‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘I’m not!’ The other woman glances at her watch. ‘Officially, we became the new owners at twelve o’clock, but the agent let us pick up the keys just before that.’

‘What are you talking about? What agent? No agent has keys to my house!’ Fi’s face spasms with conflicting emotions: fear, frustration, anger, even a dark, grudging amusement, because this must be a joke, albeit on an epic scale. What else can it be? ‘Is this some sort of prank?’ She searches over the woman’s shoulder for cameras, for a phone recording her bewilderment in the name of entertainment, but finds none – only a series of large boxes sailing past. ‘Because I’m not finding it very funny. You need to get these people to stop.’

‘I have no intention of getting them to stop,’ Lucy Vaughan says, crisp and decisive, just like Fi usually is, when she hasn’t been blindsided by something like this. Her mouth turns in vexation before opening in sudden wonder. ‘Wait a minute, Fi, did you say? Is that Fiona?’

‘Yes. Fiona Lawson.’

‘Then you must be—’ Lucy pauses, notices the querying glances from the movers, lowers her voice. ‘I think you’d better come inside.’

And Fi finds herself being ushered through her own door, into her own house, like a guest. She steps into the broad, high-ceilinged hallway and stops short, dumbstruck. This isn’t her hall. The dimensions are correct, yes, the silver-blue paint scheme remains the same and the staircase has not moved, but the space has been stripped, plundered of every last item that belongs in it: the console table and antique monks bench, the heap of shoes and bags, the pictures on the walls. And her beloved rosewood mirror, inherited from her grandmother, gone! She reaches to touch the wall where it should be, as if expecting to find it sunk into the plaster.

‘What have you done with all our things?’ she demands of Lucy. Panic makes her strident and a passing mover casts her a correcting sort of look, as if she is the threatening one.

‘I haven’t done anything,’ Lucy says. ‘You moved your stuff out. Yesterday, I’m assuming.’

‘I did nothing of the sort. I need to look upstairs,’ Fi says, shouldering past her.

‘Well . . .’ Lucy begins, but it isn’t a request. Fi isn’t seeking permission to inspect her own home.

Having climbed the stairs two at a time, she pauses on the upstairs landing, hand still gripping the mahogany curve of the banister rail as if she expects the building to pitch and roll beneath her. She needs to prove to herself she is in the right house, that she hasn’t lost her mind. Good, all doors appear to lead to where they should: two bathrooms at the middle front and rear, two bedrooms on the left and two on the right. Even as she lets go of the banister and enters each room in turn, she still expects to see her family’s possessions where they should be, where they’ve always been.

But there is nothing. Everything they own has vanished, not a stick of furniture left, only indentations in the carpet where twenty-four hours ago the legs of beds and bookcases and wardrobes stood. A bright green stain on the carpet in one of the boys’ rooms from a ball of slime that broke open during a fight one birthday. In the corner of the kids’ shower stands a tube of gel, the kind with tea tree oil – she remembers buying it at Sainsbury’s. Behind the bath taps her fingers find the recently cracked tile (cause of breakage never established) and she presses until it hurts, checking she is still flesh and bone, nerve endings intact.

Everywhere, there is the sharp lemon smell of cleaning fluids.

Returning downstairs, she doesn’t know if the ache has its source inside her or in the walls of her stripped house.

At her approach, Lucy disbands a conference with two of the movers and Fi senses she has rejected their offer of help – to deal with her, the intruder. ‘Mrs Lawson? Fiona?’

‘This is unbelievable,’ Fi says, repeating the word, the only one that will do. Disbelief is all that’s stopping her from hyperventilating, tipping into hysteria. ‘I don’t understand this. Please can you explain what the hell is going on here?’

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to do. Maybe if you see the evidence,’ Lucy suggests. ‘Come into the kitchen – we’re blocking the way here.’

The kitchen too is bare, but for a table and chairs Fi has never seen before, and an open box of tea things on the worktop. Lucy is thoughtful enough to push the door to so as not to offend her visitor’s eyes with the sight of the continuing invasion beyond.

Visitor.

‘Look at these emails,’ Lucy says, offering Fi her phone. ‘They’re from our solicitor, Emma Gilchrist at Bennett, Stafford and Co.’

Fi takes the phone and orders her eyes to focus. The first email is from seven days ago and appears to confirm the exchange of contracts on 91 Trinity Avenue, Alder Rise, between David and Lucy Vaughan and Abraham and Fiona Lawson. The second is from this morning and announces the completion of the sale.

‘You called him Bram, didn’t you?’ Lucy says. ‘That’s why it took me a minute to realize. Bram’s short for Abraham, of course.’ She has a real letter to hand too, an opening statement of account from British Gas, addressed to the Vaughans at Trinity Avenue. ‘We set up all the utility bills to be paperless, but for some reason they sent this by post.’