I sink into a chair, my head between my legs to try to stop the room from spinning. But it continues to turn, round and round like the waltzers we had loved as little kids, screaming for the man to spin us faster and faster as our teeth chattered in our heads and candyfloss churned in our guts.

Vicky is talking but I don’t hear what she is saying, until the words “blunt force trauma” bring me back to the present. It sounds so clinical, so… surreal. I ask her to repeat what she just said.

“We believe the cause of death to be blunt force trauma, a single blow to the head with something heavy, wielded with significant clout. We can’t tell exactly when unfortunately, because of the… err… method of storage.” She winces as she says it. I had been hoping that freezing would leave them unable to accurately pinpoint her date of death, and it seems I was lucky.

“Was it Chris?” I ask eventually.

“That’s what it looks like.” Of course it does. My fingerprints were never on the body. It was February and absolutely freezing, so I was wearing gloves like any sane person standing outside would be. I did, however, pluck a few hairs from Chris’s head and place them in the freezer with the body. Just in case there was any doubt that he had touched her.

“Poor Megan…”

“It looks quick. Single blow to the head. She didn’t suffer.” She is quick to reassure me. She probably wants to stop the keening from my lips. Hell, I want to stop the keening from my lips.

Half an hour later, I am being led down a brightly lit corridor, a chill on my face. It isn’t what I was expecting; I must have watched too many American dramas set in the modern subterranean morgues of inner-city facilities. I thought she would be on a metal gurney, draped in a sheet, a luggage label attached to one toe. I had prepared myself for the full cliché.

But the room is separated into two, one side with a few leather-upholstered chairs in front of a large plate glass window serving as a divider. On the other side, the walls are painted a light-diffusing magnolia. There is a small pale oak dresser with a single candle and a bouquet of flowers in a simple white vase. It is peaceful. She is lying on a gurney, but it is white plastic not metal, and she is covered by what looks more like a tarpaulin than a sheet; it covers from her neck down past her feet. Only her face is visible.

Inside that part of the room it is cold enough to keep her body frozen, you can feel the cold through the window. Vicky’s hand is icy in mine as she squeezes it encouragingly.

“You don’t need to say anything except to confirm if you believe it to be Megan.”

This is obviously a waste of time. There is no one else it could be, unless there was a third, a triplet we never knew about. Gosh, that would be something, wouldn’t it? But I promise there were only ever two of us. Mum would have succumbed to her demons a whole lot faster if there had been three.