At precisely the same time Bart was coming round from a distinctly chemically induced sleep, his mother was waking from a herbal insomnia remedy and wondering why the house was so quiet. It wasn’t a Sunday. On Sundays, Bart neither had college nor work, and sometimes he slept in. Not all that often, but sometimes. Maggie rolled onto her side and rubbed bleary eyes, trying to focus on the small travel clock perched on her bedside table. 9 a.m. She’d overslept. Not that she had anywhere to be in a hurry, but mornings – it was a Wednesday, she realised – were marked with the clanging of crockery, the pouring of cereal, and the sound of the dishwasher being loaded before Bart exited the house. He was a good boy. The sort of boy her friends were rather jealous of. She was conscious of the fact, sometimes moaning about him a little to make it clear that he wasn’t perfect, although secretly she knew he was. She might tell her neighbour that he’d played his music too loud, or pretend to her weekly library social group that he was forgetful about tidying his room. But Bart was neither loud nor untidy. In fact, he was independent, considerate and helpful. An exception among other twenty-year-old men. (Boys, Maggie thought. Twenty was no age at all. Certainly not mature enough to comprehend all the cruelties the world had to offer.) But then Bart had grown up quickly after his father had been killed serving in Afghanistan. Not in battle. That would have been devastating, of course. The truth had garnered more pity and less admiration from the community. Her husband had choked in the mess hall one night when a fellow officer had cracked a particularly hilarious joke. The meatball he’d been chewing was sucked up into his airways where it had stubbornly lodged and refused to move in spite of no end of back patting, then finally a desperate attempt at the Heimlich manoeuvre which had broken ribs but not allowed any oxygen to his lungs. How did you explain that to a fourteen-year-old boy? That his father, who had been a military man since before Bart was born, had been dispatched not by bomb or bullet, but by a ball of minced beef, egg yolk and breadcrumbs.

Perhaps Bart was ill, Maggie thought. Or maybe she’d taken too many sleeping tablets and not heard him leave the house. That had happened before. Distracted after a long shift at the call centre, she’d returned home and taken a SleepSaver, eaten dinner, then swallowed another pill without thinking. Such were the perils of tiredness. Living on a military widow’s pension and her wages was too tight for comfort, even with Bart earning a few extra pounds waiting tables in the evenings.