She tried being conciliatory. ‘All right, I’ll come over tomorrow night. I’ll be able to use Mom’s car – OK?’

‘I could cook,’ Richard offered.

‘That’d be nice,’ she said, thinking she’d believe it when she saw it. ‘How was today?’

‘A pain. Delays in court all morning. Gerry Kinsella this afternoon.’

Gerry was one of Richard’s most intractable probationers. Normally she’d have felt obliged to ask about it. Today she didn’t think she’d bother.

Richard sighed wearily. ‘I suppose I’d better go and find something to eat then.’

‘Yes, you had, hadn’t you?’

Anna put the phone down hard and said to it, ‘You’ve just lost your mother, Anna, so how are you feeling? Well funnily enough I’m pretty cut up about it, Richard. Really nice of you to think of asking.’

The box, with its card pinned to the top, ‘FOR ANNA’, was in one of the bedroom drawers.

She had not been long in the house when she started prowling restlessly round the rooms, as if to make absolutely sure it was empty. The bedroom door opened with a squeak and she felt her palms sweating, somehow nervous of invading Kate’s privacy. It was a pretty room: floral curtains and bedspread to match in soft pinks and greens, and a cream carpet with sprigs of pink roses. Kate had moved into this house only a year ago, preparing for retirement and a bigger garden. Anna remembered the austerity of her mother’s room when she was a child, the brown lino and old iron bedframe, the lodgers.

She opened the wardrobe and looked inside, but found at once that she couldn’t bear it. Kate’s clothes, her shape, the skirts limp and slightly pushed out at the back from being sat in, the broad, still creased waist-bands. And shoes, her second, very personal skin. Kate’s shoes, squatting there in the bottom of the wardrobe, defeated her. She lay on the bed, her hair draping her face like a shroud, and cried. She hugged the flowery quilt with its familiar scent, trying to feel her mother’s once plump arms round her, soothing her out of the pain of her own death.

It was after this she found the box, a carton covered with Christmas wrapping paper. Inside were a photograph, two letters and a thick bundle of paper pushed into a pink file. These were all tied together with the thin white elastic Kate used to thread through Anna’s school socks to keep them up.

She had never seen the photograph before. It was from an old newspaper, the paper yellow and the print grainy. She knew at once that the two children in the picture were Kate and Olivia. There had evidently been bright sunlight in their eyes, adding crinkled noses to their smiles. It was quite obvious which was which. Kate’s wide, friendly face, the glasses, well-defined eyebrows above them, her dress looking a bit too small. And Olivia, beautiful right from the first. Anna squinted at the image. She had never seen any picture of Olivia before. She was thin, shorter than Kate, with a mass of wavy hair and dark eyes which dominated her face. Her dress was of a pale, frothy looking material. Anna thought she could just make out the tips of Olivia’s fingers round Kate’s waist. Beside the two of them stood a very tall dark-haired man, and behind, a ring of people watching a roundabout, its movement slightly blurred in the picture.