She laughed. ‘Well done. Throw that girl a biscuit – we got there in the end. Except I’m not Caitlin anymore. I prefer Catherine these days. Cait. However you want to spell it. Catherine sounds classier, don’t you think? My old bitch of a mum was an Irish tinker. Oh, sorry, you can’t call them that anymore can you. Traveller. Whatever. She turned her back on me when I first got put away. Twenty-six, I was! Imagine your mum turning her back on you just because you weren’t right in the head! And whose fault was that in the first place, I ask you? Bloody right: hers! She smokes skunk all through her pregnancy and then blames me for having a screw loose? Unbelievable. So naturally I didn’t want to be called the name she gave me, not after that.’

Meredith was still finding it difficult to reconcile the Caitlin she remembered with the bloated, red-faced, ruined-looking woman in front of her. She remembered admiring Caitlin’s neat little nose, back then, but this Caitlin’s nose was an aberration – squashed and flattened and almost bulbous. And yet … perhaps the resemblance was there. The dimple in the chin, the way her lip curled slightly when she spoke. It could be her, Meredith thought. Just about.

The woman placed her hands on her thighs and heaved herself heavily to her feet. ‘There we have it.’ She had a trace of a West Country accent.

‘I don’t understand why you’re here, or how you found me,’ Meredith said warily. She wanted to add, And I don’t give a shit about your relationship with your mother, but thought she’d better not.

This woman had the weirdest air of loose cannon Meredith had ever seen, as if at any moment she would grow three-inch fangs and launch herself at her throat. She’d never witnessed anything like it. She tried to remember if she had ever had an inkling back when they worked together, but was pretty sure she hadn’t. The only thing linking young Caitlin with this one was the roll-up that had been a constant between her fingers back then too.

Caitlin/Catherine narrowed her eyes at her, a mean grin squinching them up further still. ‘Ah now, this is where it gets interesting,’ she said. ‘Make me a cuppa first, would you? I’d better come with you to supervise, I suppose.’ Her tone was grumbling, as if she’d been badly inconvenienced.

‘Supervise me?’ Meredith said, half bemused, half furious. ‘In my own house?’

The woman just nodded, heaving herself back up again and gesturing Meredith to accompany her to the kitchen, where she flicked on the kettle and proprietorially unhooked two mugs from the mug tree on the counter. ‘I’ll let you take it from here,’ she said.

Meredith glared at her. It felt like a weird dream.