She walked among the graves, looking at dates going back a century. Rows of little white lines, giving off their secret heat. One of them was her mother’s, if she could get her bearings and find it. Yes, she remembered now: just along from the mausoleum of some Victorian businessman. She hadn’t been back here since the funeral, partly because she didn’t want to revisit such a scene of pain, but largely also because she didn’t see the point. It wasn’t a place to remember her mum, because she’d never been here with her. It was just where her body lay, no more infused with her essence, with all the things that made her herself, than that quarry had been infused with the essences of Jim or the Ramsays or anybody else who had been buried there.

Still, she always felt guilty about not going, like it was some kind of daughter’s duty she was neglecting.

The headstone was there now. She remembered getting a letter about it, with an acknowledgement that the fee had been paid through some kind of insurance. It should have given her a more pressing impetus to return to the cemetery, but at the time she just wasn’t strong enough. This would be her first time of seeing it. She suspected it would upset her, in particular the dates: the finality of that second one, bracketing a life and rendering all its deeds and possibilities finite.

The dates did not upset her, though. She was too distracted by the name, because in its unaccustomed formality, it looked like a mistake.

Her mum was Beth: that was how she was known to friends and colleagues, to anyone she ever stopped to talk to on the street when Jasmine was dawdling at her side, tugging Mummy’s hand to move along.

Beth, always Beth. Letters would say ‘Elizabeth’ sometimes, if it was something official or junk off a mailing list, but neither Beth nor Elizabeth was actually her first name. As Jasmine remembered now, that was her middle name.

Jasmine assumed that she just preferred Elizabeth, but realised that she must have gone by her given first name once, because Jim would call her by it occasionally. He’d refer to her as Yvonne, then correct himself, like Mum used to when she referred to her old pals by their maiden names.

There it was: written in stone. Yvonne Elizabeth Sharp.

And that was when Jasmine shuddered, like the cold rain had run off her brolly and poured straight down the back of her neck.

The Fallan file.

CLIENT: YES.

There had been no invoicing details. That was because Jim was doing it for nothing. He was tracking down Glen Fallan for her mum, and he’d found him, but that wasn’t all.