Marnie disconnected and put the phone down on the counter. She gazed about her kitchen, light and cosy. The cottage walls were painted a dusty blue, apart from the dining room, which was primrose yellow, and the rooms were full of colour and things that Marnie had collected for good luck: fir cones and pebbles, pieces of driftwood from the estuary, sketches of the different dogs she’d owned and fostered, trophies she and Tessy had won at agility competitions, and others that Lucy had won with her pony, Scrumpy, at gymkhanas and country shows. A framed picture of Marnie aged about four, with her mother, Denise, was on the ledge above the stove. Marnie, skinny in a white dress, sandals and ankle socks, hair held back with a plastic clip, was smiling shyly, leaning against Denise, who was crouched on her heels with her arm round her daughter. Marnie’s dad had taken that picture. It was one of the few things Marnie had left that was of Denise, along with her memories, a box she kept in the bottom of her wardrobe and the locket that Marnie found hidden beneath her own pillow the day her mother died.

John Morahan had burned most of the pictures of Denise. He’d burned them with her clothes and books, in the incinerator in the back garden of the caretaker’s cottage, one day not long after the funeral. He’d have burned everything if Angharad Jones hadn’t come along and stopped him.

‘Come on now, John, what are you doing? What if one day you need those things to comfort you? Or,’ with a significant nod towards Marnie, ‘she wants to know about her mother? What then?’

Angharad had packed away what was left of Denise’s belongings: her shoes, her make-up bag, the bottle of perfume on the bathroom window ledge; the few books left on the shelves. She’d put them in a box and taken the box back to her chalet. ‘You want anything, lovey, you just come and ask your Auntie Angharad, all right?’ she’d said to Marnie, tweaking the child’s chin.

Marnie didn’t terribly mind that the photographs were gone. Denise never managed to be herself when she was being photographed; she was too self-conscious. Marnie preferred to remember Denise when she was happiest, which was when she was reading. She used to lose herself completely in whatever book she had on her lap, her fingers twining the silver chain of the locket as her eyes moved to and fro across the pages. It used to annoy Marnie’s father, as if he was jealous of the books and the time that Denise spent with them, but Marnie liked to sit beside her mother and read with her. Sometimes she’d look up from her own book to see that Denise had stopped reading, and instead was staring out of the window.