As I turned the pages, something fluttered out. A piece of green paper – a prescription from this hospital, with no doctor’s name specified. It was signed in an indecipherable scribble, and the medicine name was also blank. I thought of the pills he had brought home for me, my ‘doctor’ husband, urging me to take them. Saying I needed them for my anxiety, my mental health problems, just like my mother. And I had taken them, of course I had, because I believed he’d been to medical school. Had someone given him a blank prescription, to be filled as he chose?

The ramifications of that were just sinking in when I heard a noise, and the door into the room opened. ‘Can I help you?’

Suzi

Suzi

The police came back the next day. Of course they did, because I had stupidly never called them to say I knew nothing, to take myself off their list.

They were very polite, wiping their shoes on the mat and thanking me for the tea I made, in a china pot, chocolate ginger biscuits out on a plate. I apologised for them not being home-made, then kicked myself for trying too hard. As far as they knew I was just an innocent neighbour, who had nothing to do with this accident. I was obsessively running over the story, looking for holes. Was there a way to connect us? There must have been, if Nora had found me. I still didn’t know how she’d done it.

There was a man and a woman, both in the same dark uniforms, radios on their belts. I knew from TV this meant they hadn’t sent the detectives, that this was probably a routine inquiry. We sat down in the living room, which I noticed had an icy chill.

‘Sorry it’s so cold. We’re meant to have that kind of holistic heating, what do you call it’ – I’d lost the word. Baby brain. ‘Maybe it’s not working.’

‘It’s a struggle with the snow,’ said the woman politely. ‘We get a lot of call-outs this time of year, elderly people freezing. They keep the heating off so they can eat.’

I arranged my cardigan around me, ashamed of all my wealth and privilege. ‘My husband said it was something about an accident?’ I used the word ‘husband’ consciously, like a shield. I’m married. I have nothing to do with this man, whoever he was.

‘That’s right. About three months ago there was a crash on the motorway slip road, the one that runs parallel to here a few miles over. A man drove into a tree.’