Cover

Dedication

This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to organ donors everywhere. You are the true heroes of so many stories.

Epigraph

There are two teachers in the school,

One has a gentle voice and low,

And smiles upon her scholars, as

She softly passes to and fro.

Her name is Love; ’tis very plain

She shuns the sharper teacher, Pain.

Or so I sometimes think; and then,

At other times, they meet and kiss,

And look so strangely like, that I

Am puzzled to tell how it is,

Or whence the change which makes it vain

To guess if it be—Love, or Pain.

—SUSAN COOLIDGE, WHAT KATY DID

Part I

Chapter 1

It should have started with ominous dark crows, great murmurations and flutterings, bad omens taking to the sky; with thick storm clouds rolling in, clocks striking thirteen.

In fact, it started with an extremely undignified argument with an old lady over a bar of chocolate.

“But you have a bar of Dairy Milk right there in your hand!”

Mrs. Marks looked up at her, heavy and glowering, from the cracked brown leather sofa. “I do not!”

“Behind your back!”

Like a tiny child, Mrs. Marks refused to remove her hand, just shook her head mutinously.

Lissa Westcott put down the medical equipment she’d been packing away and strode back into the center of the room, exasperated. “You thought I’d gone! You thought I was leaving the room and you were making a grab for a hidden Dairy Milk!”

Mrs. Marks fixed her with beady eyes. “What the bleedin’ hell are you then, the chocolate police?”

“No. Yes!” said Lissa, rather desperately.

She held out her hand. Mrs. Marks finally handed it over. It was, in fact, a Bournville.

“Ha!” said Mrs. Marks.

Lissa looked at her.

Old Mrs. Marks lived on the fourteenth floor of a South London tower block where the lifts were often broken. Her foot was gradually giving in to diabetes, and Lissa was trying her absolute hardest to save it. She glanced out from the dingy, fussy room with dusty fake flowers everywhere, over at the grand views of the river to the north, at the great towers of the City, glinting in the light, bright and beautiful, clean and full of money, like a vast array of glittering palaces, completely out of reach, though less than two miles away.

“We’ve just been talking about your diet for twenty minutes!” she said to the poor woman who was practically a shut-in, with only her daughter to visit her. Watching EastEnders with family-sized bars of chocolate was one of the few pleasures she had left, but it wasn’t doing her any good. “I don’t want to be coming up here one day and finding you in a coma,” Lissa went on, as severely as she dared.

Mrs. Marks just laughed at her. “Oh, don’t you worry about me, duck. Whatever will be will be.”