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wouldn’t,’ said Chiara. ‘Dogs should live outside as far as I’m concerned.’
    ‘How long’s it going to be though?’ Louise asked. ‘You might have adopted him permanently, if the old man dies. What sort is he?’
    ‘A Norfolk terrier.’
    ‘Cute!’ Louise ruffled Pepper’s fur, and Pepper, out of character, growled.
    I didn’t sleep that night, I lay and listened to the hiss and suck of the waves on the shore. I’d hit something, and a man had been injured.
    His life might be ruined. I imagined he might be a young man, a teenager perhaps? His parents would be beside themselves. Or his girlfriend. Where had he been going? Was he alone? When would
they have heard that their son had been hit on the road and the driver had gone off without stopping?
    I could go to the police, but what would I tell them? That I had been on that road last night, that no, I hadn’t seen a man on the road. No, I hadn’t hit anyone, as far as I knew.
But something had caught my wing mirror and I’d found blood on the door? That I was haunted by the fear I should have turned back? That I regularly had the compulsion to go back and check on
things, so it was difficult to untangle what was rational, what irrational. What would they do? Keep me in for questioning? It might take all weekend. I had important buyers coming this evening.
And anyway it sounded bonkers. It
was
bonkers.
    Then how come there was a hit-and-run on the same stretch of road where something had flung my wing mirror back against the door? And the doubts started up all over again,
smashing into my brain, then receding, like the waves.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The first thing I did the next morning was put on the radio.
    The item was not first on the local news, it came on after two or three other things about the wettest April on record, and a fishing crisis.
    ‘The man knocked down by a hit-and-run incident last night has been named as Patrick McIntyre. He remains in critical condition in hospital. Police continue to appeal to drivers to come
forward.’ I switched it off.
    I got up and dressed, and downstairs pulled my long boots on over my jeans. Louise’s lilies seemed to glow on the hall table
    I didn’t want to see them. Flowers were for roadside accidents. Lilies were for death. I went outside, Pepper at my heels. Tapped the gatepost three times. The air was fresh and a wind
blew in off the sea.
    I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist bending down to check the bonnet of my car where the blood had been. It had washed off in the rain. All evidence gone. As I turned to go
back indoors, a voice disturbed my thoughts.
    ‘May’s house! You burgling May’s house.’
    I looked up. The man on the bike down on the road was about fifty but was staring at me wide-mouthed – a child’s expression. I remembered him – his name was Larry, a local
who’d been here forever. He lived in one of the fishing cottages along the harbour. He stood and stared at me, his lower lip trembling.
    ‘You burglar!’
    ‘I’m not a burglar, I’m May’s niece. Ellie.’
    ‘May gone. Girl gone. Gone. Dead. Don’t come back.’
    He’d got the out-loud logic of a young child spelling out to himself something he’d been told but didn’t quite understand.
    ‘Yes, Larry, May’s gone. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Not coming back.’
    ‘No she’s not, I’m sorry, Larry.’
    ‘You killed the lady.’
    I stared at him. I didn’t need this.
    ‘No, Larry. No. May died. I didn’t kill her.’
    ‘Bye-bye, lady,’ he said.
    ‘Bye, Larry.’
    I wondered if Larry’s ‘she’s not coming back’ was his way of differentiating this from the time she had gone into hospital, leaving the house empty for
several years.
    I was eighteen and at art college when I heard that Aunty May was back in the blue house. I knew by then she had been sectioned, had been in and out of hospital but had been discharged at
last.
    I had been shocked by the change in her. She had aged terribly in the