It did seem to have taken over, that smell. Like something gone bad in the fridge. She should get out. Look for the cat. Leave by the back door, so there would be no craned necks, no amateur detectives trying to get the story behind the stretcher. She couldn’t find the key, so she didn’t lock the door behind her, walked straight up the garden, over the little fence and into the woods behind the house. Wet grass already soaking through her slippers, but that didn’t matter. Far, far better to be out here.

Clio had arrived at the platform with a battered wheeled suitcase, two tote bags and a sports holdall slung messily across her body. Her hair was frizzing out from a rubber band and her hands weren’t still: they twitched and clenched as she glanced about herself.

‘Here you are,’ Ruth had said, walking towards her with her arms outstretched. ‘Hello, my lovely. Let’s get you into the car.’

When they got to the cottage, its rough white walls seemed to wrap themselves around Clio, swaddle her down. Ruth had lit a fire in the stove before driving up to the station, and Clio settled herself in the big patchy armchair beside it, pulled out a small embroidered quilt from one of her many bags and arranged it over her knees. The cat had jumped on, straight away. The cat loved Clio.

‘There we are,’ Ruth said, handing her a cup of herbal tea. ‘There we are.’

Ruth had seen this before, more than once. The first sign was always the fluttering, the anxiety of her fingers, followed by an inability to choke a full sentence through her teeth without becoming distracted or rising into a panic. In fact, it tended to be this Clio that she saw, these days. It had become a bad-times-only friendship, somewhere as the years passed. The role she filled in Clio’s life now was occasional care-giver and calm-bringer, and she wasn’t sure when that had happened. Ruth had always enjoyed being capable; something about her sturdiness put people at ease and she liked it. Clio had reacted to that early on in their professional relationship, when she’d been futzing over lost receipts in the old office, and Ruth had poured her some water, ushered her into a seat and sorted the problem out. It had set the tone for the friendship to come.