‘How can it have happened?’ she whispered. I knew she had been asking herself this all the way here.

Jasper said, ‘We don’t know. The police will find out. I’m going to fetch you a cup of coffee, Lois. It’s only from a machine but it will make you feel better.’

With Lois to take care of, with someone who needed his support, Jasper was more himself again. He seemed to have grown back to his normal size. Lois would look to him for protection, of course, because she was used to being looked after by Steven and then by her children. But it was just as much help to Jasper to be able to offer it as it was to her to receive it. I thought how we are all made who we are by our needs as much as by our strengths.

‘He seems a good man,’ Lois murmured when he’d gone.

‘He is.’

‘If only Steven were here.’

Steven was Mel’s legendarily charismatic father. The only man Mel had ever loved, she told me. Up until now.

I bit the inside of my cheek to stop the tremors. ‘Yes.’

‘Stewart’s in Melbourne, you know. And David’s away in Greece.’

These were two of Mel’s perfectly matched pairs of younger and older brothers. There had been so much good fortune in the Archer family. Steven’s triumphant career and the children’s looks and talent and ambition had been nurtured by the deceptively fragile matriarch who now sat beside me with her old hands clasped on her beaded handbag. It was hard not to think of the family’s progress like an express train, forever gathering momentum and confidence, and travelling faster on its parallel lines, until it plunged without warning into the black tunnel of tonight.

Stop it. Don’t think like that.

‘Don’t worry, they’re only a few hours away,’ I soothed Lois.

A young doctor who reminded me of Dr Raj Srinivasar appeared. He murmured to the young couple and they stood up at once, clutching at each other. Meekly, they followed him out of the room. Lois didn’t speak and neither did I. Their child and Lois’s child, both fighting their battle somewhere out of our sight. I thought about my own children, Jack behind the locked door at Audrey’s, and about Audrey with no child of her own. And then Ted was there.

I felt his presence as strongly as Lois’s beside me, smelt his cologne and heard his entirely familiar voice that I would now never hear again except in my memories. ‘Well, my girl,’ he said. ‘This is a shaky old do, isn’t it?’

I tilt my head, listening and gazing at the images in my mind’s eye.