Tall evergreen trees obscured the view of the neighbours. When she had been a kid – when she had lived here too, getting under her mum’s feet – those trees had been shorter, friendlier even. Now they threw the garden into shade, hiding Heather from view and keeping the outside world firmly out. There was a little square of concrete by the back door, with two ironwork chairs and a table on it, and another clay flowerpot with empty soil in it. Empty. Out in the cool air, she felt a little better. She wondered why she had gone wandering around the house in the first place, looking in rooms and staring at photos. Poking around on dressing tables. Because I’m checking she’s not here, she thought, wincing. Part of me still expects to find her in the bathroom, scrubbing the loo, or in the living room, watching Countryfile. I’m checking for ghosts.

‘Fucking hell.’ She took a long, deep breath, waiting for the nausea to retreat. ‘What a bloody mess, Mum. Honestly.’

Her mind turned back to the screwed-up page, thinking of her mother’s mental state in the days before she took her own life. What had she been thinking? It was hard to imagine her mum – a woman with near-religious feelings about the use of coasters and bookmarks – tearing out a page from a book, let alone crumpling it up like a piece of rubbish. But that was the dark heart of it all, the frightening truth Heather didn’t want to look at directly: her mother hadn’t been in her right mind. Something had stepped in and taken her reason from her; some cruel, lethal stranger had taken up residence inside her mother’s head. ‘None of this makes any sense to me. None of it.’

Shortly after she’d been called to take possession of her mother’s body, the police had put her in touch with a counsellor, who had been very kind and spent a lot of time talking about shock, about how people with severe depression could be very good at hiding it, even from their closest loved ones. Heather had listened patiently, nodding through her own numbness, and though she had understood perfectly what the counsellor had been saying, even then it had felt … wrong. Those old instincts had started to twitch, the ones that told her when a story was bunk and when a story had legs.

‘You’re being ridiculous,’ she told herself, listening to how cold and small her voice sounded. ‘Paranoid.’

Somewhere out on the road in front of the house, someone beeped a car horn, and she jumped. There were hot tears on her face, which she wiped away irritably with the back of her hand. After a moment, she slid her phone from her pocket to see a text message notification winking up at her.