The other case had been more difficult to whittle down. It contained the drawings her brother had done in primary school, his art-school portfolio. There were school photographs, in an envelope, all together. Something about them – their simulation of the formal tradition of portrait photography, the pathos of that little boy in school uniform – had made them almost unbearable to look at. When Hazel had pulled them out to see what was what, she had recoiled like someone burnt. To see his six-year-old or nine-year-old face was brutal. He looked so innocent, so full of hope, a little embarrassed smirk playing around his mouth. Her mother had kept two or three framed pictures of Stephen out on display, maybe so as to avoid being ambushed like this by the unexpected sight of him. But Hazel only had photographs of her own children on show in her house. She hadn’t seen Stephen’s face for a long time. She could not look through the school pictures, she could not throw them away: she could only replace them in the envelope they had ended up in. There were letters. Notebooks, abandoned after only a handful of pages, in which he’d started writing a diary or jotting thoughts down.

A long time before, Hazel’s feelings about her brother had settled into an anger that was dull enough not to cause her trouble, as long as she didn’t poke at it.

The initial childhood grieving had been sharp and short. The fury which came later had come as a shock: hot and sticky, destroying everything it spilled over, like lava. It was murderous: it made her want to kill him. The trouble was, he was dead already. More than she loved him, more even than she missed him, she began to hate him for the suffering he’d wrought on the family. Their mother, most of all. Dad, too. And Karen. And herself, too, if she was honest. They’d been destroyed, almost. But, again like lava, that anger had hardened over as the decades went by. It could bear a little weight without cracking. And yet the sight of Stephen in his school photographs was like a chemical reaction, corroding it in an instant. And when the stiff layer of rage disappeared, the pain, the sadness were still there underneath. They hadn’t gone away after all.

Under her mother’s bed had been a smaller suitcase. Hazel knew what was in it: the duffel bag Mum and Dad had brought back from England after he died. They’d brought his body home, too, so that his grave would be close. Repatriation, was the word. The duffel bag was plastic, the colour of butterscotch, with greyish rope around the top. The rope must once have been white. Owen had seen her flinch at the sight of the duffel bag.