‘If she comes back,’ he said quietly, ‘then don’t let her in.’

Melissa was surprised. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘She seemed dead nice to me. What’s wrong with her?’

Ray put his arm around her and pulled her tight into him as if he were protecting her from some unseen threat.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she’s perfectly pleasant. No, it’s her husband, my so-called half-brother, that I never want to have anything to do with ever again.’

He spat the words with such venom that Melissa almost felt frightened, and caught herself looking round the bedroom just to check that this Charles wasn’t hiding behind the curtains. Then she wriggled free of Ray’s grasp and sat up so that she could look directly at his face.

‘What on earth did he do?’ she asked, totally intrigued now.

Ray took a deep breath and then looked her straight in the eye. ‘He killed our dad,’ he said, and his face became darker than Melissa had ever seen it before.

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Was Ray’s half-brother a murderer? Well, that didn’t make any sense. Grace hadn’t said anything that would suggest he was in prison, and anyway, she was far too well-to-do to have married a common criminal.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked doubtfully, although it wasn’t the kind of thing you got wrong. ‘I didn’t get the impression that . . .’

‘Not literally,’ interrupted Ray. ‘But he was responsible for it.’

Melissa really wasn’t following this at all. ‘How do you mean, like?’ she asked.

‘Dad was ill,’ said Ray. ‘Really ill. The doctors had done everything they could, but there was this one treatment that might save him. It was a drug, a new one, still in trial but the results were positive in cases like Dad’s. It was looking really hopeful. The problem was, it wasn’t available on the NHS. You had to get it from America privately, so it was seriously pricey.’

Ray’s eyes were downcast now, his shoulders hunched as if it was draining everything out of him just to be recounting the tale. Melissa was touched. If it was this difficult for him to talk about, then that would explain why she had never heard anything about his family before now. She leant into him and stroked his arm soothingly.

‘Well, there was no way I could find that sort of money. I just didn’t have it, and Dad barely had a bean to his name. And we needed it sharpish. Dad was fading fast and the doctors wanted to get him started on the treatment as soon as we could. So that’s when I thought of Charles. He was Dad’s lad, too, and I knew that he was doing all right for himself, so I asked him to cough up the cash to buy the drugs.’