There was nothing else in the desk. I even searched it for secret compartments, which some of these old desks have. After that, I took a look inside the boxes lining the walls, which proved to be full of medical records. Perhaps the reason that the Secs had arrested Nick had nothing to do with Lorelei after all, and the reason really lay in these records – a powerful patient with a secret illness, or someone who had died when he shouldn’t have done – but they may as well have been written in a foreign language for all that I understood of them.

I moved back to the desk and hesitated, far from sure that I was doing the right thing, but I gripped the tarnished brass handle on the bottom drawer and pulled it towards me, lifting the letters out again. As I did so, I noticed something new. The bottom of the drawer felt different to the others – papery where the others had been smooth wood. I pulled it out entirely and turned it upside down, to find that what I had thought was the bottom was, in fact, a sheet of white paper cut to perfectly fit the base. It fluttered out and fell to the floor; and with it fell a photograph.

I recognized the pair in that picture, their faces displaying happy and confident expressions that seemed to say the sun would never dim. But it would one day. And I saw too that Nick and Lorelei weren’t alone. They stood beside a car, an expensive open-roofed one, and at the wheel sat a pale woman with her black hair tied back. All three had wine glasses in their hands, seemingly toasting something. Across the bottom, in Lorelei’s handwriting, were the words, ‘To a brighter future!’ I pondered them. Such optimism and confidence, but it wasn’t high hopes for the state – no, this was a private affair. There was something between them that they thought was going to work out well.

I knocked on Hazel’s door. ‘Come in,’ she said.

‘How’s the radio show?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, I hope it’s nice. I have to ask you something. Do you remember your parents ever having this car?’ I said, showing the photograph. She had been crying and I wanted to comfort her, but I had to keep on with what I was doing. Time could be short.

‘No. Why?’

‘It’s nothing. Do you recognize this woman, maybe?’

Hazel looked at me with curiosity and took the photograph. ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen her at our house, I think. But I don’t know who she is.’

‘Do you remember anything about her?’

‘No, it was a few years ago.’ She looked bemused that I would ask about such trivial matters at a time like this. ‘Jane, what’s going to happen about my mum? The funeral.’ She stuttered over the final word. It was heart-breaking.