Annie was sitting at the table in the kitchen. She looked exhausted, her eyes squinting with tiredness.

‘There’s coffee in the perc,’ she said. ‘And I’ve already put milk in your mug.’

‘Thank you, hon. How long have you been up?’

‘An hour or so. But I was awake for ages. My head’s a total mess with all that’s going on. And it doesn’t help that I don’t know what to do with myself. I no longer have to prepare for the family get-together, the school’s in virtual shut-down, and the thought of doing any renovating really didn’t appeal. To top it all, mistakes I made in the past have come back to haunt me.’ She blinked and puffed out her cheeks. ‘But enough about me. Did you manage to get much sleep?’

‘About five hours, I reckon.’

‘I didn’t hear you come to bed.’

‘That’s because it was after midnight and you were out cold.’

‘Why did you stay up so late?’

‘I found something of interest in Lorna Manning’s suitcase,’ he said. ‘I think it solves the mystery of why she seemed depressed much of the time. But whether it helps lead us to her killer is another matter.’

He placed his mug on the table and went into the living room, where he’d left the envelope with the words Open in the event of my death on the front, and grabbed it off the coffee table.

Back in the kitchen, he showed it to Annie and slid out the two newspaper cuttings and the sheet of A4 paper.

‘The stories appeared in The Sun and The Mail ten years ago, when Lorna was living in Hampshire,’ James said. ‘As you can see, they’re both reports of a hit-and-run on a country lane in the New Forest. An eighteen-year-old girl was knocked down and killed, and left by the side of the road. I did a Google search last night and it seems the police never found out who the driver was.’

‘So, what has this got to do with Lorna?’ Annie asked.

‘Well, it turns out that Lorna Manning was the driver. That typewritten note is a confession and it’s her signature on the bottom. She says she was returning home from an impromptu party in Christchurch when her car struck the girl, who was walking along the side of the road after her own vehicle broke down. Lorna says she got out to check and found the girl was dead. But she drove off in a panic because she’d been drinking and was way over the limit.’

Annie was now shaking her head in disbelief, her eyes out on stalks.

‘She admits she’s a coward and ashamed of herself because she couldn’t face going to prison,’ James continued. ‘She asks whoever opens the envelope to contact the girl’s parents so they can have closure. She tells them how sorry she is for accidentally killing their daughter and for not going to the police.’

As Annie read the notes and the reports, James thought about what Lorna had done and how it had blighted her life afterwards. She joined the long list of drunk drivers who had taken similar action after colliding with a pedestrian, only to regret it afterwards.