I nodded. ‘Thank you.’

‘We will get to the bottom of this, you know,’ he said, shaking my hand and walking away.

I didn’t know whether to take it as a threat or a promise. Or both.

I let the conversation run through my head all the way to Mum’s house, wishing we could just go home to our own place. But it’s expected we’ll go to Mum’s, to join the other mourners for tea and sandwiches for the wake. She’ll be so cross if we don’t.

Stella just holds my hand. She doesn’t ask questions. And when we arrive, she doesn’t question me when I say I need some space. I climb the stairs and sit in my old bedroom – a room my mother long ago transformed into a ‘sewing room’. She has an upcycled Parker Knoll chair by the window and I sit here doing my best to hang on to the numbness that has come over me.

Heidi hasn’t shown her face. It’s a good thing. If she does, I don’t think anything in the world will be able to stop the rage from bursting out of me.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Heidi

Now

I find myself with the two people in the world I have always felt safe and secure with.

My grandparents live in a small, always overheated, flat in sheltered accommodation close to the city centre. They’ve lived there for more than ten years now and even though I wish they had somewhere with a little garden to potter about in, or somewhere just further away from the sometimes anti-social activity of the city centre, they seem happy.

They’ve done their best to make the one-bed flat their own; crammed as many of their possessions onto shelves or into cupboards so that there is still an air of the house I used to visit as a child about the place. Pride of place on the wall of their living room is a large framed photograph of my mother and me.

Professionally taken, in the early nineties, it looks dated. A heavy wooden frame. Soft blurring around our faces. My mother’s hair, teased and backcombed. Her lip gloss a shiny pale pink – I can still remember the sweet smell of that gloss and how it would leave sticky marks on my cheeks when she kissed me. I’m there, all of three years old, hair much curlier than it is now, tied in two pigtails with pale blue ribbon, and a pretty, flouncy, completely over-the-top party dress. We are looking not at the camera but at each other, and we are both grinning.

I wish I could say I remember the day it was taken, but I don’t. Still, every time I see that picture in my grandparents’ flat, part of me feels like that day says everything that needs to be said about my relationship with my mother.

I’m looking at it now, sitting on a small brown two-seater sofa, while my grandparents, perched either side of me in their armchairs, look between me and each other, waiting for me to speak. My granny has wrapped me in a blanket after roughly towel-drying my hair. She gave me her housecoat to wear while she hung my coat, dress and tights around the various radiators in the flat, adding to the stuffy, humid feel of the place.