April and Tara reached for their glasses at the same time. If she hadn’t been driving, Tara would have asked for something stronger. ‘Faith mentioned he had a workshop and that she was expected to help out when he was too drunk to function,’ she said. ‘But until I saw comments on social media from people who remembered her working at the garage, I always presumed he was a carpenter or a joiner.’

‘She fixed the horn on my car once,’ April said. Like Tara, she was trying to join up the dots that had been laid in front of them. Her words were tight as if her throat had constricted. ‘She rooted under the bonnet as if she knew her way around an engine, but I never questioned it.’

‘If Faith was good at fixing cars,’ Ella said, ‘she’d have a good idea how to break them too.’

‘You think she caused Derek’s accident?’ asked April, daring to voice what Tara had been thinking too.

‘I didn’t know Faith particularly well while Dad was alive,’ Ella explained. ‘But after he died, whenever she mentioned her parents and her dad’s workshop, she was deliberately vague. I think there was a reason for that.’

‘But she was away when the accident happened,’ said Tara.

‘Our theory is that she had been tampering with Dad’s car in the weeks before it happened. The first two engine faults logged with the dealership would have been decoys. Faith could have loosened a connection to trip a sensor only to retighten it before a mechanic went anywhere near it. When the ABS warning light appeared the third time, she was about to go away on her spa weekend, and I imagine Dad had plans of his own. No doubt Faith convinced him that the fault was with the sensor, not the brakes.’

‘She did,’ Tara replied. ‘She told the group how guilty she felt about it.’

‘That’s good,’ Ella said. ‘We’ll need a statement from you.’

‘We?’ asked April. ‘Who exactly is involved in this?’

‘The car dealership have put me in contact with the insurers who settled the negligence claim. They’re very interested in reviewing the case.’

‘Do they still have the car? Might there be incriminating evidence?’ asked April.

‘No such luck, but I’m sure they gathered as much forensics as they could at the time. The car was a burned-out shell and I don’t know how far we’ll get making a case, but I have to try, not for Dad but for Mum.’

‘Rosemary wants the house to go to you,’ guessed Tara. Faith would be stripped of her assets if it were proven that she had caused Derek’s death.