Dorothy held Connie’s hand as she lay dying and promised to look out for her baby. She turned up at the hospital on the baby ward, found out who was fostering, and then adopting her. It wasn’t hard with a criminal for a friend. Kenneth knew all the right people to ask. And then she appeared at significant moments. Not a figment of Ruth’s imagination after all. Dorothy had kept her promise, tracking Marina’s progress, making sure she was happy. How had she felt when Marina had turned up at the house? She must have recognised her immediately.

It will be a while before there can be a proper funeral. The post-mortem must be completed as they try to establish the cause of Connie’s death. Dorothy thinks it was the placenta – that a fragment had been left behind and caused bleeding, slow at first, but steady. Like a dripping tap. Taking Connie’s life drop by drop with an occasional gush of blood and then a massive haemorrhage. Is that what happened? Too late to prove it, but Marina believes that her mother’s death was natural. She believes, too, that if Dorothy had realised, she would have called a doctor.

Harry came to see her when she called him to explain. After his initial shock, he had told her how much he loved Connie, described the things he’d missed about her after she’d gone. He gave Marina the typewriter he had kept for so many years, waiting for her return, and the rest of the jewellery too, which Connie had entrusted to him. And Dorothy gave her the ring which she had slipped from Connie’s finger. Family heirlooms. It’s something. And she has the paintings. Her father’s paintings from the attic, including the one that shows a half-finished picture of her mother. She has spent a long time staring at the image, looking for a resemblance between them.

Dorothy confirmed that the paintings were her son’s. She told Marina he had written occasionally over the years, but his letters had become few and far between. As far as she could know, he was still in France: despite everything, he had never come home. He had rejected his mother permanently and she had lived with that loneliness, staying in the house, hoping that one day he would change his mind, that she would return and find him in the flat.