‘Lamb wokra?’ said one of them. ‘Never had wokra before. What do you think it is?’

‘Wokra?’ said the other one. ‘Sounds like some kind of stew.’

Bailey listened in with mild interest. She too had never heard of wokra before. She looked at the whiteboard. It took her a few moments to realise that the messy writing was actually referring to lamb with okra. The ‘with’ had been abbreviated by ‘w/’ but the ‘/’ was too faded to be visible so instead it just looked like ‘wokra’. She chuckled to herself.

‘Excuse me, but I think you’ll find it’s supposed to be lamb with okra,’ she said.

They both turned and looked at her quizzically.

‘Okra? What’s okra?’

‘It’s a plant,’ she said. ‘It’s kind of like a green pod with gooey seeds in it. It’s used a lot in African cooking.’

They both swapped glances and wrinkled their faces in distaste.

‘Gooey green pods. Yuck! Don’t like the sound of those,’ said the first one.

‘I think I’ll go for the sausage and mash,’ said the other one.

When it came to Bailey’s turn to be served, she also opted for the sausage and mash, not because she disliked okra but because she’d never been that keen on the flavour of lamb.

She sat down and started to eat, smiling to herself as she reflected on their misinterpretation.

Wokra.

She supposed that if you didn’t know what you were looking at then it was quite easy to mistake the abbreviation for—

It suddenly triggered a flash of insight within her.

Could it be…?

Thinking back, she visualised Sharon’s bloody scrawl in her mind’s eye. With mounting excitement, she took her fork and spread the mashed potato out on her plate, and with the tip of her knife she traced the letters in exactly the way that she recalled they had been written by Sharon’s dying hand.

First a capital ‘F’. Then the downwards stroke of an ‘l’, the tail jerking sharply to the right to lead into the first lower-case ‘e’, which was followed by a further lower-case ‘e’. It was the ‘l’ that niggled at Bailey though. There was something ambiguous about it. She’d assumed that it was a lower-case ‘l’ with a wonky tail joining it to the following ‘e’, but what if it had actually been a capital ‘L’? Maybe it was just written so closely to the following ‘e’ that it looked like it was joined up when in fact it wasn’t supposed to be. After all, the two ‘e’s weren’t joined up. And if Sharon had meant to write the word ‘flee’ then surely she wouldn’t have used a capital ‘L’ in the middle of the word. Of course, when she’d written it, she’d been scalped, her throat had been cut and she was dying – not exactly the best condition to be in when attempting neat legible handwriting – but still… had she actually been trying to communicate something completely different? Had she deliberately intended to write it as a capital ‘L’? And if she had, then did that mean that the capital ‘F’ was actually an initial of some sort?