She looked defiantly and deliberately from face to face. “Basically, Dudley killed Mum,” she said. “When he refused to pay for her cancer treatment, he condemned her to death. He had so much cash in those days he wouldn’t even have noticed but he wouldn’t do it. And Amelia was complicit in that because she could have made him pay for Mum to go to America for treatment but she just gave up. When he refused, she let him get away with it.”

“Anna...” Sam shifted in his seat, placing one of his hands over hers. “We talked about this at the time,” he said. He sounded lost, despairing. “I thought... We all thought you agreed the treatment would have made no difference. Jessica said so herself. It was too late.”

“You can’t know that.” Anna was shaking now. Lizzie could see how thin was the veneer of her self-control. “How can anyone know? You could at least have tried.” Her voice splintered on the last word and she started to sob in great gulps and gasps, her whole face contorted and her shoulders heaving with the weight of grief and anger.

“Amelia said she understood why I was still angry but that I had to let it go, that I had to let Mum go...” Anna said. She raised her chin. “She said she had moved on with her life and that I should too. But I couldn’t.” Her voice shredded into despair. “I didn’t want to! Millie was bustling about packing her bags all the time we were talking, like I was just an irritant to be brushed away. I snapped, I suppose. When she carried the first bags over to the top of the stairs, I followed her and said she couldn’t just walk out in the middle of our discussion. She laughed and said the discussion was over, and I grabbed her arm and screamed at her not to turn her back on me... And then...” She stared. “I pushed her. I was so angry I wanted to kill her. She fell down the first flight and hit her head the wall—I heard the crack—and then she sort of rolled over and fell down the second flight too.”

No one said anything at all. Johnny was slumped against Arthur’s shoulder, eyes closed. Arthur looked ashen. A muscle moved in his cheek.

After a second Sam got clumsily to his feet, the scrape of his chair shockingly loud in the quiet. He put his arms about Anna. She did not move into his embrace but neither did she push him away.

“It will all be all right,” Sam said, and he sounded as though he was trying to convince himself. “We have to go to the police, Anna, you do understand that? We’ll tell them it was an accident. It’ll be all right.”

Lizzie was reminded of Anna comforting Johnny that day at her flat, because how did you ever make anything right when it was so wrong, so messed up, so painful? She had no idea.