I sighed. “It’s a relief, really,” I said, “that someone apart from me is doing the investigating.”

Ramsay looked at me, then at DI Carter, then back at me. “That was an investigation? For fuck’s sake.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The first Christmas I had spent with Greg, we had escaped our families and gone walking in the Lake District. I knew I was in love with him—no, I knew I loved him—when he took a miniature Christmas pudding out of his backpack on the top of Great Gable and insisted we eat it. I can remember it vividly: the cool gray blustery day, the rock we perched on looking out over the empty landscape, the way the wind blew his hair into his eyes and turned his cheeks ruddy, the rich crumbs in my mouth, his warm hand in my cold one, a grateful sense of belonging—of being at home, even though we were up in the hills and far from anywhere. Despite all that had happened, the memory remained intact and robust.

The next Christmas we had spent with Fergus and Jemma, and Fergus and I had cooked a goose; Greg had insisted on making his version of champagne cocktails, singing loudly, filling their house with his tipsy cheerfulness. Last year, we had been in this house; we had planted the small Christmas tree at the end of the garden, planning to retrieve it. I used to dread Christmas; then, with Greg, I had learned to love it. Now I dreaded it again. In ten days’ time I would wake up on my own in this house, which seemed to be on its own downward slide (the faulty heating system, which meant that most of the radiators were lifeless and at best the water was tepid, the freezer kept icing up so that little lumps of ice lay across the kitchen floor, a window was cracked and I hadn’t got around to mending it, a cupboard door was coming drunkenly off its hinges). I’m usually good at mending things—of the two of us, I’d always been the efficient, practical one—but for weeks I’d been unable to summon the energy for domestic maintenance and all of my organizing skills had been used up on Frances and Party Animals.