Marcella’s arrival in Ashcombe caused a bit of a stir. Some of the older residents got quite het up about it, never having seen a black person in the flesh before. But most of the villagers, sympathetic to the family’s tragic past and delighted to see Robert smiling again, welcomed Marcella with genuine warmth. Marcella herself, with her natural enthusiasm, exuberance and dazzling smile, soon won over the rest, the ancient old farmers who seemed to expect her to start smoking spliffs in the pub and turn Ashcombe into a den of vice, and those doubters who whispered that she had only married Robert Harvey for his money.

Not that he had any, but that was the first rule of small-town tittle-tattle: when stuck for a spurious excuse, make one up.

But who could doubt Marcella’s genuine love for her new family when, at that year’s summer fête, April was crowned carnival queen. Nobody could have been prouder than Marcella, who had spent weeks sewing sequins onto the Barbie-pink dress she had painstakingly made by hand.

The little girl, who suffered from cerebral palsy and had never won anything before in her life, had insisted on making her own faltering speech at the crowning ceremony, and Marcella had applauded with tears of joy in her eyes.

Eight years later, the unthinkable happened. Tragedy struck again one sunny Saturday afternoon in May. April left the cottage and made her way up Gypsy Lane to visit a friend. A car, losing control as it rounded a bend at speed, mounted the pavement and catapulted April fifty feet into the air. According to the coroner at the inquest, she was probably dead before she hit the ground.

Robert and Marcella were inconsolable. Their grief was compounded at the trial when it was suggested that April’s handicap had contributed to the accident, that she had been wandering in the road when the car had rounded the bend.

‘April never wandered in the road,’ Marcella stormed. ‘She always kept to the pavement. How dare they say that, just to try and get that snivelling little fucker off the hook?’

In the end it didn’t, and the seventeen-year-old snivelling little fucker — Kerr McKinnon’s younger brother — was found guilty of dangerous driving. Den McKinnon was sentenced to two years’

imprisonment, which didn’t pacify Robert and Marcella one bit.

‘Two years,’ Marcella wept on the steps of the court, so incandescent with rage she could barely get the words out. ‘Two years ... how can that make up for killing our beautiful girl? If I ever see that murdering bastard again, I’ll kill him with my bare hands, I swear I will.’

Marcella had done a lot of swearing during those dark days, not least when a rumour spread through Ashcombe that the mother of the teenage driver had been heard outside the courtroom pointing out that it wasn’t as if the Harveys had lost a normal child, everyone knew the girl wasn’t all there.

When Marcella heard this, she had to be physically restrained. ‘Jesus Christ, are these people human?

What are they saying, that April had cerebral palsy so they’ve actually done us some kind of favour? That killing her was on a par with running over an animal? Is that it? Am I hearing this right?’ Wild-eyed with grief, she was almost literally tearing her hair out. ‘So what do they think we should do to cheer ourselves up, buy a cute little rabbit?’

But as the months passed, the family gained strength from each other. Love pulled them through. Somehow they survived and learned how to be happy again. Marcella and Robert devoted themselves to making the remainder of Maddy and Jake’s childhood idyllic and when Maddy wrote in a school essay that she had the very best mum and dad in the world, she knew that — unlike all the other kids in her class, who only thought they had — she was writing the absolute truth.

Estelle had reached Heathrow in plenty of time to meet her daughter off the flight from New York.

Now, waiting at the arrivals gate for Kate to appear, she found herself being jostled by an excited family unfurling a huge homemade Welcome Home banner. Touched by the sight of them, Estelle wondered how Kate would react if she emerged through the doors to find her mother waving a Welcome Home banner.

Well, maybe not. It wasn’t the kind of gesture Kate would appreciate. Somehow, they just weren’t that kind of family.

The toddler in the pushchair next to her spat his dummy out on Estelle’s shoe. Retrieving it and handing it back to him, she was rewarded with a face like thunder, as if it was all her fault. Strongly reminded of Kate at that age — the haughty attitude, the indifference — Estelle straightened up and quelled the butterflies in her stomach. She loved her daughter, of course she did, but she was also slightly afraid of her.

