“What’s up?” her daughter asked. “I was trying to find a picture. Of Imogen. Here, look.”

She handed Elizabeth one of the transparencies. Elizabeth held it up to the window and squinted.

“Oh my God,” she said. “When was this taken?” “1983. Why?” “The clothes! The hairstyles! What were you thinking of?”

“Never mind that. This is the party I was telling you about. Rosamond’s 50th. Now – you see the little girl standing in front of Aunt Rosamond?”

Elizabeth held the picture up to a patch of brighter light at the top of the window. Her attention was drawn, at this moment, not to Imogen but to the infinitely strange, infinitely familiar figure standing at the far left of the grouping: this ghostly projection of her mother’s younger self. It was what people might have called a “good photograph”, in the sense that it made Gill look attractive, beautiful even. (She had never thought of her mother as beautiful before.) But Elizabeth wished that it told her more than that: wished that it could tell her what her mother might have been thinking, or feeling, at this momentous family party, so soon after her marriage, so newly pregnant. Why did photographs – family photographs – make everyone appear so unreadable? What hopes, what secret anxieties lay behind that seemingly confident tilt of her mother’s face, her mouth slipping into its characteristic, slightly crooked smile?

“Yes, I see her,” Elizabeth said, finally, turning her attention back to the little fair-haired girl. “She looks pretty.”

“Well, that’s Imogen. That’s who we’ve got to find.”

“Shouldn’t be difficult. You can find anybody these days.”

Her late aunt’s house was hidden off one of the many mud-encrusted lanes that lay between Much Wenlock and Shrewsbury. The approach always managed to take Gill by surprise. Dense banks of rhododendrons announced that you were nearly there, for behind them, she knew, stretched Rosamond’s shady, sequestered garden.

Emerging, at last, blinking, into the autumn sunshine, you expected to see some crumbled baronial hall, but what you found was a modest grey bungalow, built some time in the 1920s or 1930s, with a greenhouse leaning up against one side and an air of absolute quiescence that could be quite unnerving. This had always appeared to be the main feature from the outside, even when Rosamond was alive, and now, in the knowledge of her final absence, Gill stepped out of her car that frozen morning to be enveloped at once in a loneliness more complete than any she could remember.

If the silence of the house and its grounds seemed almost unearthly, the cold inside was even worse. Gill could tell, without being morbid or fanciful, that it was more than a question of room temperature. This was a dead person’s house. Nothing could take the chill off it.

Rosamond’s armchair had been placed to take advantage of the garden view. Around the chair, just as Dr May had informed her, were stacked a number of photographic albums – some recent, some almost antique – along with three or four plastic boxes containing transparencies and a small battery-powered device for viewing them. There was something else, too, which gave Gill a jolt of recognition when she noticed it leaning up against the chair: an unframed oil painting, a portrait of the young Imogen, which she had certainly seen somewhere before. (Perhaps – though she could not be sure of this – at Rosamond’s house in London, at the 50th birthday party?) On the little table next to the chair was a tape recorder, a small microphone – the connecting wire now neatly coiled up © Jonathan Coe 2007. Extracted from The Rain Before It Falls, to be published by Penguin on September 6 at £17.99. To buy it for £16.19 (inc p&p), call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst and tied around itself – and four cassette jewel cases, standing in an orderly pile. Gill examined these curiously. There were no inlay cards describing the contents, and there was nothing written on the tapes themselves: all she could see were the numbers one to four, which Rosamond appeared to have cut out of cardboard, and then glued, in sequence, to the plastic cases. Furthermore, one of the cases was empty: or rather, instead of housing a tape, all it contained was a sheet of A5 airmail paper, folded up tightly, upon which Rosamond had scrawled: Gill – These are for Imogen.

If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself.

Where was the fourth tape to be found? She pressed the eject button and, sure enough, there was another cassette inside. It appeared to match the others, so Gill slipped it into the empty case and took all four of them over to a writing desk that stood in the corner of the room. She wanted to put these out of temptation’s way, immediately. In the desk she found a large manila envelope; she dropped the tapes into it, sealed the envelope with a couple of quick, decisive licks and wrote “Imogen” on the front in capital letters.

Next, Gill went over to the record player, which sat on top of a stained and weathered rosewood cabinet. Again just as Dr May had told her, there was a record still resting on the turntable. She raised the Perspex lid, carefully lifted the record – taking care not to touch the surface – and examined the label. Songs of the Auvergne, it said: arranged by Joseph Canteloube, sung by Victoria de los Angeles . There were also, on the top shelf of the cabinet, a few dozen more cassettes, some blank and some prerecorded, and standing next to them, something else, something quite unexpected – enough to make Gill draw in her breath sharply, so that her gasp rang out in that silent house like a scream of distress.

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