Where are you? Are you safe, dear Hero? No one would blame you if you needed some breathing space. It’s a lot to take in. If you’d like, I could come and get you.

56

The country roads at night are as quiet as death itself.

We don’t talk much, but Lawrie drives my car through the ice with care, not too fast, but with enough determined concentration to deliver me home to Aunt Peg as quickly as possible.

Heat pricks the back of my eyes. In the last twenty-one years, my great-aunt has been my mother and father, my sister and brother. My home and family. She’s been Sunday dinners and supermarket shopping trips, Scrabble and Gene Kelly musicals, home-made knitted gloves for Christmas and a safe harbour in life’s choppy seas.

My throat feels like it’s got something stuck in it that can’t be cleared. The road hums beneath us. Lawrie has turned on the radio, the music filling up the space between us. Words rise inside me but get caught in the net of my grief, unable to free themselves. I bite down on my lip and watch the snow flurries, torn paper scraps trapped in the glare of the headlamps.

I was the first to hang up.

Pearline hadn’t shared more than a few scant details. Only that Aunt Peg’s body had been found in our flat, and I must come quickly.

‘How did it happen?’ My voice had sounded surprisingly calm. Aunt Peg was eighty-four, after all. I’d expected her to say a heart attack or stroke, or a nasty fall.

But she didn’t. A hesitation, a stumble over words. ‘It’s complicated,’ she’d said in the familiar rhythms of her Jamaican patois. ‘Get here first. The police will talk to you then.’

The pub had been full of noise and colour. Lawrie was still talking to Colin, our news editor. I’d stood there, a crack in my heart, thinking about Before and After. How life can turn on a moment. That death visits us all. A few minutes earlier, I’d been laughing and drinking, the world as it should be. Now everything was shaded by loss.

Lawrie had ended his call, and turned to me, his eyes bright with gossip straight from the newsroom. ‘Heathcote’s been shagging his mistress for a year. Classic kiss-and-tell.’

He’d swallowed a mouthful of his lager. ‘First edition of the Sun’s dropped. They’ve got pictures, an interview, the full works. This will keep the story running for a couple more days.’ He’d grinned, delighted by the turn of events. ‘And keep us out of the office a bit longer.’