Had last night been something like that? She’d been upset leaving the party. It could have triggered something…

Anna pondered the idea as she shifted position, realizing she’d got distracted and hadn’t actually registered the time on the alarm clock. She turned her head to take another look.

Eleven thirty-two? She sprang out of bed.

She was supposed to be having a New Year’s Day lunch with Spencer’s parents at half past twelve, and it was a forty-five-minute drive to Epsom – at the very least. That meant she had to get into the car, well, now!

But one quick glance in the mirror confirmed that plan was a bust before it had even got underway. She was still wearing the same wrinkled black dress from the night before, her tights had a ladder that started under her heel and disappeared up under her hemline, and her hair looked as if she’d been caught in a hurricane.

There was no time to analyse what had happened last night now. She had to get herself in the shower and dressed in a presentable manner in under fifteen minutes, and then, even if she flirted with the speed limit all the way to Epsom, she was still going to be cutting it really fine.

Spencer’s mum was a stickler about punctuality, and Anna always made sure to turn up to their fortnightly Sunday lunches on the dot of half past twelve, even if they never ate until one. While Spencer had been famously late for everything, and Anna couldn’t remember one family function she’d been to with him where they hadn’t arrived at least half an hour after they were supposed to, Gayle seemed to hold her daughter-inlaw to a different standard.

Maybe that was because the lunches had started not long after Spencer had died, a way to support each other through that awful time, to laugh and cry and remember him, and the tradition had just kept going, no one brave enough to suggest otherwise. Being late would have seemed disrespectful.

By noon Anna had got a grip of herself and made it into her car. By twenty past, she was joining the M25 and putting her foot down. It was raining hard, that horrible, cold, icy stuff that would have been sleet if the temperature had been a degree or two cooler. She put the windscreen wipers on max and forced herself to overtake a few cars and lorries instead of hugging the slow lane, as she usually would have done in such weather. However, the journey was a familiar one, and it wasn’t long before she was driving mostly on automatic pilot, allowing her thoughts to wander.

What had really happened last night?

There were only two possibilities: either she’d heard the voice on the phone – Spencer’s voice? – for real, or she’d thought she’d heard it. Neither scenario calmed her down much – option one was just too ‘out there’ to consider, and option two meant she was starting off the New Year by having a nervous breakdown.