Sitting in her bank manager’s office, a middle-aged spinster gets the shock of her life. Marie, a linen-shop assistant who lives simply with her widowed mother in a little house in Kettering, had only popped in to see if she had enough for a holiday in Italy. “You can have any kind of holiday you want,” says the young clerk. “Why not buy a villa while you’re there?”When he swivels his computer screen to show her the details of the account bequeathed by her father, she can’t believe what she sees: she and her mother have millions in the bank. The next hour passes in a blur and gives rise to a question: “Who was her father … who had he been? She [had] never much cared, except that he was her father and she loved him. She had to. She fea