Jeannie Proctor paused for a few seconds as if she was wondering if she should speak, then she said candidly, ‘It was a long time ago, so I don’t suppose it matters now. She torched the house – for the insurance, like. She had spent so much on it that they could never get the price it was worth, so she torched it. Left fags all over the place, she did, and open cans of paint and turps. Looked like she was decorating, see. She was a fucking girl, her. Mind you, in those days you could get away with murder with insurance companies. Can’t any more, they’re wise to everything now.’

The woman was laughing, but Gabby could feel herself going cold.

‘I had my bedroom windows open, and the smoke damage was atrocious, as you can imagine . . . Here, where you going?’

Jeannie Proctor watched as the girl hurried away from her. ‘Well, what on earth rattled her cage?’

Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-Seven

Gabby sat in her car and thought back to what Jeannie Proctor had said to her. Somehow she knew that the woman was telling her the truth. But did that mean her mother had burned her house down too? Had killed her baby boy? Somewhere inside she knew that was what had happened.

It was all falling into place now. She had been on the verge of getting the kids back, she had straightened herself out. In her heart she should have known her mother would not have countenanced that. Her mother had always wanted those children more than she had ever wanted anything in her life. Gabby had actually deemed that at one time her mother’s saving grace – the undeniable love she had for those two little mites. It was the love she had never had for her own kids, but she had lavished it on her grandchildren. Gabby had been so grateful to her, had felt so indebted to her for all her help. She recalled how badly her mother had taken little Vince’s death; Gabby had assumed, like everyone else, that it was because she had loved him and cared for him. But it had been guilt. The wicked bitch had been consumed with guilt.

Even as Gabby’s heart was trying to deny what she was telling herself, her brain was telling her that it couldn’t have been her brother who started the fire. The brother who her mother had said had visited her a few days before, and who she subsequently admitted had threatened them all with death, pain, torture and destruction, was well and truly dead by then.