He doesn’t need to reply. She knows it’s true and from what she has read about the other tenants, they would have said the same. Hadn’t Eileen Clarke talked about the open front door and how someone must have come in? Marina could almost hear her wanting to help like witnesses do. Kenneth would have backed her up, misdirected the police. At the same time, the other tenants would have said the same thing. Thomas was on holiday in Whitby and Connie had gone to Paris to be with her boyfriend. There would have been no reason to look in Flat 4.

The police had been scouring the streets when all along they should have been searching the house. Connie had been dying in her flat. And they simply hadn’t looked.

‘Where is she now?’ Marina manages at last.

He is silent and she realises she has underestimated this man. He won’t confess and she can feel her rage growing. Yet she will make him. She will force a confession. She hasn’t come this far to fail now.

‘What did you do?’

He looks away. She moves closer, reaches out to grab his collar. She will shake the truth from him. She will find out what . . .

She turns abruptly.

There is someone in the doorway.

Dorothy, wizened and tired, hands clasped, eyes cast down as if in supplication.

Her head still full of Kenneth’s guilt, Marina takes a deep breath, willing her heart to slow.

‘We buried her,’ says Dorothy. ‘But she didn’t die alone. I was there.’

35

Eva

February 1992

Eva remembers many things as she stands in the hall listening to Kenneth and the woman who she has now discovered is called Marina.

She remembers Little Eva changing her clothes. She remembers how she hid her purple dress and wet knickers in her room where later her mother would find them. She remembers pulling on a different dress. It was yellow, she thinks. Or maybe blue. The details are hazy. She remembers returning to the landing to find Connie, but she wasn’t there. Instead, the door of the flat was closed and so she waited, uncertain, until the door opened and Kenneth appeared. He was holding a bundle, wrapped in blue. Eva crouched, making herself small, hoping he wouldn’t see her, but he didn’t look up anyway, because he was too set on creeping down the stairs.

Eva remembers many things. She remembers Little Eva watching the small woman with the bright eyeshadow hurrying up the stairs shortly after Kenneth had gone. She remembers her rushing into her flat, coming out with a bunch of keys on a ring and then fumbling with the lock on Connie’s door.