anything as long as I couldn’t see it. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

“I’m Jess Derbyshire,” she said, loud enough for me to hear. “I’ve called Dr. Coleman. He’s with a patient but he’s promised to come straight on when he’s finished.” There was a hint of a Dorset burr in her voice, but it was the deepness of her register that struck me the most. She seemed to want to sound like a man as well as dress like one.

I thought if I didn’t reply she might go away.

“Shutting your eyes won’t help,” she said. “You need to open your window. It’s too hot in there.” I heard something tap against the glass. “I’ve brought a bottle of water for you.”

Desperate for something to drink, I opened my eyes a crack and met her unwelcome stare again. The sun was beating relentlessly down on the roof and my hair was plastered to my scalp with sweat. She waited while I lowered the window four inches, then passed the bottle through before nodding towards the door of the house. She twisted her hand as if to indicate that she was going to unlock it, then moved away to kneel on the doorstep. I watched her take a can of WD-40 from her toolbox and spray a fine mist into the lock before sitting back on her heels.

In a funny sort of way she reminded me of Adelina, small and neat and competent, but without the Italian’s expressiveness. Jess’s movements were economical and spare, as if the method of releasing a key was something she’d practised for years. And perhaps she had.

“It always sticks,” she said, stooping to talk through the window. “Lily never used it…she bolted the door inside and came in and out through the scullery. The oil takes about ten minutes to work. Were you given any other keys? There should be a mortise and a Yale for the back door.”

I glanced at an envelope on the passenger seat.

She followed my gaze. “May I have them?” she asked, holding out her hand.

I shook my head.

“Try counting birds,” she said abruptly. “It always worked for me. By the time I got to twenty, I’d usually forgotten why I’d started.” Her dark eyes searched my face for a moment before, with a shrug, she went back to the doorstep and squatted on her haunches in front of it. After a while she took a pair of pliers from her toolbox and used them to tease the key back and forth. When she finally managed to turn it, she twisted the handle and disappeared inside. A few seconds later, a light came on in the hall. After that, she moved along the ground floor, opening windows to let in the fresh air.

I wanted to get out and shout at her. Stop interfering. Who’s going to close the place up again after I’ve left? But I’d become so comfortable with doing nothing that that’s what I continued to do. I did watch the birds, however. I couldn’t avoid it. The garden was alive with them. Flocks of house-sparrows, endangered in the cities, chattered and darted about the trees, while swallows and house-martins flashed in and out of nests beneath the eaves.

When Jess reappeared, she hunkered down beside my door to put herself on the same level as me. “The Aga needs lighting. Do you want me to show you how to do it?”

I might have gone on ignoring her if I’d cared less about seeming rude or looking foolish, so perhaps counting birds did work. I ran my tongue around my mouth to produce some saliva. “No, thank you.”

She tipped her chin towards the envelope. “Are there any instructions in there?”

“I don’t know.”

“If Madeleine wrote them, you won’t be able to light the Aga yourself. She doesn’t even know how to spark the ignition, let alone prime the burner.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask who Madeleine was, or even Lily, the name she’d mentioned earlier, but there was no point. “I’m not staying,” I told her.

She didn’t seem surprised. “You’ll need your car keys then.”

I nodded.

She fished them out of her pocket and held them up. “I took them from your bag when I was looking for an inhaler. It was close to where you dropped your mobile.”

“I’m not asthmatic.”

“I guessed.” She curled her fingers round the keys. “I’m going to hang on to them to stop you driving. You can’t leave yet…not behind a wheel, anyway. If you want them back, you’ll have to come into the house and get them.”

Her assumption that I would tamely do as she said annoyed me. I still thought of her as younger than she was, but there was a rigidity about her slight frame that suggested a strength of purpose I didn’t have. “Are you a policeman?”

“No. Just playing safe. You’ll damage yourself as well as other people if I let you go now.” She searched my face again. “Was it the dogs?”

I recalled how long it had taken me to drive through the entrance. “No.”