‘But if it’s not her body, it means there’s no motive for Heather,’ he says.

‘I know.’ She leans her head against the steering wheel and closes her eyes. ‘Are you still coming to visit today?’

There’s an awkward silence. ‘I, um, listen, sis, I’d love to come back to support you. I feel dreadful I’m not there for you – and Heather, but it’s just … it brings it all back, you know.’

She does know. After it transpired Dylan had an alibi it was Leo who was hounded most by the police. She knows that a large number of people still believe he had something to do with Flora’s disappearance even though he, too, had an alibi.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again, into the silence, and she can hear the emotion in his voice. He hasn’t been back to Tilby in fifteen years. When they meet up she and Heather always travel to Bristol to see him. Not once has she doubted him. She knows he’d never be capable of hurting his niece, yet that doesn’t stop the gossip and speculation. It was his liking for younger women that did it, she knows that. She’d heard the rumours at the time that he slept around with much younger women, but she never felt he was inappropriate with her own girls. He was their uncle. She knew he didn’t view them in that way, even if Sheila had once made a throwaway comment that Margot should watch him around her daughters. She insisted she’d been joking, but Margot hadn’t found it remotely funny.

‘That’s okay. I’ll keep you up to date with any news.’

Margot ends the call, then throws her mobile onto the passenger seat, blowing her nose loudly and peering at herself in the mirror, wiping the stray mascara away from her bottom eyelids. She doesn’t want Heather to see she’s been crying.

Heather. Something is niggling at Margot. The way her daughter had reacted when she’d told her they thought Flora had been found. She’d been so sure the body hadn’t been that of her sister. Why?

Unless – and the thought is so awful that Margot can barely bring herself to think it – unless Heather knows exactly what happened to Flora. An image of Keith’s crumpled body comes to mind, the gun slipping from Heather’s trembling hand to the ground.

Heather had killed her father. Could she have killed her sister too?

Chapter 40

40

August 1994

Heather watched as Flora scuttled across the fields and out of sight. She wondered if Dylan was waiting in the lane. She imagined so. The two young lovers running off to London for the day. She turned away from the window in disgust.

Doesn’t Flora understand how much she’s done for her?