After a shower and two mugs of black coffee, she set to with trying to restore some sort of order out of the chaos that surrounded her. When the locksmith turned up almost as rapidly as the police had the night before, Clare began to think that maybe the fates were feeling more kindly disposed towards her than they had been yesterday evening. Well, her mum was always telling her that you make your own luck, and she wasn’t going to sit around licking her wounds. She’d soon be out of this flat for good, and in her own home – the next step in her new life. Which reminded her, she must ring her landlord to tell him about the break-in. Though on second thoughts maybe she should leave that until after she’d cleaned the place up and had the lock repaired. She didn’t want to give him a heart attack. Or, worse still, end up losing her deposit when she finally moved out.

By the end of the morning, Clare had returned the living room to a state that was at least now inhabitable and the locksmith had been and gone, relieving her of a not inconsiderable sum – an expense that at the moment she could frankly have done without. With only the spare room left to tackle, she’d considered just shutting the door on it and leaving it for another day. But in the end she’d decided that as she’d have to have everything packed and ready for the move to her new house in the next few weeks she might as well get it over and done with now.

But that didn’t mean she had to go through all of Stephen’s stuff now. For the moment she could just put it back in its cardboard boxes and she’d deal with sorting the contents out once she was ensconced in her new home. One or two bits and pieces of Stephen’s old golfing memorabilia lay broken on the floor, which made the decision not to keep them considerably easier. And, in the event, it didn’t take her long to stack the paperwork into neat piles ready to return them to the boxes from whence they’d come. She was just putting the final pile into the last box when her eye was caught by several pieces of A4 paper stapled together that lay on the top of it. It was a printout of an email exchange. She placed the rest of the pile on the box and closed the lid, taping it shut.

Perching on the edge of the bed, she read and reread the printout’s contents. When she’d finished, she made her way into the living room and slipped it carefully into the side pocket of her laptop bag.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Hello, Margaret. I didn’t expect to see you here.’