When they pried the object loose, it turned out to be an outboard computer drive with a polished titanium shell and a style of connection port no one had seen except in museums. They passed it about, rubbing their fingers over some deep, etched-looking marks at one corner. The paramedics, meanwhile, got the body on to a trolley and pushed it effortfully up the lawn, leaving tracks in the dew. The doctor watched them go. ‘She was a nice old woman,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘A bit mad, like most of that generation.’ Suddenly depressed, he leant on the orchard fence and looked out across the meadow at some wisps of mist dissipating above the river. He was thirty years old. Anna’s age weighed on him. She had seen the world when it was still proud of its future, blown, like its economy, as a stream of bubbles. Behind him, the remains of the summerhouse settled suddenly. Dust puffed up, and from inside came faint scraping noises.

‘I think there’s an animal in there,’ one of the police said.

‘Hurry and rescue it then,’ the doctor advised without turning to look. He laughed. ‘I can’t see a health and safety issue.’ He left them to it and went up to the house to make out the formal notice of death and call the daughter.

When Marnie Waterman arrived she found a note from him. In handwriting precise and careful, it told her how to proceed; he had also left a leaflet entitled What to do when someone dies. She folded the note in half, and then in half again. No one seemed to know what had happened to the summerhouse, much less to the cat. She watched the policemen, still waist-high in the wreckage, calling out like people who had never had much to do with pets. Stopping her car to allow the ambulance to pass in the narrow lane between Cottishead and Wyndlesham, she hadn’t thought that her mother might be in it.

‘Oh Anna,’ she said, as if Anna had let her down in some way.

She repeated that silently to herself, in one tone of voice or another, all morning – talking to the police, driving to Lewes to identify her mother at the mortuary, filling in forms, making arrangements. ‘Oh Anna.’ It was less pejorative than it sounded. It was a murmur of disbelief.