Her father’s office was at the back of the house, and it was his inner sanctum, the place where he kept all his personal items, many of them brought from Russia. She pushed the door wide and surveyed the gloom. If she were going to find a clue to her mother’s fate, it would be in the wooden desk her father had always kept locked. After her mom disappeared, Val had snuck in there many times to hunt for the key, checking behind the gold-painted icons in the shrine in one corner, and under the leather-bound tomes on the bookshelves, but she had never found it.

She tried the drawers now: locked, as always. She ran downstairs to the tool closet and selected a hammer and chisel. Back in her father’s office, she got to work, hammering the chisel blade into the top right-hand drawer first. The elderly wood splintered easily and she was able to yank the drawer open, but inside there were only some pencils, mathematical instruments, and bottles of ink. She had hoped for an address book with a forwarding address for her mother, or a copy of her parents’ divorce certificate, but there was nothing like that.

When she prised open the top left-hand drawer, she gasped at what she saw inside: the unmistakable shape of a pistol wrapped in a white cloth. She sat down on her father’s revolving chair before unwrapping it. The barrel was dull black metal and it had a brown handle with a honeycombed grip, a chamber with space for six cartridges, a cocking hammer, and trigger: it was an ugly weapon, nothing elegant about it. Some bullets rolled around the drawer. Why had he owned a pistol?

Suddenly she wondered if he had shot her mother and buried her in the garden. Was that why there had been “so much blood”? Should she get the police to dig it up?

She shook herself. That was ridiculous. There was no evidence. Finding an old pistol in a drawer wouldn’t persuade the police a crime had been committed. It had never occurred to her to suspect her father of murder until she heard what he kept repeating in the nursing home, and that was just the ramblings of a senile old man.

She stood and applied the chisel to the lower drawers. On one side she found several years’ worth of household bills, while on the other she found her father’s tax returns neatly filed in folders with the years marked on the outside. Tony had asked her to set aside any financial documents so he could deal with the tax affairs.