On her fiftieth birthday, Clio had asked guests – if they insisted on presents – to bring her something they’d made themselves. Her friends, she was always fond of saying, were creative people, and mostly they rose to the challenge. Clay pots, hand-knitted scarves, specially bound books containing photographs, earrings, poems. Clio courted her admirers from drama students and young revolutionaries; earnest kids, basically. And then there were the crumpled faces and puffy stomachs of her original fans, the lonely souls who’d loved her at concerts in tiny bars and who still couldn’t really talk to her now they were friends with her on Facebook. Creative people. People who were not ordinary.

Twelve days before Clio’s fifty-first birthday, Ruth walked into the guest room and found her dead, surrounded by those gifts. Clay pots jammed with now empty tea-light cases, all their wax burned away. Scarves tied between the bedposts like bunting. A mix CD made for her by one of her lovely twenty-something boys ticking in the portable player. The empty packets of painkillers had been neatly stacked, the vodka decanted into a porcelain jug Ruth had inherited from her grandmother. Her kitchen pestle and mortar, a thirtieth birthday present, sat to one side, with a white residue in it. The scene had been stage-managed, set not just for Clio, but for whoever would find her. And she must have known that would be Ruth. Who else would it have been.

‘Oh,’ Ruth said. ‘Clio. Sorry.’

Clio’s voice, in her head, ‘Oh fucksake, Ruth! You have to stop apologizing!’

When she made herself look at it, she saw that the body was contorted at a strange angle, one hand wrapped around her stomach. Some pale yellow foam had crusted around the left-hand side of her mouth and stuck to the pillow. Her face was wedged into an ugly scream – eyes screwed shut, mouth gaping open. She looked like a wax figure from a horror film, a shonky approximation of a human.

Ruth breathed in. The curtains were drawn and the room smelled sour. Then she steeled herself, placed two fingers on Clio’s neck. She wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for; the skin was cold, didn’t feel like flesh although it had the same texture. She moved her hand around. There was no pulse. Of course there was no pulse.

‘Right,’ Ruth said, to Clio. ‘OK.’

She pushed past the bed, opened the window, scooped up the four empty boxes of supermarket own-brand paracetamol. There was one of those supermarkets round the corner from Clio’s flat in Glasgow. None near here. She put them down.

Ruth began to pull at a knitted pink scarf wrapped around the bedpost. Blood bulged in her fingers as the wool tightened on her hand. The scarf started fraying and she thought she might be disturbing a crime scene. She decided to leave the room.