‘I told you before, call me Yu. What have you done with my daughter?’ Her voice was bubbly, strong Canton accent, but there was an edge.

‘I don’t know, me and Indy were out all day and just got in. I found her phone in her room.’

‘I’ll kill her,’ Yu said, in a tone that meant she would do the opposite. ‘She was supposed to meet her father and me for lunch. It’s my birthday.’

‘Happy Birthday.’

‘Thanks, dear, but I wanted to spend it with my daughter.’

Melanie never missed appointments and she would never, ever miss her mum’s birthday.

‘I’m sorry,’ Hannah said, trying to keep her voice light. ‘When I see Mel, I’ll tell her she’s in trouble.’

‘You have no idea where she might be?’

Hannah looked out of Mel’s window. Her room faced onto Argyle Place, but you could still see a swathe of the Meadows, a sliver of Salisbury Crags in the distance. ‘We had classes this afternoon. I wasn’t there, it was my grandpa’s funeral.’

‘Oh, baby, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s OK. But I know Mel was going to lectures. She probably just got caught up with something at uni.’

That was no excuse at all. The classes were in the afternoon, nothing to do with lunch, but Hannah couldn’t think what else to say.18

‘OK, dear,’ Yu said. There was hesitation down the line. ‘You get her to call me as soon as she gets home, understand?’

‘I will,’ Hannah said. ‘Bye.’

She hung up and turned to Indy, raised her eyebrows.

Indy stepped into the room. ‘I heard.’

She walked to where Hannah was standing, staring at the home screen of Mel’s phone, a picture of her with Xander from their year, the two of them dressed up for a Valentine’s Day dinner. Hannah remembered helping Mel decide what to wear that night.

‘Something’s wrong,’ Hannah said.

19

4

DOROTHY

Dorothy stood in the embalming room and stared at what was left of Jim. An outdoor funeral pyre doesn’t reach the temperature of a cremation oven, a couple of hundred degrees lower, so his remains were chunkier than they usually got back from crematoriums. Also, crems sift the remaining bone fragments and pulverise them in a cremulator, so the bereaved get a nice pile of grey sand for scattering.

In comparison, the bone fragments and dust in front of her were real. And it was dust, not ashes, that was a misnomer. She was thankful that the fire hadn’t left any large bones for her to deal with, nothing longer than a few inches amongst the dirt. She imagined lifting an intact skull from the pile, addressing it like Hamlet. Or one of Jim’s femurs, waving it around like a cavewoman.