‘Go on with you,’ Mrs Murphy said, flicking a tea towel in my general direction. ‘Go and have a good time. You deserve it.’

I was not so sure. I knew I should have done more to protect Nesha and Billy. I felt bad that Edie’s grandmother had been moved from the retirement community she loved. And I knew I would always feel bad about it. But Mrs Murphy kept smiling. More than anyone in the world, she truly wanted a happy ending for our little family.

She chuckled happily as I collected the flowers I had bought.

‘What time is the young lady expecting you?’ Mrs Murphy said.

‘Nobody’s really expecting me,’ I said, and it was only then that her smile began to falter.

I am not one of those people who visit graves.

I never go to the small churchyard on the outskirts of London where my mother and father are buried. If you saw their grave, battered by time and the weather, untended and ignored, then you would think that this woman and man must surely be forgotten, unloved and unmourned.

Nothing could be less like the truth.

But I saw them both after they died, and the spark that had made them the man and the woman they were had gone to some other place or dissolved from the universe. I had no idea. But their souls had flown. So I can never convince myself that the double grave in the little churchyard contains my parents. They are not there. They are in my heart – that is where my parents rest.

And I don’t need to see their grave to remember them.

Yet something drew me back to Chinatown and the place where we had found the lorry. Of the twelve women we discovered on that freezing morning, only Hana Novak was ever identified and claimed. I felt that we had failed them all, and everyone who loved them, and there needed to be some act of remembrance or gesture of apology. So I took flowers to the dim sum restaurant where we discovered Hana and the women whose real names we never learned.

I placed them as far away as I could from the diners passing through the busy doorway. The makeshift shrine that had briefly appeared outside the restaurant was gone now and my flowers were the only sign that lives had been lost on this spot. It was Saturday evening, the weather mild after our long hard winter, the crowds thronging Chinatown, and everything spoke of life apart from the solitary bouquet of flowers, alone in the shadows of the red-and-gold awning. I stood there for a moment, remembering Hana and the others.

But I had no prayers for them and I did not linger.