It didn’t take us long to find it. The sealed envelope addressed to the solicitor was sitting on her writing desk, beneath the watchful eye of a framed image of the Virgin Mary. It was stamped, ready for posting.

‘Look away, Mary,’ Emerald said, as she tore open the letter.

We fumbled around in our respective bags for our reading glasses, then pored over the pages, heads banging. Our mother had made handwritten amendments to the document, scratching out our names and citing the Catholic Church as her sole beneficiary. She had carefully initialled each of the amendments. The document was signed, dated, and witnessed by two of her hairdressers. Emerald took the will into the kitchen, rummaged through the drawers and found a box of matches. She stood over the sink, match poised to strike.

‘We mustn’t. It’s illegal,’ Amber stated, but I could hear the touch of a plea behind the assurance in her voice.

‘No, we mustn’t,’ I agreed, gnawing my nails all the way up to my wrists.

‘Although . . . nobody will ever know,’ Amber added. ‘Except for the three of us.’

I had now chewed my nails nearly all the way up to my elbows. We caught each other’s eyes over our reading glasses. And then as one, we signalled a covert middle finger by pretending to adjust the frames on our noses. It had been our secret code since we were kids, giving a subversive middle finger without being caught by our parents.

‘A pact.’ Emerald laid her hand out flat in front of her. Amber placed her hand on top – then I added my own quivering palm to the fleshy tower. ‘In sisterly solidarity.’

‘In sisterly solidarity,’ Amber and I chorused.

We nodded our agreement and Emerald lit the match. We watched in silence as our mother’s new will and testament flamed into black curls and disappeared in a fug of smoke.

Emerald scooped up the ashes and deposited them in the compost bin, then called the police to report Mum’s death. As we waited for an officer, she poured herself a large whisky and sat nursing the bottle with her legs dangling into the pool, pristine silk pyjama pants rolled up. I resorted to comfort eating, grazing straight from the fridge with a spoon. Amber started frantically cleaning, binning spoilt food, putting on the dishwasher and polishing surfaces, using a flannel to manically wipe down anything that didn’t talk back.

The police officer, a middle-aged, no-nonsense woman with salt-and-pepper hair, arrived half an hour later. She offered perfunctory condolences then moved straight outside into the backyard. Watching through the window as the officer examined our mother’s body, I felt as though we were in a play. This impression was only heightened, half an hour later, by the arrival of a grizzled badge-flasher who introduced himself as Detective Tyson.