I couldn’t help it. The feeling that some poor woman had lost her life shouldn’t be the subject of staffroom banter. Maybe my own grief had made me raw to it all. Ms Doherty said nothing, but the look she gave me spoke a thousand words. She thought I was a killjoy, a fuddy-duddy. Someone bereft of ‘craic’. She hadn’t known me before my mother died. Before I’d been changed, utterly.

My phone beeped again with a text message from one of my oldest friends, Julie:

Have you heard anything from Clare? She didn’t go into work today. I called round her flat but there was no answer and her phone is off. You know, it’s not like her – and there’s been that woman found …

Julie was always prone to drama and tended to jump directly to the worst possible conclusion about everything, but this time a nagging, sickening feeling started to wash over me. Julie, Clare and I had remained the very best of friends after we’d left school. While I’d trained to teach English, they’d both joined the Civil Service and worked for the Pensions Department on Duke Street. They didn’t do anything without the other knowing.

I immediately tried calling Clare myself, I don’t know why. I hoped for some sort of rational and reasonable explanation as to why she wouldn’t have got Julie’s call. When it went straight to answer service, I wondered who else I could call to try to find her. It would be a bit hysterical to call the hospital, wouldn’t it? I mean, she was a grown woman. She could be anywhere. She might be with her parents. Out with another friend. She’d been seeing someone lately, someone she’d admitted to developing deep feelings for. She could be lying in post-coital bliss in his bed right now, being decadent and loved-up for once in her up-to-now sensible life. I almost envied her, if she was. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been post-coital anything, never mind blissed-out.

I was about to call Julie back, when my phone rang and her name popped up on the screen. I answered, said hello, expected her to tell me Clare had just rolled into work, hungover but happy.

I hadn’t expected the breathless, sobbing, gasping, almost screaming cry of my friend.

‘It’s her, Rachel. It’s Clare. She’s dead.’

Chapter Three

Elizabeth

I was sitting in front of the kitchen range, shaking. I winced at the sweetness of the tea I’d been given for the shock.

I had just been too late. Even if I’d got to her an hour before, it would probably still have been too late to save her. She shouldn’t really have survived for as long as she did – her wounds were so severe.