The ambulance men were having a lot of trouble getting the stretcher down the staircase. She heard it knocking against the walls, their gentle grunts and mutters to each other. Something thumped, one of them swore.

‘So, can you tell me the nature of your relationship with Mrs Campbell?’

Clio never, ever stood for being called ‘Mrs’. Ruth let it go. Let’s just get all this over with, she thought.

‘Your relationship?’

Why did she need to know that, this little bird? She was just being nosy. She saw two older women – well, Ruth was a bit older than her, at least – together and was poking around after scandal. That was what.

‘We were friends. She often came to stay with me when she was feeling depressed. She liked it here.’

‘And when was the last time you saw Mrs Campbell?’

Scrawny thing. Snuck snuck snuck; her little teeth on the biscuit. The male officer looked up at the ceiling.

‘The last time?’

‘This morning. I made us breakfast, and she came downstairs to eat it. I told her what I was doing today – I was in a hurry to leave. She seemed fine, but I wasn’t paying attention. She’d seemed fine for days. Fairly peaceful. I didn’t think she was having one of her episodes.’

‘One of her “episodes”?’

Yeah, that’s what I said, Ruth thought and didn’t say. Be nice. Be civil. Use sentences.

‘Mania. She suffered from periods of mania, which would then throw her into quite a hard depression. Undiagnosed, but I looked it up – she fitted all the symptoms. She’d been like that when she arrived, about three weeks ago, but I’d thought she was getting better. She’d been calmer. Talking about going home again, about getting back to work.’

The policewoman wrote with a translucent hand crossed by delicate blue veins, the pen fatter than her fingers.

‘I wasn’t expecting this,’ Ruth said. These were half-truths – if that – and she wondered whether she was obstructing the course of justice by sort of lying to a police officer. Of course not. There was no justice to obstruct. It just meant they’d get out of her hair more quickly, if she told them these things.

‘And is there anything else you think we should know?’

‘I – yeah. The vodka.’

‘The vodka?’

‘I don’t like vodka, so I don’t buy it. And she couldn’t drive, so she must have picked it up somewhere in the village. You should ask. Maybe someone saw her today.’

All those bags she’d arrived with full of her trinkets and faff. Because she wanted to be able to wake up in the morning and see physical evidence that people loved her, she’d said. Easy enough to tuck a bottle and a few packets of pills in a side pocket somewhere.

Those pills.

The policewoman leaned forward.

‘Mrs Jones? Are you all right?’