“How come? What happened?”

Anna shrugged and looked away, a slightly shifty expression moving over her features, when a short young woman came over with two polystyrene cups of tea for them. Heather thanked her, and she moved to the far side of the room, where an old man was playing checkers by himself.

“So. This seems like a nice place. How did you end up here?”

“Referrals, one place to another, that’s me. They said I have mild paranoid schizophrenia,” she pronounced it carefully, as though reading it off a card in her head. “With long-term delusions, occasional hallucinations.” Then, as an afterthought, “probably exacerbated by drink and drug abuse.”

“That’s a lot to deal with.”

“You’re telling me.” With this out of the way, Anna seemed to brighten a bit. “It’s hard, and I take so many pills I rattle, but this is a nice place. Better than others. Pam sent you, did she?”

“Yeah. I chatted to her about her art work, and she helped me out, so I said I’d come and talk to you.” She cleared her throat. “She says she’s sorry she hasn’t been lately.”

Anna shrugged again. “Poor Pam, she worries a lot. She thinks a lot of this is her fault, when it’s not. It’s just the way my brain is made, but she … she finds it hard to see me when I’m going through a bad patch.”

“Why would Pam think your problems are her fault?”

Again, Anna seemed reluctant to answer. Instead, she took a sip of her tea, grimacing as she swallowed. “Christ, this stuff tastes like piss. That’s the worst thing about being in these places, I think. The bloody tea. There’s no tea quite like the stuff you make yourself at home, is there?” As she put the cup back down, Heather got a glance at the top of her forearm; she only saw it for a second, but there was a tangled knot of scar tissue there, white against the woman’s heavily freckled skin. It was roughly heart-shaped.

Heather forced a smile onto her lips even as her stomach turned over. “You’re definitely right there. So how do you know Pam?”

“We met when I was a girl really, travelling round Europe, getting into all the wrong things.” She grinned briefly, revealing at least one tooth that had turned black. “She was older than me, so I followed her for a bit, and we ended up at this commune place in Lancashire. She loved it at first, Pam did.”

“The commune?”

“Oh yeah. All that nature stuff, she loved it. She was one of those real committed hippies, you know?” Anna smiled, although it looked pained now. “I was there for the drugs, mostly. They had some good shit there.”

“Fiddler’s Mill.” Heather said it carefully, somehow convinced that the name would upset the woman, but she didn’t show any particular reaction. “Pam mentioned the place. Said that you had a hard time there.”

The unspoken question hung in the air for a moment. Anna lifted her arms again in the slight, almost hugging motion, then laid her hands on her stomach instead.