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of the closed door. As she expected, it was locked.
    ‘Sass, darling, don’t . . .’ she heard her mother whisper loudly from the kitchen. ‘You know what she’s like.’
    ‘I’m doing it, Mum,’ she said, reaching above the door frame for the new key. She saw her father shake his head.
    She turned it in the door, and pushed it open.
    It was the smell that hit her first. The smell of disuse. The odours of fresh paint and a new carpet, incarcerated for four years in this locked room. Forced to ripen into a chemical reek, now complimented by the sweet tang of fresh putty.
    Shutting the door gently so Jack wouldn’t hear, she walked to the window and pushed the curtains further apart to brighten the room. It had little effect. The room was naturally sombre. Like that gloomy parlour in the eighteenth-century cottage she and Jonathan had rented in North Wales one Easter that felt as if bodies had once been laid out in it before funerals. Or perhaps it had just been a foreboding about the fate of their marriage.
    She placed the tray gently on the long walnut Georgian table, one of the few beautiful pieces Kate had kept of Hugo’s. How many times had she been in here? Once? Twice? In four years? The room was painted the same white Kate had chosen for the rest the house. Not the careful shade of off-white Hugo would have spent a month tracking down. This was Kate’s white. An I-don’t-care, this-will-do shade of white. The fresh putty used to fix the window broken by the burglar was lighter than the rest. She ran a finger over it. Dry.
    Curious, Saskia looked round. There was nothing in here apart from a four-drawer oak sideboard with turned legs that she remembered from the Highgate house, too. Something Hugo had salvaged from one of his restoration projects.
    She knelt down on the carpet and opened a door.
    A silver Georgian-era epergne stared back at her, its delicate arms and tiny bowls, once ready to shine as the centre piece of a lavish dinner party, now tarnished and unloved.
    Her hand shot out to touch its cold surface. She hadn’t seen this for years.
    A rush of memories came at Saskia, unexpected and pungent.
    Dinner at Hugo and Kate’s.
    Opening the door further, she found the sets of gold-plated bone china that Hugo collected, his exquisite silver soup terrine, found in a cellar in a derelict property in Bath and polished to within an inch of its life, now blackened and dull once again.
    She shut her eyes and saw it all for a moment. Friends seated along the Georgian table, silver cutlery, laughing, eyes shining under Hugo’s prized candelabra. Hugo pouring the wine so generously that she’d find herself emptying half-drunk goblets into the sink at the end of the night, with Kate growling something about ‘there goes our bloody pension down the drain’. Hugo the fabulous host. The spirit of Hugo.
    Now all hidden away in a cupboard in a locked room.
    She took out a modern taupe table runner that she recognized from their casual suppers around the kitchen table in the basement. A musty smell arose from it. She ran her fingers along it, then stopped.
    There was a dark-grey stain on it, the size of a two-pence piece. Red wine, perhaps.
    Why hadn’t it been washed off?
    A glint of glass below the china caught her attention. What was that? Kneeling down, Saskia pushed her hand into the back, trying not to knock over a set of cut-glass crystal. It was a bottle. Grimacing, she delicately placed her fingers around its neck and pulled it out.
    As soon as she saw it, she knew what it was.
    Saskia froze.
    A dusty bottle of red wine, half-drunk, with a stopper in its top lay in her hands. Not a particularly good one. In fact, it was one she recognized as the high-end limit of the corner shop near where Hugo and Kate lived in Highgate. She had bought it in there enough times on the way to visit if she was late.
    Kate had kept it. Hugo’s last bottle of wine, from that night. The one he must have been drinking when