Lorna shuffles in her seat. ‘It can’t be a coincidence, can it? She finds out someone is looking for her and then runs away.’ She sighs. ‘I don’t remember much about living here, or Daphne,’ she says. ‘So they must have parted ways at some point when I was still young. Me and my mum, we lived in Bristol after moving away from here.’

‘They seemed so close.’

‘As much as I love her, my mother is a funny one. In all the years I can remember she never had a relationship. With a man or a woman. She concentrated on me and then, when I left home, on my daughter.’

‘Something really seemed to scare her on Bonfire Night, though,’ says Melissa, wistfully. ‘She said . . .’ she looks towards her fireplace and frowns ‘. . . something really odd.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said, “If anything bad happens to me, look in the fireplace.”’

Lorna frowns. ‘The fireplace? Which one? Yours?’

She laughs. ‘No. I don’t think mine. I assumed hers. But I don’t know . . .’

Lorna’s heart starts to race. The fireplace. She must be talking about the evidence that Victor has been so desperate to find. Is that where it’s been all this time? ‘And . . .’ she can barely contain her excitement ‘. . . did you ever look?’

‘No. No, I didn’t think much about it, really. After she left I’d heard that she still owned the house and was renting it out. So it’s not like anything bad had happened to her. If it had – if, I don’t know, she’d been found dead in the house or anything like that – well, then, yes, yes, I would have done as she asked, but she left, other people moved in. About ten years after she left, around 1990, I bumped into an estate agent who was looking at the house and asked him about Rose. He said she still owned it, that she rented Skelton Place out. I assumed she’d outrun the man she was so frightened of.’

God, thinks Lorna, tears blinding her vision when she thinks of her mother, alone and scared, bringing her up by herself.

‘The bodies in the garden,’ says Melissa, suddenly. ‘Do they know who they are yet?’

‘One was a journalist called Neil Lewisham. And the other, they still don’t know. But I’ve been wondering. Maybe they didn’t split up and the other body is Daphne’s.’

Melissa breathes in sharply. ‘But who would have killed her?’

Lorna looks down at her hands. ‘I’m worried the police will think it’s my mum . . .’

‘No, no, that’s not right,’ Melissa says emphatically. ‘Rose would never have hurt Daphne or let anyone else hurt her, not without calling the police, or doing something.’

‘Unless it wasn’t my mother who killed her,’ says Lorna, swallowing.

43

Saffy