‘What do you mean by complicated family dynamic?’ she asks.

‘Aren’t all families complicated?’ I say. ‘It’s been a long day and a long evening.’ I can feel my lip start to tremble and I’m embarrassed to find that I’m on the brink of tears.

‘Take your time,’ DC King soothes and I roughly brush away a tear that has shamed me by running down my face.

‘Look, Heidi is the daughter of the woman he left my mother for. He raised Heidi after her mother died. I was still just a teenager. Things were difficult. Heidi and I never saw eye to eye and we still don’t. She was a very troubled child well into her teenage years. You know, mental health problems and the like.

‘My father did his best to do right by her – at the expense of his relationship with me at times – but she never seemed to view him with anything other than utter disdain. But that doesn’t mean she’d have done anything …’ I said, knowing full well that it meant she was more than capable of it all the same.

‘Of course it doesn’t,’ DC King says. ‘How did she appear on the night of your father’s death?’

‘Tense,’ I say. ‘But we all were. We were all walking on eggshells. Just the night before she had told us she wanted to sell this house as soon as possible. It goes to her, you see. It was her mother’s and although my father was allowed to live here until he died, or formed a new family, it was always going to go to Heidi.

‘It seemed very distasteful to have that conversation with him dying upstairs, but that’s Heidi, you see. Cold at times. And she has just become a mother and by all accounts the house she’s living in now isn’t big enough for a growing family …’

‘I imagine that conversation made you angry?’ DC King asked.

‘Well yes, of course it did. It was callous. But my anger was with Heidi and certainly not with my father. I mean, there’s no telling what she’s capable of … not that I’m saying it was her, of course,’ I say, even though I want the blame to be shifted squarely onto her shoulders. It might just teach her to be more sensitive to other people and their feelings.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Heidi

Now

I’ve escaped the house for a while and am pushing Lily in her pram along the quay and back again, even though it is freezing and my face has started to go numb with the cold.

I needed to get away from the house. It’s been just over two days since the police dropped the bombshell on us and we’ve spent hours talking to different officers. Going through the same details over and over again. They’ve been professional with us, nice even. But I can sense DI Bradley getting frustrated. They’re no closer to finding any answers. None of us are, but I can’t help but feel that they are all looking in my direction.