‘Well. Clio – Clio’s dead. Suicide. Yesterday, while I was at work. She was staying with me. She hasn’t left an address book or anything, and I wasn’t sure whether – well, I know the two of you didn’t have the best relationship but it just seemed as though – I just thought you should know. Sorry. Sorry that you have to find out like this.’

He was breathing down the line, in, out, very controlled.

‘Right. Right. OK. Thank you – thank you for letting me know. Does anyone else know yet – I mean, the media, have they got hold of it?’

‘Um. I don’t think so? I don’t see how – it’s just me and the police who’ve been involved so far.’

A dry half-laugh.

‘So it won’t be long till the press are on it. I’ll get the girls in the office ready. Sorry. And you – did you find her? The body.’

She took a couple of those breaths herself, swallowed the collapse back down. ‘I did.’

‘That must have been very hard for you. I’m sorry. Listen, someone will need to let her mother know.’

‘Her mother?’

Ruth was blindsided. She’d never formally asked, but she had heard Clio refer to herself as an orphan on a number of different occasions. Sometimes with mocking laughter in the bright light of a pub, sometimes maudlin at the end of a night. Knowing of the father’s death, the way it had fed into The Northern Lass and some of the press had tried to focus on it, she’d made assumptions.

‘I just – I thought—’

‘Well, they’re estranged. Don’t talk much. Didn’t. Before – Eileen was diagnosed with vascular dementia, about four, five years ago. Shockingly early, she’s really not that old. But, no other family left, and Clio is of course barely able to support herself, so she came to me. Eileen’s in a care home in Ayr – it’s nowhere fancy, but I wasn’t going to leave her to rot. I always had a soft spot for Eileen. She explains a lot about who Clio is. Who she was. Jesus.’

Ruth’s head swam with the information, with the almost-too-personal things this man, who she’d only ever encountered as a symbol, a power within her own industry, was telling her.

‘Anyway. I’ll get you the details. I’m not – I’m not going to go there myself. I think it would be too confusing for Eileen. I’ve been once; she jumps about in time, she’s come unstuck. She’d need to hear this from a stranger, I think.’

DANNY

Cumbria, 1993