‘I can’t believe you came! Mum! Mum!!’ Sally called out behind her, beckoning wildly to a woman with identical hair. And there she was – Mrs. Pea, ballooned and lined, but with those same bright eyes twinkling through the generations. They had always been a double act, Sally and her mother. Now they looked more alike than ever. Emma remembered how envious she had been of them as a teenager, the different atmosphere of their houses; the warmth in Sally’s and the chilliness in her own. Sally wrapped her arm around her mother. ‘Remember Emma, Mum? Clever Emma?’ She was shouting loudly into her ear and turned to Emma with a grin. ‘Deaf as a wombat.’

‘Ooh! Lordy me! Emma Davis! I certainly do but I wouldn’t have recognized you! You’ve lost a pound or two. What did you do, give it to Sally?’

Sally realigned a stray strand of her mother’s hair. ‘That’s rich coming from you, Karen Carpenter.’

Mrs. Pea wheezed a smoker’s chuckle. ‘What are you doing with yourself these days, Emma?’ she asked. She meant marriage and kids, of course, the only female destination for her generation. ‘You married?’

‘She’s only a frigging psychologist!’ Sally yelled.

‘A gynaecologist?’ The unimaginable horrors of such a profession visibly passed across her features and Emma and Sally laughed.

‘Not a gynaecologist, Mum. A psychologist.’ Sally rolled her eyes at Emma. ‘She doesn’t know one end from the other . . .’

‘Psychiatrist, I’ll have you know, not psychologist,’ Emma said, flicking back her hair, making fun of herself, so happy to be here. How on earth had she let the years slip by without Sally? She reached out and squeezed Sally’s hand, overcome with fondness for the both of them.

‘She’s famous! She’s doing that case in the papers, Mum.’ Sally had bent forward to shout in her mum’s ear again. ‘You know the Yummy Monster? The acid attack woman?’

Emma flinched. The Yummy Monster. She hated that moniker. It had been splashed across the front page with two photographs of Connie. The ‘Before’: Connie at the school ball, a glamorous trendy yummy mummy. And the ‘After’: Connie looking dazed and confused in the psychiatric unit, her peculiar tufts of red hair sticking up on end, the grotesque scars on her neck and arms.

Although she smiled at Sally and her mother, she felt suddenly profoundly hurt for Connie, who would be sitting in that chair by the window with no idea that she was the subject of such careless gossip up and down the country.

‘Oh, her? Albert’s brother went to school with her brother!’

Why did everyone need a personal connection with tragedy? Sally turned to greet some late arrival with a whoop.

‘Nasty piece of work,’ Mrs. Pea said to Emma. ‘How’s your mother, Emma?’ And Emma was glad she had moved on so quickly.

‘Oh, she died a good few years back, actually.’