He gives me a glum smile and I nod, noticing the invisible eye-roll, the way he looks at me as though we both know what she’s like. For some reason it annoys rather than pleases me. Cora may be difficult, but she’s his wife. He should be loyal.

She must have heard me come in, because she appears, refreshed from her nap, just as Tim is asking me where I’ve been.

‘To see Alex Wells.’

‘Oh?’ Cora says. Their surprise is evident. Tim looks nervous.

‘He’d arranged a meeting with Nick, so I thought I’d go along and see what it was about. Alex has some stuff he’s working through. He’s been in therapy. He wanted to talk about his sister.’

‘Well, of course, that was a tragedy,’ Tim says.

‘He thought Nick might have unresolved issues. Alex certainly does. I got the feeling that no one talked about it properly after it happened. That you dealt with it by losing sight of each other.’

Tim sighs. ‘Yes, that’s true to an extent. We did lose touch with the family. It was so incredibly difficult, so painful. It’s not a nice thing to admit, but I was relieved when they moved away. How is he?’

‘I don’t know him, but he seemed uncertain, in a bit of a rut, maybe. The impression I got was that he was trying to move his life forward by tracking Nick down. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that the timing was a coincidence.’

‘It certainly seems odd,’ Tim says.

‘Why wouldn’t Nick have told me about this?’

‘Perhaps he thought you wouldn’t understand,’ Cora says. ‘Or that you would play it down in some way.’

‘He knows I’d never do that.’ I swallow back the hurt and instinctively fight back. ‘What about you two? Alex told me about the restaurant. About losing your friends’ money. He didn’t think you cared.’

‘Of course I did,’ Tim protests. ‘I felt terrible. But it was business. You win some, you lose some.’

‘Do you?’

He ignores my tone. ‘Nick was going through adolescence. He was very up and down at the time. After the accident he withdrew. He was diagnosed with depression the following year.’

Depression. There’s too much to take in; I pull out a chair and sit down hard.

‘I’m sorry, that’s obviously a shock to you.’

There’s a long silence. After a few moments, I take a deep breath and look up. ‘How did she drown?’

‘No one knows,’ he says. ‘It was one of those things. We didn’t even know she was outside.’

‘Do you think it might have something to do with what’s happened?’

‘We don’t know,’ Cora says. ‘We’re just looking for something to explain the unexplainable.’

TAISIE

July 2000