Surely that must mean I was safe.

Mustn’t it?

9

I decided to address that question by ensuring I was too busy and worn out to think about it any more. I finally gave in and left Lucy a message, explaining how I’d been doing a lot of thinking and had decided to resign, which of course then meant that unfortunately I would have to let her go. I told her I’d provide her with a stellar reference for Miles if she wanted to carry on as Nora, how much I valued her, and hoped we’d stay in touch blah, blah, blah. I also added that I’d had some disturbing messages. Although they had clearly been aimed at me, and they’d stopped now, I strongly urged her to put everything Nora-related on pause until I could fill her in.

For the rest of the weekend I worked on the study, sorting and dusting and scrubbing away layers of neglect. I folded Hope’s giant heap of clothes into neat piles and rearranged her changing table so there was actually space to change her on it. Daniel helped me swap the furniture about, so that Hope had a space to sit near the window, and he could charge his tech without wires trailing across the room waiting to be tripped over.

I also cooked, and took Hope for a walk around the nearby lanes while Daniel caught up on some work. Then, finding him conked out on the study sofa, we baked cookies with the last of the flour and sugar. In the evenings, we ate dinner once Hope was asleep, lingering over a decaffeinated coffee until the ripe old party hour of nine o’clock, when Daniel would either go to bed or head back to his desk.

Sunday afternoon, Billie phoned Daniel and asked if she could speak to me, so we cried and talked and breathed through a couple of awkward silences.

‘I’m sorry you weren’t told,’ Billie told me, voice trembling. ‘Things hadn’t been… you know, things were never good between us, and then she didn’t cope very well with me moving on. So we’d not seen each other for a long time, beyond the odd hello. I hadn’t realised you’d stayed in touch. Although I wouldn’t have known how to contact you even if I’d thought about it. And. Well. We were so overwhelmed with it all. Hope, the farm, the police. Given the circumstances, we kept things small. There’d been enough fuss.’

Given what circumstances? I wanted to ask. Charlie would not have wanted a small, quiet funeral, no matter what the circumstances of her death. She’d have wanted funny stories and noisy toasts and masses of food and drink, all finished off with a singalong. A send-off that people would have talked about for years afterwards. I felt a stab of anger that I had missed my opportunity to ensure she had a funeral befitting her. But then, it seemed like she’d changed in the year or so before she died. Who was I to say what this older, wiser, sober Charlie would have wanted? Who was I to comment on how a grieving mother, a bereft brother should say goodbye?