‘Do you find that you are more likely to injure yourself while Stephen is around?’

Pam had been mortified. What was she insinuating? Stephen would never lay a hand on her. He was a doctor. Do no harm! She’d shrugged the question off and avoided Diana ever since. But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because as upsetting as Diana’s comment was, Pam did find that she was more likely to injure herself while Stephen was around. One hundred per cent more likely.

But it got her thinking about something Fiona Arthur had said to her, years ago, right after Stephen left her.

‘He’s not who you think he is.’

A strange comment, admittedly, but given the situation, Pam had written it off as sour grapes. And yet . . . what if it was more than that? What if Fiona also had unexplained falls? What if she’d also spent her marriage wondering if she was going crazy when something more sinister was at play?

Maybe Pam would reach out to Fiona? Now she had this money, she had options. Maybe it was finally time to face the truth.

Pam got out a notepad and a pen. These days, with her memory issues, if she didn’t write things down, they didn’t happen. She wrote down Fiona Arthur’s name. Then she wrote down Tully’s name. If she got the news she feared, she’d need to pack, find a new place to live. There’d be a lot of paperwork. Her daughter may have had her troubles but if there was one role Tully was born for, it was this.

Pam heard Stephen’s car pull into the driveway. She tore the page out of the notepad, folded it in half and stuffed it inside the hot-water bottle. It was as good a hiding place as anywhere.

‘Pam?’ Stephen called.

‘Coming!’ she said, shoving the hot-water bottle into the back of the closet. She’d come back to this later, when she remembered.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A couple of years ago I received a phone call from my beloved Great Aunty Gwen. She’d had a fall and been taken to the hospital, but that was, as far as she was concerned, unimportant. What was important, she told me, was that I drop everything and drive directly to her home to retrieve her hot-water bottle.

Odd request, I thought, but who was I to argue? The heart wants what it wants.

Alas, Gwen’s house was not on my route to the hospital, and in my eagerness to get to her, I offered to bring my own hot-water bottle instead. When my offer was swiftly declined, I offered to purchase her a new one. But none of my suggestions would do.

Finally, I agreed to collect the hot-water bottle. It could be located, Gwen said, behind the set of drawers in the sliding cupboard of the spare room, under a pile of old newspapers.

And just like that, the hot-water bottle became a lot more interesting.

As I drove to Gwen’s house, I theorised as to what could be in the bottle. Body parts were the most likely option, obviously. Bones, or organs – perhaps a human heart? It made sense. After all, Gwen is a strong, savvy 93-year-old single woman – surely there had been a scorned lover or two in her lifetime? And how wonderfully perverse it would be if she yearned to keep a piece of that lover close in what might have been her final moments!