The tide was out and down on the shore, the redshanks were busy poking about in the mudflats. In the distance, a soft breeze played across the surface of the water and shafts of early morning sunlight shone down through banks of clouds and glinted off the ripples. There wouldn’t be many more mornings when Naomi would be able to enjoy her first cup of tea of the day this way. Not in her nightclothes at any rate. The forecast was for rain to push in from the west this evening and to linger for the next few days. She was glad for Ellis’s sake that the weather had been as good as it had been yesterday. A funeral in the rain was just adding insult to injury.

Ellis had known that it was only a matter of time before his mother died, but it had still shaken him. Given the strong relationship he had with his mother, his reaction was only natural and had brought back memories for Naomi of losing her own parents, who had died when Martha and Willow were teenagers.

Her mother was first to die of a stroke and her father a few years later of sepsis, after stepping on a rusty nail and not bothering to go to the doctor. Not until it was too late. At the time, Naomi could accept that there had been nothing her mother could do to prevent the stroke that killed her, but her father’s death had seemed so avoidable. If only he had been more careful … if only he had gone to the doctor … if only he hadn’t been so reckless and pig-headed and made light of feeling ‘a touch under the weather’ on the telephone to her. ‘Just some silly bug I’ll soon shake off, I’m sure,’ he’d said.

In many ways Colin had been quite like her father – both thoroughly headstrong and convinced they could make the world bend to their will. Kindred spirits, her father and Colin had got on famously together, and perhaps Colin had seen in Naomi’s father not so much a replacement for his own, but someone he could respect and admire in a similar fashion.

Colin had lost his parents when he was at university; they’d died in a bomb explosion planted by the IRA at a restaurant in London. He never forgave those who were responsible for the murder of his parents, and years later he was still capable of exploding with a furious rage when murdering terrorists, as he saw them, appeared on the television masquerading as politicians.

Naomi had always believed that this was the source of his temper and internal anger, the death of his parents, to whom he had been devoted. Many times she had suggested he seek help, that talking through losing his mother and father in so violent a manner might help unlock what had the power to consume and overwhelm him at times. He refused, of course. Very likely he was scared to look too deeply inside himself, afraid at what he might find lurking there.