‘We argued. He told me he’d stay at his mum’s, with Ethan. Give me some peace if that was what I wanted. I opened a bottle of wine, cried a bit. Flopped onto the sofa. I think I passed out. And then …’ she’s fiddling with her rings again ‘… and the next thing I know I’m here.’

I can’t imagine not being able to remember something. A whole event just gone, wiped from my memory. Even when I’ve been at my drunkest, I’ve remembered everything the next morning, even if half of those memories were excruciatingly embarrassing and all jumbled up. I’m no psychiatrist but it sounds like some kind of blackout. Or maybe it’s because of the head injury.

She wrinkles her nose and, in that moment, I see the teenage Heather in her. ‘It’s so frustrating. I hate not being able to remember.’ She looks at me, imploring. ‘I just don’t understand why I would kill anyone, particularly those two people. I’ve never met them.’

‘I think you met Deirdre, though. Your mum told me she rented a caravan from you earlier this year.’

‘Oh, yes. But I barely remember her. Only that she seemed chatty and had a really cute dog I couldn’t stop cuddling. It looked like a bear. She said she bred them. That’s all the conversation we had.’

The outer corner of her eyelid flickers, her face impassive.

I remember her twitchy eye. It’s hardly perceptible – you’d only notice it if you knew her well. If you’d maybe grown up with her or, like Adam, loved her and knew all her little idiosyncrasies.

Her eyelid always flickered very slightly when she was lying.

She’s still playing with her hands, almost like she’s nervous. I glance down. And that’s when I notice it. The rings. There’s her wedding and engagement ring on her left hand, a modest ruby among a cluster of diamonds. But also two others, one on each little finger, identical, small and gold with an oval crest on the front that looks a bit like a lion. I remember asking her about it when we were kids, because she always wore it. Then it was on her middle finger. Now there is one on each of her little fingers. She’d told me it was a family ring, handed down through the generations. She had one, so did Flora and her mother. I’d never heard of them before and was intrigued by this grown-up piece of jewellery that she was allowed to wear to school. It sounded very posh and aristocratic to me, and they weren’t like that, the Powells.

Flora never took hers off. She had been wearing it the day she disappeared.

So why was Heather wearing it now?

Chapter 43

43

Jess