‘Thank you,’ I manage. ‘Charlie and I, we were running so late …’ Emma looks as though she is expecting more, but I always stop at this point. I see her own face close up. She swivels away, picks up her phone and scrolls through her updates, all those posts to ‘like’ and comments to read. She told me once that she had over three thousand followers.

The office is silent now except for the hum of our computers and I jump as my phone rings. It is PC Delliers.

‘Ms Arden?’ she says. ‘Can you help me with something? Can you check Ms Jones’s file again, please, and see if there are any other details she has given for her next of kin?’ Her voice seems to echo around the office.

I open my desk drawer at the same time as asking, ‘Her next of kin? Why? Did the number not work for the person she gave?’

I think maybe, while she’s on the line, I should tell her about the email I’m trying to find; I’m worried that I might have lied to her before when I said there’d been no contact, but then I haven’t found the email, so would I be lying now if I mention it?

‘It’s not that,’ PC Delliers answers. ‘We reached him. But he wasn’t a next of kin.’

Her tone is strange. I feel myself go still. ‘He wasn’t? This –’ I try to remember the name I read – ‘this Peter Duggan? Then who is he?’

At the other end of the line, PC Delliers clears her throat. ‘Her bank manager,’ she says. ‘Ms Jones listed her next of kin as her bank manager.’

Chapter 8

I am finding it hard to speak. Her bank manager. Her bank manager?

‘Can you hold the line?’ I tell her. ‘While I get Ms Jones’s file?’

‘Of course.’

I pull it from the drawer, but in the file there is nothing else. Only: Peter Duggan. Her bank manager.

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her. I’m feeling a little dizzy. ‘There are no other next-of-kin details. And I think you have copies of everything else that’s there.’

‘All right. Well, thank you anyway.’ PC Delliers’s voice sounds faint on the line now, as though she is standing outside, in the hard February wind.

From her tone I can tell she’s about to hang up and before she can I ask quickly, ‘What happens now?’

‘We’ll have to trace her relatives another way. Her parents’ details should be easy enough to find. We’ll pass those on to the coroner’s officer. Or, if we can’t reach anyone, it will be up to the council to arrange the funeral.’