‘Well, you do now,’ Tracy said. The kid snapped her head up and stared at Tracy before glancing warily round the kitchen.

‘Where?’

Tracy put her hand on her chest and said, rather heroically, ‘Here. I’m going to be your mummy.’

‘Are you?’ Courtney said, looking doubtful. As well she might, Tracy thought. Who was she kidding? (That word again.)

‘Last slice?’ Courtney gave her a thumbs-down, a small emperor in the Colosseum. She yawned. ‘Time for bed,’ Tracy said, trying to sound as if she knew what she was doing.

She gave the napped kid a bath. A lot of grime but no bruises, no obvious sign of damage. Skinny little legs and arms, thin shoulder blades that were like wing nubs. A noticeable birthmark, tattooed by some tiny misreading of the genetic code on to the kid’s forearm. The birthmark was the shape of India, or was it Africa? Geography had never been Tracy’s strong point. Any distinguishing marks? A seal of ownership stamped on the skin for ever. A stigma. Maybe there was a way of removing it. Laser treatment perhaps.

Courtney sat passively while Tracy soaped and rinsed her, untangled the scrawny plaits, carefully washed her hair and then wrapped her in a towel and lifted her out of the water. Tracy hadn’t appreciated just how small a kid really was. Small and vulnerable. And heavy. It was like being put in charge of a Ming vase, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Thank God Courtney wasn’t a tiny baby, Tracy didn’t think she would have been able to cope with the nerves.

Tracy’s newly acquired house had last been refurbished some time in the early eighties – hardly the pinnacle of style in décor – and the bathroom suite was a sludgy avocado, the colour of Shrek. Tracy had watched all three Shrek DVDs on her own. If you had a kid you could watch cartoons, go to the pantomime, visit Disneyland, without feeling like a pathetic loser. Just the sight of the small, naked body sitting in her own snot-coloured bath had almost moved her to tears. She was surprised to find (let alone explain) such deep wells of primal, untapped emotions inside the calcified shell.

‘Just a sec, pet,’ she said, perching a towel-swaddled Courtney on the bathroom stool. She raked through the bathroom cabinet and found a pair of nail scissors. ‘Just tidy you up a bit,’ she said, taking a lock of the kid’s limp hair and snipping it off. Felt like a violation, but it was just hair, she told herself.

She helped Courtney into the new Gap pyjamas and said, ‘Just pop into bed, pet,’ and felt her heart moved all over again when Courtney obediently scrambled into bed, lay on her back and pulled the covers up to her chin. Christ, you could get a little kid to do anything, you just told them and they did it. Horrifying.

Tracy looked around with new eyes and realized that the small spare room with its mean little bed seemed hopelessly barren and inhospitable. There was a third bedroom but it was still full of cardboard boxes from her own move as well as all the junk from her parents’ house that Tracy hadn’t had the energy or the interest to look into – a jumble of embroidered tray-cloths, chipped plates and old photographs of unidentifiable relatives. Why unpack the stuff, she could just take the whole lot and dump it on the pavement outside an Oxfam shop.

She should have done something about the bedrooms before she started on the downstairs. Tracy had been pleased when she decorated the living room, having toiled her way through The World of Interiors and House & Garden for weeks, but when it was finished and she looked around she realized it looked more like a public space in a corporate hotel than a comfortable nest. Her own bedroom had been decorated by the previous owner with a wallpaper patterned with big purple flowers that had a vaguely obscene look to them.

The little spare room, papered in boring woodchip, seemed to have been used as a study. Flimsy plastic Venetian blinds hung at the window and the floor was covered in cheap beige contract carpeting. Tracy wished that she had thought ahead, bought cheerful curtains and a nice soft rug and painted the room in pleasant pastel colours. Or white. Pure and unsullied, the colour of swans and birthday cake icing. A woman with foresight would have anticipated kidnapping a kid.

Hot milk? Or cocoa? Tracy was trying to invent a childhood she had never had herself, her own self-absorbed parents having expected Tracy to bring herself up somehow. They had never taken much interest in her and it was only when they died that she realized they never would. Better parents (loving parents) and she might have turned out differently – confident and popular, with the ability to charm the opposite sex into bed and into love so that now she would have a child of her own rather than a second-hand one.

Hot chocolate, she decided, her own idea of a treat. When she came back with a mug for each of them she found Courtney sitting up in bed with the contents of her little pink backpack spread out on the thin Ikea duvet. It seemed she had a collection of totemic objects, their significance known only to their small owner:

a tarnished silver thimble

a Chinese coin with a hole in the middle

a purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it

a snow globe containing a crude plastic model of the Houses of Parliament

a shell shaped like a cream horn

a shell shaped like a coolie hat

a whole nutmeg

‘Quite a treasure trove,’ Tracy said. The kid looked up from her wampum and stared inscrutably at her and then, for the first time since Tracy bought her, Courtney smiled. A beatific sunbeam of a smile. Tracy beamed back, a bubble-burst of mixed emotion – ecstasy and agony in equal, confusing measure inside her – rising in her chest. Jesus. How did parents manage with this kind of stuff on a daily basis? She found herself blinking back tears. ‘I haven’t got a bedtime book, I’m afraid,’ she said quickly.

Tracy herself liked to read big fat Jackie Collins books. She would never have told anyone, they were like a secret vice, an unspeakable pleasure like pornography (or Disney). Hardly suitable for a kid so instead she made up a bespoke fairy tale about a poor little princess called Courtney who had a wicked mother and was rescued by a very good stepmother. She threw in a lot of mythic paraphernalia – spinning wheels and dwarves – and by the time the glass slipper was being tried for size on Princess Courtney’s little foot, the kid was asleep.

Tracy kissed her tentatively on the cheek. The kid smelled of soap and new cotton. Tracy didn’t remember ever kissing a child before and a small, primitive part of her felt as if she had trespassed, broken some natural law. She half expected something momentous to happen – for the sky to crack open like an egg or an angel to appear – and when neither of these things occurred Tracy breathed a sigh of relief. She felt as if she’d achieved something, although she wasn’t sure what.

When she came back downstairs the answer machine was blinking even though she hadn’t heard the phone ringing. She played the message back, worried that it might be announcing her downfall. Can you confirm that you are harbouring a child who belongs to someone else? Children were possessions, people didn’t like it when you stole their stuff. For years it had been her job to see that they didn’t. Sleep, eat, protect, repeat.

She was relieved that it was only Linda Pallister, although why Linda should be getting in touch out of the blue was a puzzle. There was something spooky about the way Tracy had been thinking about contacting Linda and now Linda was contacting her. When had Linda Pallister ever phoned her at home? Never, as far as Tracy could remember. Her message was even more puzzling. Tracy? Tracy? I didn’t know who to call. I have to talk to you. I think I’m in . . . trouble. How could Linda Pallister be in trouble? And what was it to do with Tracy? There was a long silence and then Linda started up again, hardly more than a mumble. It’s about Carol Braithwaite. Do you remember Carol Braithwaite, Tracy? Someone’s been asking me about her. Phone me back when you get this message, will you? Please.