“Okay,” said Nikki. “So what? Lots of people don’t do the whole Valentine’s thing. And would that have been so out of character for your mum? She never struck me as soppy, exactly.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. But …” Heather turned the pot over again, racking her memory. There had always been plants around the house when she was growing up, fat green plants with lustrous, shining leaves, the sort of plants that you could ignore most of the time without them dying. But flowers? Had Dad ever just brought home a bunch of tulips from the gas station? Sitting in her mother’s chintzy living room, the faint smell of coffee and air freshener in her nose, Heather thought not. “She didn’t like flowers, I’m almost sure of it. No daffodils in a vase on the table, no roses on Valentine’s Day. Nikki, what if flowers had bad associations for her? Perhaps she had looked at cut flowers, fresh blooms already dying, and had remembered that the man she had once spent so much time with—the man she was writing to in prison—had used flowers to decorate the corpses of his victims.”

“You’re reading too much into it,” said Nikki, but she looked uncertain, all the same.

“I don’t know if I am. Because there’s clearly loads of stuff about my mum I never had a clue about. It’s like I’m being shown a whole other side of her now.” Heather sighed. “Maybe I’ll find out more tomorrow.”

“You’re going to see this Anna woman?”

Heather nodded. She had phoned the number Pamela Whittaker had given her and spoken to the receptionist of the Twelve Elms Centre. Heather had sensed a fair amount of surprise from the woman that Anna had a visitor at all, but they had been eager enough to book her in.

“She might have known my mum, so it’s worth a try.”

Nikki swirled her wine in her glass thoughtfully. “Hev, do you really think Fiddler’s Mill is the key to all this? That something that happened so long ago could have caused your mother to … do this to herself?”

“I do.” As soon as she said it out loud, she realized it was true. “I really do think something happened at this place, something mum kept secret for the rest of her life.”

Heather stood up and left the living room, heading for the kitchen with the pot still in her arms. She was halfway across the tiled floor when a memory dropped into her mind like a blade of ice, and she jumped, the terracotta pot slipping from her arms. It shattered, scattering shards of orange clay all over her feet and sending pieces skittering under the fridge and the oven, but Heather hardly noticed.

The card.

“Heather?” Nikki appeared at the kitchen door, her eyes wide. “Are you all right?”

It had been left outside their door when Heather was thirteen or fourteen. She had found it as she’d stepped out to nip to the shops, and she remembered the weird combined feeling of embarrassment and pleasure as she’d knelt to pick it up. At the time, she had been nursing a crush on a boy called James Thurlow, who was in her science classes, and thanks to a wild combination of hormones and optimism she had been dropping huge hints about Valentine’s Day for the last few weeks. The card itself had been quite a classy one; simple white background traced with gold lines, a big red heart in the middle. Inside, somewhat disappointingly, there were just the printed words “always thinking of you” with a heart hand drawn in ballpoint pen underneath.