Oh Lord, that was an awful thing to even think. Not afraid, intimidated. Kate had inherited her father’s somewhat aloof manner, and the emotional distance had been furthered by the school she had attended. Estelle hadn’t been convinced that sending her to super-expensive Ridgelow Hall was necessary, but Oliver had insisted. ‘Can you imagine how she might turn out if we dumped her in the nearest comprehensive?’ he’d demanded. ‘Good heavens, woman, are you out of your mind?’ So Estelle had capitulated, thinking that maybe she was wrong after all, but the long-suppressed doubts had come back to haunt her. And as for the local comprehensive, well, it hadn’t seemed to do Maddy and Jake Harvey any harm. They may not have PhDs and stratospheric careers, but they were thoroughly nice people and had grown into the kind of young adults of which any parent would be proud. Plus, of course, they adored their mother. Despite all the truly terrible things that had happened to Marcella over the years, Estelle secretly envied her.

‘There he is! Dad, Dad, over here!’ The family at her side began screaming and Estelle was forced to dodge out of the way to avoid getting entangled with their frantically flapping banner. Dad, letting out a roar of delight, raced over and hauled several small children into his arms. As they showered him with kisses and he told them how much he’d missed them, Estelle saw him catch his wife’s eye and mouth: Love you. The wife, who was forty if she was a day, beamed like a teenage bride and blew him a kiss, happy to wait her turn.

Estelle’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. Now she was reduced to envying total strangers –

total strangers waving the kind of banner her own daughter would sneer at and pronounce naff.

She wouldn’t mind betting this couple would be having fabulous sex tonight.

Then she straightened, because Kate was coming through, pushing a trolley piled high with cases and looking like a celebrity travelling incognito in a sleek charcoal trouser suit, dark glasses and trilby-style hat.

‘Darling! Yoo-hoo,’ Estelle called out(slightly naffly), waving an arm to attract her attention.

Catching sight of her, Kate altered course and came over, proferring the undamaged side of her face for a kiss. Hugging her rather too enthusiastically in a feeble attempt to keep up with the neighbours, Estelle dislodged the trilby, which managed to land in the lap of the toddler in the pushchair.

The small boy stared at it as if it were a bomb. Kate snatched it up and thrust it back onto her head. Estelle flinched as one of the small children said, ‘Mum, what’s happened to that lady’s face?’

‘Sshh,’ his mother chided. ‘It’s not nice to say things like that. Poor girl ...’ She pulled a sympathetic face at Kate. ‘I’m so sorry. You know what children are like.’

Shooting the woman a look that could have pickled walnuts, Kate said brusquely, ‘Mum, can we get out of here? Now?’

Kate waited until they were racing down the M4 in the Lancia before speaking again. ‘Will Dad be there when we get home?’

Estelle shot her an apologetic look. ‘Sorry, darling. He had to work.’

‘Par for the course.’ Kate watched her mother light a cigarette. Estelle, a furtive smoker when her husband was around, had needed the boost of a Marlboro in order to brave the terrors of the motorway.

‘But he’ll be home soon,’ Estelle went on brightly, as she had done for the last twenty-odd years,

‘and he can’t wait to see you.’ She paused. ‘I thought we’d have dinner tonight at the Angel, just you and me.’

Kate shuddered. The Fallen Angel was the only pub in Ashcombe. Just you and me could be roughly translated as: the two of us sitting at a table while everyone else in the pub ogles us from the bar and sniggers at the posh bird’s comeuppance.

She hadn’t asked to be the posh bird, they’d just saddled her with that label God knows how many years ago, and ever since then she’d been stuck with it.

‘Darling. I know. But you have to face them at some stage.’

Estelle was only too aware of what gossipy small-town life was like.

Kate sighed and gazed out of the window as Berkshire sped past them in a blur of motorway-constructed emerald-green turf and geometrically planted trees. She knew her mother was right.

Aloud she said, ‘We’ll see.’

‘You’ll have to tell Mum,’ said Jake.

‘I can’t tell Mum.’ Maddy covered her face with her hands. ‘She’ll go ballistic.’

‘You still should. She at least has a right to know he’s back.’ Jake kept his voice low. They were outside in the back garden of Snow Cottage, Maddy sitting cross-legged on the grass and Jake lounging in the hammock, his eyes shielded by dark glasses, a can of lager in his hands. Upstairs, Sophie was having her hair rebraided by Marcella, in preparation for the ceremony.