Again, Anna seemed reluctant to answer. Instead, she took a sip of her tea, grimacing as she swallowed. ‘Christ, this stuff tastes like piss. That’s the worst thing about being in these places, I think. The bloody tea. There’s no tea quite like the stuff you make yourself at home, is there?’ As she put the cup back down, Heather got a glance of the top of her forearm; she only saw it for a second, but there was a tangled knot of scar tissue there, white against the woman’s heavily freckled skin. It was roughly heart-shaped.

Heather forced a smile onto her lips.

‘You’re definitely right there. So how do you know Pam?’

‘We met when I was a girl really, travelling round Europe, getting into all the wrong things.’ She grinned briefly, revealing at least one tooth that had turned black. ‘She was older than me, so I followed her for a bit, and we ended up at this commune place in Lancashire. She loved it at first, Pam did.’

‘The commune?’

‘Oh, yeah. All that nature stuff, she loved it. She was one of those real committed hippies, you know?’ Anna smiled, although it looked pained now. ‘I was there for the drugs, mostly. They had some good shit there.’

‘Fiddler’s Mill.’ Heather said it carefully, somehow convinced that the name would upset the woman, but she didn’t show any particular reaction. ‘Pam mentioned the place. Said that you had a hard time there.’

The unspoken question hung in the air for a moment. Anna lifted her arms again in the slight, almost hugging motion, then laid her hands on her stomach instead.

‘There were some bad people. Good drugs, bad people. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I … I had some fun there. It’s a strange place, that bit of the countryside. I grew up in a flat on a council estate and the closest we got to green stuff was the balding little bits of grass in the swing park but that place … there’s so much of it. You go out there and stand in the middle of the woods, it’s like it could be any time. Like, a hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, I don’t know. Maybe even before people were around, you know? That sort of place. So quiet, so lonely.’ She shrugged. ‘I got lonely there, I made myself less lonely. That’s how drugs work sometimes – they make it easy not to be lonely.’

‘A lot of free love?’

Anna smiled wanly, although there was an expression about her eyes that worried Heather. She glanced around and saw a portly nurse come into the room, the first person she had seen in any sort of uniform. The woman paused at a table to pick up an empty cup.

‘Not sure free is a good word for it. Certainly bloody costly to me. But yeah, I suppose.’