Mum took a moment. She looked at Leonie, and then she looked at me. ‘I’ll go and get her,’ she said finally. ‘Anna, would you mind waiting here? I’ll only be a couple of hours, I promise.’

I nodded and we all stood back and watched her climb grimly into the silver bullet. She waved as she reversed, and then before I could even really think about what was happening, she was driving away up the road. And I didn’t know where she was going to end up: the hospital, or a bar.

‘She’ll be back, honey,’ Leonie said to me.

I hoped so. I really did.

*

Before Basil and Leonie went back into town to wait on Danny’s new charge now that the situation had escalated, I cleared the last of my things out of Bromley Cairn. Last of all I took my memento mori down from the wall. Danny had done a beautiful job hanging it. That’s who it was, of course. Danny. Not Hessel at all. I leaned on my desk and looked out the window at the cairn. The innocent cairn. The innocent cairn made of innocent stones, drawn out of the ground and made to sit in the unfamiliar air for the rest of time.

I put the rest of my things in the boot of Leonie’s car, and Basil and Leonie waited for me while I found an old jar in the shed, filled it with water from the outside tap, and picked wattle blooms from the tree outside the empty stable. I hovered for a moment there, and looked at the straw on the ground, at Hessel’s silent radio, still hanging from the nail on the wall. Suddenly I remembered Hessel’s warmth to me, the feeling of his kiss on top of my head, and I felt a strange and complicated pang of grief overlaid with a feeling of both shock and relief. I breathed in the sweet horsey smell mixed with the fragrance of wattle and turned away. I filled the jar with the blooms and left it on the doorstep of Bromley Cairn: something nice for Bette to come back to when she returned here, to her ancestral home, whenever that might be.

As I got in the car Leonie was getting off the phone.

Basil turned to me. ‘Lawyer thinks there could be a good case for voluntary manslaughter,’ he said. ‘Or even a not guilty verdict . . .’

‘Let’s just wait and see, hey Baz?’ said Leonie, moving her bag from the back seat, giving me room to sit down. She gestured out the rear window to the old house. ‘Flowers look nice,’ she said. ‘That was a nice thing to do.’

*

We were standing outside in the sunshine of the small park opposite the police station when the silver car returned with Mum and Bette. I let myself breathe out. She came back.

Bette got out and went straight inside the station without saying a word to anyone.