Connie looked down at her plate. If she was like her mother she wouldn’t be in the fix she was.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘we’ve got a few months to decide. Anything can happen in that time.’

She nodded, her stomach churning. Anything could happen. Although some things were inevitable.

After they had eaten and Connie had cleared away, she went to her room pleading tiredness. Unable to sleep, she stood at the window.

A figure skulked in the dark, the tip of a cigarette dancing in the gloom. Kenneth – doing his yard exercise, as he called it. He headed away from the house. Connie followed his progress to the end of the garden and then watched as he stepped past the bushes and disappeared.

Clouds covered the moon and the garden dropped into shadow. It struck Connie how tiny she was in comparison to the vastness of the sky.

How odd to think that life would carry on when she had gone in the same way it had continued without her mother. Someone else would gaze from this same window and the church would still be there, but the graveyard would hold her mother and her father and herself, no doubt.

She got into bed. She could hear her father moving about, rolling back the lid of the bureau. He would be checking the accounts, or writing a letter to Maud, or looking at photos of her mother. She lay with her hands on her belly. A girl, she thought as she drifted into sleep; a girl with dark hair like Eva Kolinski.

5

Marina

January 1992

Marina parks haphazardly, drags suitcases and bags from the car and dumps them at the bottom of the steps. It has been raining, the earth around the trunk of the maple tree is damp and patches of wet concrete glisten in the struggling afternoon light.

She unbuttons her faux-fur coat slowly as she stares upwards at the house, peels off one fingerless glove and rakes at her knotted hair. She feels dishevelled after her journey, and stiff after being hunched at the wheel for so long, beetling on the motorway as fast as the Mini would take her, stopping once at a service station for coffee that tasted like flavoured water and then speeding away again, pushing aside all reservations as she drove.

A tall, thin man, who looks around Marina’s age, leaps up the steps from the basement, shoes clanking on the metal. He has light hair, rectangular glasses with thick, black frames, and a cigarette tucked behind one ear. Despite the cold, he wears a short-sleeved shirt, with a battered looking leather jacket hooked on one finger and slung over his shoulder.

He halts at the sight of her. ‘Can I help you?’

She smiles brightly back at him. ‘I’m moving in.’

He looks at her, incredulous brown eyes blinking behind his lenses. ‘Into this house?’ He jabs at number 24.