The man who had died was Ismay's stepfather, Guy. Nine years on, she and her sister, Heather, still live in the same house in Clapham. But it has been divided into two self-contained flats. Their mother lives upstairs with her sister, Pamela. And the bathroom, where Guy drowned, has disappeared. Ismay works in public relations, and Heather in catering.

They get on well. They always have. They never discuss the changes to the house, still less what happened that August day. But even lives as private as these, where secrets hang in the air like dust, intertwine with other worlds and other people. And, with painful inevitability, the truth will emerge.