Once she started, she couldn’t stop. She tore through all the papers in his office, a bewildering mass of letters and statements, numbers, codes. She had no idea any of these accounts existed. Nothing jumped out at her – some of the numbers seemed lower than she might have thought, but if it was divided over lots of different holdings, that would explain it. Likewise, she found some payslips from Surrey General Hospital, but the amount he’d been earning seemed very low. She struggled, trying to do the sums in her head, understand the deductions. Maybe it was a tax or pension thing. He was clever about things like that.

Had been.

Then it occurred to her. The box. The contents of his car, which the police had given back to her. There had been so little damage to the Jaguar, just a crumpled bonnet, just his head thrown against the side window. He was wearing a seat belt, of course, but all the same he’d hit his head in some small, catastrophic way. She hadn’t been able to bear the idea of the box before now, so it was still in the garage, lurking. Too heart-breaking, to put her hands on it and know these things had been with him when he died. Maybe there would even be spots of blood, though she was sure the police would not be so cruel as that. Would they? She didn’t know.

She found the key to the garage, inside a mug in a kitchen cupboard, and unlocked the connecting door, switched on the light. It looked so empty without the black Jaguar there, polished to a shine once a week. So many evenings watching him climb out, waving at her, often on his phone, and the burst of pleasure under her ribs to know he was home.