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events.’
    Ashton handed her card back to her and was silent for a moment, looking over her shoulder to the lights across the common. Jenny waited, unsettled by his lack of reaction. She wondered what had
happened to his hands.
    Then, sharply, he said, ‘Why don’t you come in, Mrs Cooper?’
    He ushered her through a carpeted hallway and into a formal sitting room in which a Christmas tree decorated with coloured lights stood incongruously in one corner. It was a space in which
everything was in its place, and in which a visitor couldn’t help feeling self-conscious. Jenny had the impression of a house devoid of life; a house lacking the scuffs and disorder of
children.
    Philip Ashton motioned her to a chair. ‘I’ll fetch my wife.’ And then, as an afterthought, he said, ‘I apologize if it’s too warm in here. She requires it to be at
this temperature – I’m afraid she’s very ill.’
    ‘Yes. I heard.’
    Ashton gave a stiff nod and retreated. Jenny heard him climbing the stairs calling, ‘Clare – it’s the coroner to see us.’
    She glanced around the unnaturally tidy room and noticed the absence of family photographs. Not even a wedding picture. With only a few exceptions, parents of dead children fell into two
distinct camps: those who erected morbid shrines on the mantelpiece and those who banished all traces. It was debatable which response was healthiest, but Jenny preferred dealing with a family
prepared to weep; those that had locked their grief down tight made her feel an uncomfortable urge to experience emotion on their behalf.
    They took a while coming down, Clare snapping at her husband in a stage whisper that she could manage the stairs perfectly well by herself. He entered first, holding open the door for her. A
pale woman, whose face bore only a passing resemblance to the one Jenny remembered from TV, shuffled in behind him on matchstick legs. She was dressed and made up, but nothing could disguise her
hollowed-out features and wasted body. She still had her own walnut-coloured hair, but it was flattened at the back of her head where it had been pressed against her pillow. Nevertheless, she was
putting on a brave front. Ashton held his wife’s arm as she lowered herself onto the sofa.
    She looked at Jenny with eyes made unusually round and childlike by the thinness of her face. ‘Thank you for coming, Mrs Cooper.’ Her voice was clear and steady, but less familiar
than her husband’s. It echoed only faintly in Jenny’s memory. ‘We appreciate it. We really do.’
    Jenny decided to leave the niceties aside and get straight to business. She was aware that, for Clare Ashton, maintaining her composure would be taking all of her strength. ‘I’m
afraid I don’t have anything definitive for you, but I can tell you the police think Ed Morgan was responsible for the fire and the deaths of his stepdaughters and probably that of his son.
He left a message to that effect. Would you like to see it?’
    Clare and Philip Ashton exchanged a glance. Philip nodded. Jenny handed him her phone with Morgan’s final words on the screen. He read it quickly and without emotion before handing it to
his wife.
    ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t say anything about your daughter,’ Jenny said. ‘But if the police’s reading of the situation is correct, it does tell us what he was
capable of.’
    Clare looked up and passed the phone back to her husband, her expression as unreadable as his. ‘Thank you, Mrs Cooper.’ She hesitated. ‘Thank you for sharing this with
us.’
    Jenny glanced at Philip Ashton. He was reading the message a second time, this time appearing to subject it to close critical analysis.
    ‘What is it?’ Clare said, a note of apprehension entering her voice.
    ‘He wouldn’t be the first man to kill his family, suspecting his wife was being unfaithful,’ he said. ‘In fact, from what I read in today’s papers, not to mention
what I’ve researched privately over the