Clara watched the countryside slip past her window, the hedgerows and verges beginning to burgeon into spring, and thought about Rose. When they’d first met a few years before, Rose had been in her mid-sixties and newly retired, enjoying a ‘life of leisure’, as she’d laughingly put it. Gardening, cooking, taking holidays in Europe with Oliver, relishing her new-found freedom after such a long and distinguished career in medicine. Clara had seen pictures of her taken in her forties and fifties: a good-looking, impeccably dressed woman whose eyes had shone with intelligence and purpose and responsibility, but now, though she was still all of those things, there was a softness, an ease and comfort about her too that Clara thought made her even more attractive.

She recalled a time a year or so earlier when she’d first caught a glimpse of that other Rose, the coolly capable doctor she’d once been. It was a weekend in November and they’d all taken a walk together through the frost-covered fields. Rose and Clara, slightly ahead of the others, had come across a hare caught in a barbed-wire fence. It was bleeding, its face contorted in fear and pain. While Clara had cringed and fretted uselessly at its suffering, Rose had knelt and carefully freed it, but rather than hopping away, the animal had lain there, eyes bulging, still bleeding profusely. ‘Poor thing,’ Rose had murmured. ‘It’s dying. I think it’ll be kinder if I just … don’t look, darling, if you’d rather,’ and then she’d picked the animal up and deftly wrung its neck. And though Clara had felt a little sick, she had been filled with admiration for Rose’s unflappable efficiency, her ability to get on with what was necessary, no matter how unpleasant or bloody.

‘I wonder what Rose and Oliver were like,’ she said now, ‘before Emily left, I mean. I met them so many years afterwards, I can’t imagine how it must have changed them.’

‘They were quite a big deal by the sound of things.’ Mac replied. ‘Rose was head of paediatric surgery at the hospital, and Oliver had written his first book, which had got a lot of attention – TV appearances and so on. They were pretty well known in the area, very active in the village, fundraising and all that, then there were all the huge parties they used to throw. Luke told me their house was always full of people.’ He glanced at Clara. ‘So yeah. I’d say they had it pretty good.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s just so fucking tragic the way things turned out. They don’t deserve it, they really don’t.’