‘I know why I did it! It was because of Nan reading the diary, that’s all.’

‘Why did you take the drugs?’

‘Oh, everyone takes drugs nowadays. I’m not an addict, Mum. I don’t take heroin or anything like that.’

‘But from what I read in the diary you take them often, every day. Amphetamines, cannabis, Ecstasy. What I can’t understand is how this all went on under my nose.’

Lizzy lay back in the bed. ‘Sometimes, Mum, when I was stoned, I would come and chat to you when you got in. You never even guessed because the amphetamines just make you chatty. They make you high, happy.’

‘And you’re not happy without them?’

Lizzy stared down at the bandages on her wrists.

‘Not very often.’

‘But why?’ Kate’s voice rose and the girl in the next bed stared at them all.

‘I just don’t know, Mum. I don’t know. I think about death all the time.’

Kate stared at the white-tiled floor. How could a sixteen-year-old girl think about death? Her life was just starting.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He hasn’t even tried to find out how I am, has he?’ Her voice was flat.

‘He’ll be in touch, Lizzy, he thinks the world of you.’

‘Yeah, of course he does.’ Her voice was bitter and Kate and Evelyn exchanged worried glances.

Life had a funny way of catching up with you, thought Kate. Just when you thought you had it all figured out, it threw you a curve like this.

Doctor Plumfield was right about one thing. Lizzy should go to Warley Hospital.

She needed help, professional help, and Kate was honest enough to admit that it couldn’t come from her or her mother.

Patrick was standing outside a house in Barking. Three of his best men were with him. It was twenty to twelve and he had arrived ten minutes earlier. This was one of the jobs that he hated. They were to evict a couple and their three children from a rented house. Patrick had been called in when the man had threatened his team with a baseball bat. In normal circumstances the men would just have forced their way in and relieved him of the weapon. But the police had been called so everything had to be done by the book. The man was watching them from a bedroom window, the bat visible.

A young PC went to the letter box and began shouting through it.

‘Come on, Mr Travers, this is silly. If you come down here we can talk about it.’

He stepped away from the letter box and looked up towards the window. Mr Travers, a plasterer, who had lost his house when he had been made bankrupt, opened the window slowly. He poked out a grizzled head.

‘Fuck off, the lot of you. I paid that bastard and he knows I paid him.’

The constable tried again. He lifted the letter box.