“Thank you all for coming here today to celebrate the life of Colleen Evans.” The vicar smiled around at them, and Heather wondered what she thought—about the small turn out, about the circumstances of her mother’s death. There had been an awkward conversation over the phone where the vicar had asked lots of questions about Colleen, clearly trying to glean enough information to be able to talk about her confidently at the service, but Heather had found she had had very little to tell her. If her mother had had hobbies in her later life, she hadn’t known about them, and most of her memories concerned a distant and uneasy childhood. At one point she had been seized with the compulsion to tell her about Michael Reave. My mother used to knock around with a murderer of women. Can you get that in somehow? Perhaps mention how she wrote to him for decades and never mentioned it to anyone. Or you could talk about how she used to live on a hippy commune and probably took loads of drugs. That makes a good anecdote, doesn’t it? In the end she had cut the whole thing short, and now she could see the vicar struggling to build an image of someone she had known nothing about.

“Happily married to her husband Barry for many years, Colleen was also extremely proud of her daughter Heather …”

She made a small noise in her throat at that. Thinking that she was crying, Mrs. Appiah patted her knee gently.

Heather found herself staring at the coffin, inevitably remembering her conversations with the people at the morgue, when her mother’s body had been retrieved and identified. They had been kind people, solemn and attentive, and they had explained to her that it would not be possible for her to see Colleen—the damage, when someone falls from a great height (jumps, Heather had added silently, jumps) was too extensive. Instead they had introduced her to a police officer who had given her Colleen’s handbag. Inside it had been her mother’s battered purse, her bus pass, and handfuls of rose hips, as though she had picked them and shoved them in her bag on her walk to the cliffs. It had also contained her suicide note.

“The rose hips, are they important?” The officer had asked. She had been very young and earnest, with big brown eyes, and she had put two large sugars into Heather’s tea even though she had asked for it without. For the shock. “We didn’t throw them away, just in case you wanted to keep them.”

Heather hadn’t known what to say to that, so in the end she had just taken the handbag, rose hips and all, and emptied the thing out into the bushes outside the mortuary. Were they important? She had no idea. That was the problem that was becoming more and more obvious: she knew barely anything about Colleen Evans and everything she’d found out since her death suggested she never would.