Jasmine recalled Jim’s upper-register handwriting on the notes and saw now how she’d misunderstood it, assuming that it referred simply to Jim having got in touch with Ingrams. What it had actually said was ‘INGRAMS CONTACTED YES’, and a date.

Glen Fallan had been to see her mum shortly before she died.

Forgiveness

Catherine was lying awake again. It was close to three o’clock on Sunday morning, and what was making it worse was that somebody would have to be up with the boys at seven, and it was her turn. Drew had got up yesterday, albeit Catherine didn’t get a lie-in then either. She and Laura had been due to go and pick up Dominic to escort him to the Ramsays’, and Drew had sorted the boys with breakfast and taken them swimming so that she would have time to make herself presentable.

She had woken around twenty past two and couldn’t get back to sleep. Why couldn’t she sleep?

It had been a good day. A tiring day, in all the best ways. When Laura brought her back home, it wasn’t yet eleven. It was a clear, sunny day. Cooler than it had been, with a breeze that promised autumn, but way better than anyone living in this part of the world had ever come to expect for late August.

She and Drew had taken the boys to Loudoun Castle for the rest of the day, down in Ayrshire. They had been going there for a couple of years, and despite Catherine’s natural aversion to theme parks, she always found it curiously relaxing and a little quaint: its verdant setting making it seem all the more like a place where old amusement rides were put out to pasture. The boys adored it, of course, and every time they came back, it seemed they had each grown tall enough to be allowed on one more attraction than last time.

After that, they had gone out for dinner, the four of them, to the little Italian place round the corner where the staff had made a fuss of the boys since birth. Could have been there she made her misstep, taking a large espresso after dessert. Surely not, though: it had been around seven. Coffee only did this to her normally if she had one at the end of a meal out without the kids and was drinking it after ten.

She didn’t have any trouble getting to sleep; in fact had slipped away so pleasantly it was like she was on opiates.