Honor is left with a blank screen in the palm of one hand, the other pressing her forehead. Narinder’s hostility has come at her like a dark tornado. It’s a shame about Satnam, unfair on her and Nevis, but perhaps Dr Keane will be able to talk her round. She starts Gerry and pulls out of the infirmary car park. At the exit she hesitates then makes a left. The drive to Nevis’s flat takes only a few minutes from here. She won’t call. Nevis doesn’t like surprises. But it will reassure her to see Nevis safely at home.

She pulls into a space opposite the flat and cuts the engine. In the living-room window a light shines through the cheap curtains. Two figures mill about, both silhouetted but one is recognisably her daughter, the other someone taller and with a man’s gait. A friend or perhaps even a lover. For a few minutes she watches as the two figures cross the room then settle before she starts her engine once more and moves back out into the traffic and away.

Chapter 14

Nevis

‘I can’t get my head around it.’ Luke flips the ring pull from a can of Stella. Nevis had seen him earlier, when he’d come into the chippy anxious and keen to talk. She was glad he’d reached out. It had been on her mind to contact him. She’d told him to come to the flat after her shift. Now here he was.

‘What the hell got into her?’

‘I was going to ask you the same question,’ Nevis says. She moves over to the curtains, peers outside at the dying light and draws them closed.

‘I haven’t seen her to speak to in months,’ he says, his voice agitated and tremulous. In the months since he and Satnam split Luke has grown a goatee and he’s lost weight. His skin has taken on a strange pallor.

‘I’ve got her phone. I was hoping you might know her passcode.’

He picks up the can and begins bobbing his legs. ‘Isn’t that a bit, I don’t know, invasive?’

‘It might give us some answers.’

‘Maybe it was just, like, a spur of the moment thing?’ Luke asks, taking another swig from the can. She can tell he is genuinely upset. His hand is shaking as he raises and lowers the can. ‘I can’t get my head around it to be honest.’

‘There was an empty vodka bottle on her bedside table. If that had been there for long, I’m sure I would have seen it. We were always in and out of one another’s rooms.’

‘I remember.’

Nevis had burst in on Satnam and Luke in a private moment once. After that Nevis didn’t go in when Luke was around.