An overwrought sob was working its way up through my body. I tried to suppress it, but it escaped through my nose, uninvited. After a raucous bout of my crying in his arms, Brody said, ‘I’ve always thought distant relatives are the best kind. And the further away the better. Come on. Let’s sort this out.’

His warm hand was on my shoulder as he steered me gently back down the hallway. His competence overwhelmed me. I began to envy his patients. Hell, I began to wish for a serious ailment. When he lowered his hand to the small of my back, I felt a rush of blood to a part of my anatomy that was totally inappropriate on the day that my mother had drawn her last breath.

When I walked back into the kitchen with Brody in tow, Amber’s face registered a level of surprise last seen on the faces of the congregation at Oscar Wilde’s wedding.

‘Detective Tyson?’ Brody said.

‘All day, every day,’ the world-weary detective drawled.

Brody shook hands with the detective then produced his own ID that identified him as a doctor. In a steady, calm voice, he explained about Mrs Ryan’s terminal pancreatic cancer, an affliction she’d kept secret from her family. He gave a name and number for Doctor Zahra Hanbury, who’d be able to confirm the diagnosis.

Amber and Emerald looked at me, startled. I delivered ocular confirmation that, yes, our mother had been terminally ill. At least it explained her lack of sympathy at my own ‘diagnosis’.

‘Like all docs, you’re clearly hell-bent on flapping your gums until you’ve worked up to a Force Ten Gale,’ the deadpan detective droned, putting away his notebook. ‘But the mother’s diagnosis does shed new light on the investigation. We’re still going to have to get a toxicology report and possibly a full post-mortem, so nobody is to leave the general area, is that understood?’

Brody rang the nearest forensic medicine department, identified himself and made a joke about operating a ‘skeleton staff’ over Christmas, which helped him to sweet-talk the pathologists into hurrying along the report in order to eliminate any uncertainty and get the death certificate signed so that we Ryan sisters could bury our poor mother.

When Ruth’s body had been loaded in the back of the coroner’s van, Emerald and Amber started the grim ritual of calling relatives and friends, planning funeral readings and flowers, and writing death notices. It was the worst time of year to try to organise a funeral, as the whole country was on holiday.

‘Are you two okay to work on this together?’ I asked my warring sisters. ‘Because I, um, have a private consultation booked with a heart specialist.’