‘She liked knitting, my Sylvia,’ he’d said as she entered, with a kind of gruff warning that Irene shouldn’t criticize. She wouldn’t have dreamed of it, never having had any skills in that area herself. He had prepared a ham salad that she didn’t eat and then she had taken herself off to a bedroom with a patchwork quilt and swirling dust motes caught in the early evening sun.

She had lain there, flat on the bed, like a statue on an ancient crypt. The pain inside pressed and probed into every part of her body and she felt as though a sudden movement might shatter her into a million fragments. The light bled from the day and still Irene lay there, staring up at the ceiling and thinking that now there was only her. There had been four of them and now there was only her.

Then she had curled into a ball and wept until she almost needed to vomit.

It had been a very long day.

It was Frank, last night, who had asked whether the hospital had talked about his belongings. Irene had told him that Michael had been found without anything that could identify him. As she said it, Irene had suddenly sat upright, realizing how stupid she had been. Where was Michael’s car?

Frank had known where impounded cars were kept and insisted on driving her over there. Irene could drive, but hadn’t for years, and was in no fit state right now.

Getting it back, though, proved to be a nightmare. Irene had tried to explain the whole thing to a spotty youth who looked totally disinterested and who, at first, had refused to believe she had any right to pick up the car.

There happened to be a copy of the local paper lying crushed and dusty in a corner of the waiting room and Frank had brandished it at the young man and started talking, in a very imposing voice, about how he was distressing a grieving mother and ought to be ashamed of himself.

Eventually, they had been allowed to take the car, which had been found with keys in the ignition when it was towed away from the car park near where Michael met his death.

The inside of the car, an ugly big thing in Irene’s view, was filthy, the floor covered in crisp wrappers and takeaway coffee cups. There was a key on a plastic fob that belonged to a boarding house in Casterbourne.

So now Frank was driving her there, without complaint, so she could collect the rest of Michael’s things.

‘It has to be done, doesn’t it?’ she said and her voice came out sounding much more clipped than she’d intended. It sounded like the voice of a woman who was in control. This, at least, was a comfort. Then she found herself asking a question she hadn’t anticipated.