Meredith felt bewildered, invaded, the beginnings of fear, even though this was clearly not an attacker. Just some fat, annoying old woman. She followed her into her living room – a room where almost nobody aside from Pete, Ralph, Paula and Andrea had ever been – and found the woman lowering herself with difficulty onto the worn velvet sofa, her large arse sending up a little cloud of dust on impact.

‘Do I know you?’ Meredith demanded. She didn’t feel like being polite any longer. ‘Like I said, this is really not a good time for me. Please just tell me what you want.’

‘Cuppa tea would be nice.’

The woman leaned her elbows on her legs and rested her chins in her hand. She was dressed in a shapeless tube skirt, a cross-body ethnic sort of bag with little mirrors embroidered on it, a long, cheap-looking sweatshirt and sandals that cut into the flesh of her puffy feet, which swelled over the straps.

‘I must say I’m disappointed you don’t remember me, Meredith,’ she said. Her toenails were thick and yellowed.

‘I know it’s been a long time, but I suppose it figures that I was just completely … disposable to you. Someone you could use and abuse and then forget about.’

Meredith had been fiddling with a magazine on the table, but this made her head jerk up in alarm. Who the hell was this? Someone from a rival band to Cohen’s? Someone she’d known in the squat, or at the record company? For a minute she wondered if this was Iain’s doing.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please get to the point, otherwise you’re going to have to leave, now.’

The woman smiled meanly, displaying small brown teeth. ‘Sarum Discs, 1983?’

Meredith stared at her, the penny still not dropping. ‘The record shop in Salisbury? Yeah, I worked there for a while. For Alaric. Did you know him?’

‘Meredith, I worked there too. All week, and you came in on Saturdays.’

Meredith frowned. The only person she remembered working there too was little hippie Caitlin. She studied the woman’s doughy face more carefully. This woman surely had nothing to do with her brother and the murders. ‘Caitlin?’