With shaking hands she moved on to the next bag, tearing it open. These were more personal, intimate things. Nula’s Chinese tortoiseshell jewellery case. Her tablets. Dad had called them ‘Nula’s crazy pills’. That had been unkind. But she supposed the stress of living with someone as flaky as Mum must have told on him. Must have frustrated him, she guessed, because Charlie wasn’t the kind that would ever succumb to a mental illness, and he had never understood Nula’s pain.

Milly delved deeper. There was a big Louis Vuitton holdall in here, with notebooks inside. Nula had never been a reader. You either were or you weren’t, and she knew that Nula had never picked up a book in her life.

‘I’ll read when I’m ninety,’ she had always said.

But Nula hadn’t lived that long. And these weren’t books to read. Milly thumbed through a few pages and saw Nula’s scrawled, shambolic handwriting. Ah! Nula’s journals. These were the notebooks the psychiatrists and psychotherapists had encouraged Nula to write in when she was receiving treatment and in her day-to-day life; they had wanted her to pour out her troubles onto the page, to find some release maybe. Milly reached into the bag again. There was a whole stack of them, testament to Nula’s long struggle with her mental health. There were more of them in the pouffe in the sitting room, the ones she’d shown Belle when she’d been asking questions about the business; she’d get those later, keep them all together in this bag. She couldn’t just bin them. And she didn’t want anybody else pawing through them. Maybe later, she would be able to look at them in more detail. Right now, she couldn’t. It was too raw, all of it.

She thought of what Belle had told her about the Clacton place, the one they’d found reference to.

A crack factory, running alongside a legitimate furnishings business? Her father, a drugs baron? Her mother, going along with that? Belle’s parents, in the know?

No. It couldn’t be true. Could it? She wished she smoked or drank or something, because she was in a bad, bad place right now and she felt that it could only get worse.

96

The nightmare went on and on for Milly. She collected the two urns containing her parents’ ashes from the undertakers, wondering – not wanting to, but unable to stop herself – how much of the dust inside the bronze-coloured urns was flesh, blood and bone, and how much was just scorched fragments of metal from the Jet Ranger.

Got to stop thinking about that, she thought.