I had fumbled my explanation of who I was and why I wanted to know about her past, suggesting I was ‘writing something’ about it. I didn’t say what. But she didn’t seem bothered by that. I wasn’t sure she was entirely following me. She seemed unanchored, drifting in time.

‘There was a fire. They died – Charles, and little Sebby.’

‘I’m so sorry. It was – an accident?’

She turned her gaze on me, and I almost jumped, recognising Nora’s grey eyes in that ruined face. ‘They said it was my fault. I fell asleep smoking. They don’t let me smoke in here.’ I recognised the restless tapping of her fingers as the gesture of a lifelong smoker.

‘I heard maybe it was . . . something else.’

‘Eleanor. She escaped the fire. Said she couldn’t sleep, so she took the dogs out. She loved those dogs. I’d been planning to get rid of them, after she went.’

‘Where was she going?’ Nora would have been sixteen at the time of the fire, I knew.

‘School. Boarding. I could do nothing with her – she only wanted to play the piano and meet boys.’ The once-beautiful mouth pursed. ‘She was a slut. Ungovernable.’ Her voice was so emotionless, the ugly word hit me like a slap. Same as the one etched into the snow outside my house. Was that why she’d chosen it? ‘Sebby would have been a wonderful man. He wasn’t even supposed to be there that night, you know. He was meant to be sleeping at a friend’s but in the end he didn’t. So cruel.’ Again, there was no emotion. I wondered if she was heavily medicated.

‘So you think she . . .’ I didn’t know how to say it. I was still trying to take in the fact that Nora, my softly spoken neighbour, had set a fire to kill her whole family, including her little brother.

‘I’m sure she did something. I don’t know what. It was her fault, not mine.’ A faint hint of defensiveness. Something flickered behind her eyes, and I thought maybe she was more lucid than she let on. ‘Who are you anyway? Why do you want to know these things?’

‘I . . . I know Nora.’

‘Eleanor,’ she snapped.

‘Sorry, yes. Eleanor.’

‘She’s alive, then.’ She flicked something from the slacks she wore, and I saw her hands were like Nora’s, slender and lovely. ‘That’s a shame,’ said her mother, tapping the imaginary cigarette again. ‘And she got what she wanted after all. The fucking piano. I shut her hands in it once, you know. Not hard enough, evidently.’ In her posh voice, the curses rang like bells. ‘She got everything. Success, money. I heard she even married. She should have died, not Sebby.’