It had been left outside their door when Heather was thirteen or fourteen. She had found it as she’d stepped out to nip to the shops, and she remembered the weird combined feeling of embarrassment and pleasure as she’d knelt to pick it up. At the time, she had been nursing a crush on a boy called James Thurlow, who was in her science classes, and thanks to a wild combination of hormones and optimism she had been dropping huge hints about Valentine’s Day for the last few weeks. The card itself had been quite a classy one: simple white background traced with gold lines, a big red heart in the middle. Inside, somewhat disappointingly, there were just the printed words ‘Always Thinking of You’ with a heart hand-drawn in biro underneath.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Nikki took her hand and squeezed it, and with some difficulty Heather dragged herself back to the present.

‘When I was a teenager, someone once left a Valentine’s card on our doorstep. I thought it was for me, but … Mum saw me pick it up, and Nikki, she went batshit.’

Her mother had grabbed her by the shoulder, yanking her back into the hallway and slamming the door shut. Her face had been so white it was almost grey, and Heather could clearly picture the dark smudges that had appeared under her eyes, almost like bruises.

‘She yanked the card out of my hands and she tore it up, just like that. When I shouted at her, said that it was mine, she asked me if it had been addressed to me, and it hadn’t, but you know, I was a kid, it never occurred to me that anyone could have been sending my mum a Valentine’s card. She was old, and married, and to kids that basically means dead, right? But …’ Heather looked at the shards of the pot littering the floor. ‘When she was done shouting at me, she started crying. Locked herself in the bathroom. We never spoke of it again.’

‘What do you think it means?’

‘I don’t know.’ Heather rubbed her hands over her face. They smelled like the dirt that had been inside the pot. ‘Probably nothing. Come on, I can’t be bothered to clean this up now. Let’s go and finish our wine.’

Heather watched Nikki walk back into the living room. It was cold, too cold. She rubbed vigorously at her arms, and a violent shiver worked its way down her spine.

The card didn’t mean anything, except that her mother was paranoid about something, even at a time when Michael Reave himself had certainly been in prison, and in no position to leave cards on doorsteps – unless there was someone on the outside, performing little tasks for him. Tasks like romantic gestures. And murder.

Heather kicked one of the bigger shards of pot under the fridge, and went to join her friend.

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