Nikki placed her hands flat on the worktop and sighed. “I don’t know, I really don’t. I doubt they let just anyone rock up and talk to these people.”

“Well, I’m not just anyone, am I?” Heather picked up the biscuit tin lid and turned it over and over in her hands. She still felt sick, but it was mixed with a tight feeling of excitement in her chest. There could be answers here. “I’m the only daughter of his only friend in all the world, it turns out. Nikki, I need to know. I have to find out what happened to my mum.”

“Hev,” Nikki met her eyes steadily, and again there was the expression of sympathy Heather found so hard to look at. “Sometimes there are no answers. Sometimes awful shit just happens. All I mean is … don’t get your hopes up, okay?”

Heather walked home that night half in a trance. She had phoned the police from Nikki’s phone, and had eventually spoken to a man who introduced himself as DI Ben Parker. At first, he had sounded impatient, harassed even, but as she spat out the details of what her mother had hidden in her attic, his voice took on a quiet, musing tone. She had photographed a few of the letters and sent them to him, being sure to include those that had been received before Reave was in prison, and he had thanked her for her help. When she’d asked if she could come to the prison and meet Reave, he had shut the suggestion down immediately, if politely. Standing at the door to her mother’s house, wrestling with unfamiliar keys, Heather shivered and glanced uneasily at the tall trees looming on all sides.

“As if this wasn’t all creepy enough already.”

Halfway up the corridor to the living room she paused, a cold hand curling around her heart. Her mother’s perfume hung in the air, strong and unmistakable; violets and lily-of-the-valley, strange and sweet—the same scent from when she’d knocked the bottle over in her mother’s bedroom. Every Christmas, Dad had bought her a new bottle of it, and when he’d died, she bought it for herself. It was the only perfume she would ever wear, despite the old woman fustiness of it.

Heather stepped into the living room, sniffing, and just as abruptly the scent was gone.

Perhaps I’m having a stroke, Heather thought as she threw her satchel on the sofa, wincing at the clank as the biscuit tin crashed against something else in her bag. Sighing, she sat down next to it, sinking into the overstuffed cushions. “They say you smell odd things as your brain is turning off the lights.”

Thanks to the chintzy pattern on her mother’s sofa it took her a few moments to spot the three brown feathers, lying against the soft fabric. Three feathers, small and faintly downy looking, their ends speckled with darker spots. Heather jumped up and looked around the room, although she couldn’t have said what she was looking for.