Noel was still looking concerned. ‘Would you like me to come to the police station with you tomorrow?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘I don’t mean that I’d come into the interview with you, just that I’d be there as company. Besides, I’ve never been to a police station, so I’d be interested in observing the procedures, and seeing how they compare to those in detective novels.’

‘No.’ Vee could just imagine him correcting the desk sergeant on an abstruse legal point while some drunk staggered about taking a swing at people. ‘You stay here and get on with your school-work. If I have to see the coroner, you can come with me then.’

Noel cracked another egg, and examined it carefully. ‘Dr Parry-Jones is going to show me how to inject a yolk-vein with vegetable dye.’

Vee closed her eyes. What were you supposed to say to that kind of remark? I mean, what was actually the right word?

‘Good,’ she said.

Her interview with Sergeant Bayliss was a surprisingly benign affair – almost pleasant, in fact; she was treated like a guest and given a glass of water while the sergeant asked straightforward questions and carefully transcribed her answers, and for the first time – ever – she had an inkling of why some people seemed to trust the police force. Even when he told her that she would definitely be required at the inquest, she managed not to wring her hands or let out a bleat of anguish, but instead said, ‘Yes, Sergeant, I quite understand,’ just like a normal person, and the weather outside – a sudden thaw, a blast of sunlight – seemed to reflect her mood. This feeling of self-congratulation lasted for at least an hour, until she returned home to find that a pipe had burst and there was water cascading down the staircase and saturating the long rug in the hall.

‘It’s Turkish, I think,’ said Noel, pressing a foot on it and watching the liquid pool around his shoe; as a very little boy, he had traced the grids and lozenges of the pattern on to greaseproof paper. ‘Mattie brought it back from Serbia.’

‘And how in the world are we supposed to dry it? How?’

It took five of them to carry it into the cellar and drape it over two chairs. Within days, it was green with mould.

‘How much would that carpet have cost?’ asked Vee, still fretting over it as she sat with Noel in the kitchen on the evening of his birthday, darning while he worked at his books, a green scarf wound twice round his neck. A tenor on the wireless was wailing about the Mountains of Mourne.

‘Mattie said she swapped a pair of wellingtons for it. Or maybe that was the one in the drawing room.’ Noel paused over a page of Latin grammar, trying to pin down the memory. More than four years had passed since his godmother’s death, and it was only in dreams, now, that he could hear the exact tone and emphasis of her voice, its buoyant swoop; what remained with him was that sense of being borne along, of seeing the world from a height, at a gallop, the horizon wide and blue.