She removed the elastic bands from both piles, and for the next hour read through twenty or so of the letters. By the end of it, her throat felt hot and her head was thumping steadily, the sandwich abandoned on its plate. With a slightly shaking hand she put the letters back in the tin, and thought about all the things she knew about her mother, and all the things she didn’t.

Quiet, well-to-do, respectable Colleen Evans had been writing to a man in prison. She had been doing so while Heather’s father had been alive, all through the early years of their marriage. It also appeared that in the Seventies, her mother had been a part of some sort of hippy commune, somewhere up north.

Heather rubbed her hand across her eyes, trying to make sense of this new information. Her mum had never been the type for reminiscing, and Heather had never questioned it. Now it was apparent there was a whole stretch of her life that had never even been hinted at. As far as she’d ever known, there had been no other serious relationships with anyone other than her dad. Yet here was this man in the letters. This man who, it seemed, was in prison.

And in all of the letters Heather had read, her mother hadn’t mentioned that she had a daughter. Not once.

Who was this man? Reluctantly she thought of the suicide note again, the strange phrases her mum had used – as though she was talking to someone else as well as Heather.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Heather murmured to herself. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions now.’

She gulped down the last of the coffee and pulled her laptop from her bag. Her mother had always been something of a technophobe and had refused to get even dial-up internet, so Heather had to piggyback off the mobile internet on her phone, but within seconds she had the browser page up. She looked at the name, Michael Reave, sitting in the search box.

She paused before clicking search. ‘There could be nothing at all, right?’ she said to the empty kitchen.