What is was to be the youngest of three – what luck to be born into a jumbly, rowdy group of bigger people and be simply adored.

It wasn’t so much the discovery of a single clue, as the coming together of many small details. That moment when the sun shifts by a degree and a spider’s web, previously concealed, begins to shine like fine-spun silver. Because suddenly Sadie could see how it all connected and she knew what had happened that night.

Lack of potatoes left a person’s stomach growling, but absence of beauty hardened the soul.

She had found there were very few genuinely dull people; the trick was to ask them the right questions.

Sometimes, Edie, a person’s feelings aren’t rational. At least, they don’t seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base.

It’s a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.

But it was not so complicated really. Such things rarely are. It was a simple case of stars aligning; those that didn’t being nudged into place.

All these people, the stars of lives unfolding quite outside the sphere in which Cassandra’s own life took place.

It was electric, a spark of cosmic recognition, as if in that moment time’s weave had opened and they’d glimpsed an alternative existence in which they were something more than strangers on a train.

While I wasn’t certain how I felt about spiritualists, I was certain enough about the type of people who were drawn to them. Only people unhappy in the present seek to know the future.