She sat, dreamily enjoying the feel of the sun on her face and eating her cake. Voices could be heard in other gardens and, somewhere in the distance, a dog barked on and off. Sitting there, Katie realized that she couldn’t now remember the last time she had heard the sound of her mother’s weeping coming from the bedroom next door.

Over the past years while they had been in Sparkhill, things had settled down in the O’Neill household, or so it seemed.

This was what made what came later such a shock.

Vera O’Neill had turned her little terraced house into what appeared to be a haven of genteel peace. She had made curtains and covers for the beds. She had persuaded Uncle Patrick that he did deserve to sleep in a bed and not just on the floor, and had made peg rugs to cover some of the bare boards of his room. Scattered round the house, and especially in the front room, were delicate lacy mats she had crocheted, and on a larger one, placed on a side table in the front room, she kept a glass vase of flowers that she replenished every week, buying fresh ones from the lady in the Bull Ring on Friday afternoon, when she was selling them off. In front of the vase rested a picture of Katie, taken in a photographer’s studio when she was just thirteen. She had had her dark hair arranged loose over one shoulder and her head turned very slightly to her left, so that she was looking round at the camera, half smiling. Katie was quite surprised by how nicely it had turned out. After all these years of teeth dropping out and being replaced and feeling awkward, she suddenly looked more grown-up.

‘It’s a lovely picture,’ Amy had said wistfully. She was a good-natured, easy-going girl who lived the other side of the Ladypool Road, where they did a lot of their shopping. She had a gaunt face with dark rings under her eyes, a beaky nose and slightly protruding teeth. No one could have called her a looker, but she was good company.

The other picture, in pride of place, was the wedding photograph. Vera in an ivory-coloured dress, her smile frozen forever, stood with her arm slipped through that of her tall, dashing new husband Michael O’Neill, looking up at him with his glossy black hair and that smile, which would win any heart. The adoration was clear in her face.

As Katie grew older, more and more she saw her own features in her father’s smile. But what would he have been like? It was terrible not knowing. Would he have resembled Uncle Patrick at all, have been kindly but unstable? When she asked her mother that question, she got a scornful snort in reply.

‘Of course not! D’you think I’d have chosen someone like him!’ She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, indicating Patrick’s room. They were completely different – you only have to look at them.’