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‘I know what it is. I know my way. See you, Gareth.’
    They watched him go out of the kitchen.
    â€˜Take your boots off!’ Velma shouted.
    His tread, still booted, went up the stairs.
    â€˜What the heck—’
    â€˜I dunno,’ Velma said. ‘I dunno. I shouldn’t have let him. But I couldn’t stop him, could I? Robin’s brother and all—’
    â€˜Sh—’ Gareth said. He looked upwards. Velma looked, too. Above their heads, across the floorboards of the room above, Joe’s boots moved slowly, and then stopped.
    â€˜Blooming cheek!’ Velma said. ‘He’s in her room! What the hell’s he doing there?’
    The footsteps moved again, very slowly and carefully.
    â€˜He’s in her room!’ Velma said again. ‘In Caro’s room! I haven’t been in since she went, only to dust and that. I’d better go up—’
    â€˜No,’ Gareth said. He put a hand on her arm. ‘Leave him.’
    â€˜But he—’
    â€˜You don’t know,’ Gareth said. ‘You don’t know what he wants. He wouldn’t take nothing. Maybe—’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜You just leave him,’ Gareth said. He gave her arm a squeeze and let it go. ‘He wouldn’t have come in, bold as brass, would he, if he was up to anything? You just leave him.’
    He moved towards the door, rolling up his paper into a baton, his flask under his arm.
    â€˜See you, Velma.’
    She picked up her tea towel again, shaking her head as if to rid it of unnerving vibrations.
    â€˜Weird,’ she said.
    In Caro’s bedroom, Joe leaned on the footboard of her bed and looked at where she had lain. He had seen her there, several times, during the fast and frightening progress of her illness, wearing candy-striped nighsthirts with her hair plaited slightly to one side so that she could lie comfortably. That is, while she still had hair. Before the treatment.
    He held the polished wooden rail of the bed and stared at the curve of the pillow under the red-and-white patchwork quilt. He wasn’t wholly certain why he was here, but only that he had obeyed a sudden impulse to say goodbye to Caro, to explain to her – by being in her bedroom rather than by saying anything – that his mental absence from her funeral, from anything to do with the fact of her death, had nothing to do with her . It had to do with something much darker and more alarming, a fear that had settled upon Joe the moment Robin had rung from Stretton Hospital to say that Caro had died twenty minutes before – and hadn’t left him since. He had felt, standing at the graveside and holding the yellow umbrella over Lyndsay and Judy, something close to panic. He had felt it again, on and off, ever since, had found himself driving the long way round through Dean Cross in order to avoid the churchyard and almost barking at Lyndsay every time Caro’s name came up in conversation. Ten minutes ago, driving down the lane between Dean Place and Tideswell, but heading home, the panic had fallen so violently upon Joe that he had, for a fraction of a second, almost blacked out.
    â€˜I’ll nail it,’ he’d said aloud to himself, gripping the steering wheel. ‘I’ll go and stand in her bedroom and I’ll bloody well nail it.’
    But her bedroom offered him nothing. It was tidy, almost austere, furnished with a random collection of things she had picked up at auction sales over the years; neat things, almost prim. There was no sign of Robin in the room, no evidence of his having shared the bed with the patchwork quilt. But then there was no sign of anything much, least of all the element Joe had so urgently wished to find – a sign of life.
    â€˜Caro,’ he said to the empty air.
    Nothing stirred. He went over to the window and looked down into the yard from it – a view she had presumably chosen – and saw nothing there,