She hadn’t told anyone the details of how she found him. She’d removed his piss-stained pyjama trousers and put them in the wash basket. Grabbed a new pair from the chest of drawers and pulled them up his legs, then dragged him into the bedroom and heaved him onto the bed. He’d been dead for hours, skin cold, a feeling she was used to in this business. She lay down and held him for half an hour, tried to clear her mind. She didn’t phone a doctor for another hour, because once she did that, Jim wasn’t hers anymore, his death was everyone’s. She wanted to keep it to herself as long as she could.

‘A week ago?’ Thomas said.

There was a slight reprimand in his tone. Why hadn’t she told him sooner? He could’ve helped.

But how could he?

‘We cremated him today.’

‘If you’d told me, I would’ve come.’

‘We didn’t tell anyone.’

She heard him shift his weight and wondered if he still used the same side of the bed as when Morag was alive. She hadn’t spread herself out in the last week, to use Jim’s side of the bed seemed an insult to him.

‘If there’s anything I can do,’ Thomas said.

Dorothy lowered her glasses to her eyes and stared at the paperwork on the desk.

‘There is a way you can help,’ she said, lifting a bank statement. ‘I want you to look into something for me.’

24

5

HANNAH

Hannah was properly worried. She stood in Mel’s room feeling like an intruder. It was dark outside now, the sodium lights from the street making the room feel seedy. She ran a finger along a bookshelf, opened a drawer of the desk and found stationery, not much else.

She’d checked all Mel’s social media, once earlier this evening, then again twenty minutes ago. No activity. She’d called round all their friends and no one had seen Mel today. As far as Hannah could work out, she was the last one to speak to Mel, at breakfast. There was a full day of classes, fluid dynamics labs in the morning, two lectures and a tutorial in the afternoon, and Mel wasn’t at any of them. And she had specifically said she would take notes for Hannah.

Hannah had called Xander first, who said he hadn’t seen her since lunchtime yesterday. He was an astrophysicist, a subject even more complex than the stuff Hannah and Mel were studying. She tried to think what she knew about him. He was in the Quantum Club with Hannah, Mel and a few others, and his parents had something to do with the military and lived abroad.