The Girl in the Picture. Kerry Barrett

be alive. I thought the ‘murderer’ would contact Tessa from prison and ask for her help in proving the victim was still breathing …

      I pulled out the whiteboard pens Priya had brought with her and wrote a few ideas on the board, feeling the rusty cogs in my mind beginning to whir. But all the time I was writing, at the back of my mind, was the stuff I’d heard about our house, and the story of the Hargreaves family and poor motherless Violet.

      ‘How’s it going?’ Ben said as he peeked round the door of the study an hour or so later.

      I was hunched over my laptop trying to write a synopsis. I jumped, not expecting Ben to be home.

      ‘I’m going back to the training ground in a minute,’ he said. ‘I just had to go and pick up some equipment in Brighton, so I thought I’d pop in and say hello. You look engrossed. Is it going well?’

      ‘Not bad,’ I said, reluctant as always to discuss a book while I was still thrashing out the plot.

      ‘I thought you’d like a cup of tea,’ Ben said. He came over to my desk, put a mug down next to my coaster, and peered at the screen of my laptop.

      Pointedly I moved the mug on to the coaster and shut my screen.

      ‘Don’t look,’ I said. ‘I’m not ready for you to read it yet.’

      Ben chuckled. ‘What’s it about?’

      I looked up at him. ‘Tessa’s working in Sussex,’ I said. ‘That’s all you need to know for now.’

      Ben grinned at me. ‘So you’re writing?’

      I nodded then made a face. ‘It’s words,’ I said. ‘But I’m not convinced they’re quite right yet.’

      ‘It looks better in here,’ Ben said. ‘Like you’ve settled in.’

      ‘I have,’ I said in satisfaction, looking round at the room. ‘But I want to open that cupboard. It would be good to stash some books and stuff in there.’

      I pointed at the cupboard nestled under the eaves in the corner of the room. The one with the door painted shut.

      ‘Mike’s still downstairs,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll get him to have a look at it if you like?’

      ‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘It probably just needs a good yank.’

      It took a bit more than that, but Mike got the cupboard open in the end. He gouged out paint from the edge of the door, and wiped the edges with paint stripper and eventually, it opened.

      I was downstairs by then, trying to put on some laundry without Dumbledore jumping into the washing machine. Mike yelled over the bannister, ‘Ella! Cupboard’s open.’

      ‘Fab,’ I said. Scooping up the puppy, I bounded up the stairs. All these steps would definitely help me keep fit. In the attic, Mike was standing at the open cupboard door, shaking his head.

      ‘Think I’ve just made a whole lot more work for you,’ he said.

      I looked inside. The cupboard wasn’t empty, as I’d expected. Instead its wooden shelves were full of books and papers.

      ‘I can get someone from the office to come and clear all this out if you like,’ Mike said.

      ‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘No way. Look at all this stuff. It could belong to someone.’

      ‘Someone who didn’t want it,’ Mike pointed out.

      ‘Still,’ I said. ‘We can’t just dump it. I’ll go through it and see what’s here.’

      The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. ‘I’ve heard stories about this house,’ I told Mike. ‘Stories about a mystery. Maybe this is linked. Perhaps the cupboard was painted shut for a reason.’

      Mike gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Or perhaps some lazy so-and-so couldn’t be bothered to paint it properly,’ he said.

      But I was undeterred. I reached into the cupboard and took out a stiff cardboard folder, full of paper and tied with cord. ‘I’m going to start with this,’ I said.

      It was a while before I got to go through the folder, but much later, when the boys were bathed and in bed, and Ben had come home again, wolfed down some dinner, then gone out to an evening training session back over in Worthing, I settled down on the sofa, and opened the file.

      It was actually something of a disappointment at first. Lots of crumbling, yellowing newspaper pages, mostly.

      I took one from the top and read it.

      Opinions are divided over the latest works by the self-titled Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,