‘Yes, perhaps that was it,’ said Cass.

While his mum and aunt were busy in Granny’s old room, Jake took himself up to the top floor. He put his head around the bathroom door, to make sure that nothing had changed. The bath still bore the greeny-brown stain where the tap dripped; the loo was still flushed by a long chain, weighted down with a dense rubber ball. He could recall the scratchy surface of that bath against his skin, when he was a child, unlike the slippy-smoothness of the bath at home in London. He went into the room he only ever thought of as his, and sat down on the bed. He liked the things in here best of everything in the house. It was a pity he didn’t have any use for the carved wooden bed. Actually, now that he came to think of it, that little table out on the landing, that was a nice thing too. Bit spindly, but he liked the shape, like a clover leaf. And the two glass-topped shelves would be a good place to keep some of the small treasures he’d accumulated: the ancient worked-flint arrowheads he’d found on walks at his dad’s place in Wiltshire; the cufflinks and studs that Granny had given him for his twenty-first, gold, set with little sparkling sapphires; some photos he and his girlfriend had had done of themselves in a passport photo booth, pulling faces and, in one, kissing. The table had had a bunch of old medals on the two shelves. When he was a child, Granny had let him use them for dressing up, when the pirate craze abated and he’d had a new-found fascination for soldiers. He stood up and wandered out on to the landing. Both shelves were empty now. He’d ask his mum if he could have it.

Georgie found it emotionally draining, looking through her mother’s things. One drawer had been full of old lipsticks, so antiquated that their casings were almost like jewellery themselves: torpedoes of fluted gold, some of them studded with bright stones. The lipsticks still twisted up out of them, cracked and dried out, but with their ancient colour preserved, like cheap jam.

‘Do you think they’re worth anything?’ Georgie had asked, doubtfully. ‘They feel very solid.’

‘Shouldn’t think so. They’re not real, just fake gold and coloured glass. Rolled gold, maybe,’ said Cass. ‘Speaking of which, shall we go through the jewellery box, see what we’d both like?’