"She can't recall what started her collection. Maybe it was in a fragment of conversation overheard as she cleaned a sink? Before long (as she dusted a sitting room or defrosted a fridge) she noticed people were telling her their stories. Perhaps they had always done so, but now it is different, now the stories are reaching out to her and she gathers them to her ... Cleaner Janice knows that it is in people's stories that you really get to know them....

Teaching English at an exclusive Cambridge school and writing an advice column for the local paper, Margot receives a disturbing letter about a kidnapped student allegedly from another girl who went missing twenty years earlier.