Adrian wasn’t home. Sam absently scanned his note suggesting that they might meet at the gym and moved quickly on to check the answering machine. He heard Jane’s voice and Prysor was dead. Through her tears Sam grasped her suggestions for meeting up with him to sort out death’s practical aftermath. He dialled her number but the phone rang out; she’d put her plans into action and was on her way.

Untouched by the news of Prysor’s demise, Sam remembered that he and Adrian had planned to be away for the week. He stared into the empty fridge and decided to do a shop; Adrian would have to eat if he decided not to go with them to Wales and he and Jane would need to take some stuff with them… He realised that the decision to stay with Jane in Dolgellau, sorting out Prysor’s affairs and arranging the funeral, had already been made. The ghost of Sawel Rhys had nudged his conscience too sharply for Sam to leave these matters entirely to his sister.

Adrian didn’t know what to think when he saw Sam sprawled out on the living-room floor surrounded by bags of shopping and the voice of Welsh hymns washing over him. But then he saw Sam’s tears and he knew well enough. Adrian lay with Sam, hugging him for a long time, kissing the back of his neck and stroking his hair. Some time later the tears ran dry.

Jane was exhausted. She introduced little Euan Crawford Sinclair to his uncles; he’d cried all the way from Carlisle! Remembering that the hospital had also referred to his sister as Crawford, Sam puzzled over this addition to their names, but as he hugged Jane and her own tears flowed again, Prysor’s death took their thoughts in other directions.

Later in the evening their conversation took an enigmatic turn when Jane tentatively announced, ‘There’s an addition to the family that I haven’t told you about… No – I’m not pregnant! But hold on to your seat or this might blow you away.’ The family had always believed that Jane’s mother had died when she was eleven months old, Prysor later marrying Sam’s mother. But Jane told a very different story: Margaret Crawford Lewis, her mother, wasn’t dead. ‘She spent nearly twenty years in prison, convicted of the murder of her lover, Rubén Ibarruri!’

Jane explained that the Crawfords were wealthy Scottish landowners, and whilst they’d seen to it that Margaret was living comfortably, they’d also paid some clever lawyers to skip over her in the line of inheritance. About two or three years ago they’d written to tell her that she would become a very rich woman one day, the only condition being that she and her children carried the Crawford name.

‘And Margaret?’ Adrian asked, ‘Have you met her?’

‘Oh yes,’ Jane smiled, ‘many times. She’s lovely, but…’ And she held Sam’s hand across the table, ‘…but Eluned was our mother.’

‘This Rubén… Spanish, was he?’ Sam asked, recalling Prysor’s delirium.