‘He was a good man, wasn’t he? Dad?’ said Aysha.

‘The best,’ said Connor.

‘Josh was a diamond,’ said Benedict.

‘What about the Milo woman? What about her daughter, Suki?’ said Aysha.

‘What about them?’

‘I dunno.’ Aysha shrugged and looked at his face. ‘I just thought there was something there. A spark of something. You and Suki. Is that crazy?’

Connor opened his mouth to deny it, and then found that he couldn’t say the words.

‘Connor, I wouldn’t mind. You and her. OK?’ said Aysha.

He thought back to the time he had found Suki here in the mud in the cemetery, crying her heart out. Hating her, then. Despising her. Feeling almost ready to wring her neck with his bare hands. But . . . yeah, Aysha was right. There had been something, for sure. A powerful erotic attraction which he thought – or wished – had cut both ways.

‘OK,’ he said, but he didn’t even know where Suki was these days, or her mother. Back in the States, probably.

A month after Josh’s headstone was erected, the Henley house got sold. Connor was there clearing stuff out when he saw someone had left a message on the phone. Shit, he ought to have cancelled the contract, but he’d forgotten. There’d been so much to think about over these last months, none of it pleasant.

The message was from Suki. He phoned her back, and told her all that had happened.

When Suki got off the phone to Connor – she was using Donna’s office phone at Sylvester’s – she went straight in to see Claire.

Suki sat down and looked at her mother. ‘I’ve just got off the phone to Connor Flynn,’ said Suki.

‘Oh?’ Claire put her pen down and eyed her daughter with a smile. ‘You liked him, didn’t you.’

Suki looked embarrassed. ‘Was it obvious? I really liked him. Couldn’t seem to get him out of my mind. So I called Josh’s home number, since I didn’t know Connor’s. Left a message. Heard nothing, and I thought, oh well, that’s it then. But he’s just phoned back. And . . . he gave me some news. Pretty shocking news, really.’

‘Go on.’

‘She’s dead.’

‘Who . . . ?’

‘Shauna Flynn. She . . . she shot herself.’

Claire went very still. Then, to Suki’s alarm, her mother’s eyes filled with tears.

‘Oh Christ!’ said Claire, putting her hands to her face.

‘It’s over, Mom,’ said Suki, going round the desk and hugging her hard. ‘Don’t cry. It’s all over,’ she repeated.

At last.

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