Gathering all Annie’s bagged possessions together and leaving the bedroom, Riley was hit by the powerful notion that she was somehow leading a funeral procession, taking the young woman’s things away not for examination but as material offerings for the grave.

She walked down the stairs into the blighted silence and paused at the living room door.

‘Mrs Boyd, I’m taking some of Annie’s belongings with me. When we’ve finished with them we will return them.’

Mrs Boyd didn’t look up or appear to hear.

Opening the front door as quietly as she could, Riley was stopped by Mrs Boyd’s voice.

‘What’s the point of bringing them back? Can you bring her back from the dead? Can you? She’s not coming back, is she?’

‘I’m sorry. No, I can’t,’ said Riley.

She headed to the front door with the weight of Annie Boyd’s possessions in her hands and a wall of indescribable grief at her back.

13

Noon

Norma Maguire wheeled herself towards the lift door outside her office on the first floor of her estate agency, pressed the call button and felt the mechanical action of the lift through the fabric of the building as it rose from the ground. As she waited, she looked at the inverted writing on the window – Maguire Holdings – and wondered if Fran had used her lift when there was only one flight of fourteen steps down to the ground floor.

Wouldn’t it be better if you had your office on the ground floor?

Over the years, she had been asked the same question in dozens of ways by as many people and had countered it with the same fudge.

I prefer a room with a view.

The truth was simple. She didn’t want to overhear people talking about her when they thought her back was turned, pitying the cripple in one breath, laughing at her funny little ways, then criticising the over-demanding but caring boss in the next.

Norma looked at her blurred reflection in the silver surface of the lift door and was relieved that the image was unclear. She saw the darkness of her curly hair and her face as a pink blob, human but featureless. In the shape of the wheelchair, she saw the dark approximation of the blue trouser suit she wore for work.

As the lift arrived, she pictured the row of trouser suits in her wardrobe at home.

Monday to Friday, one suit, the same suit she always faced the world with; Saturday, suit to the dry cleaners, and then slacks and a jacket as she put in an appearance at the office until lunchtime; Sunday, jeans, a jumper and much solitude.

The lift doors opened and she wheeled herself into the narrow space.

Pressing ‘G’, she looked down at her legs and was grateful that her fleshy thighs were concealed by the fabric of her trousers.