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was black and brittle. She used the oven glove to remove it from the shelf and placed it in the sink, where it hissed and crackled for a moment.
    She shook her head. A grown man and he didn’t even eat properly.
    There it was again, that numb feeling on the left side of her head. She reached for the edge of the door to steady herself in case she was about to fall. She’d rarely been ill in her life and had always imagined that she’d die in bed, peacefully in her sleep. Never contemplated any kind of fatal illness or something that might take away her reason.
    She’d been astonished when the doctor had suggested an appointment with a specialist. She’d submitted to the X-rays, bitten her lip and grudgingly allowed the technicians to manipulate her, pretended not to understand when they’d avoided her questions. Ridiculous, she thought now, how she had felt impelled to allow them to feel good about themselves. That inexplicable willingness always to please doctors.
    But there was that numb feeling and from time to time a shift in the visual plane. ‘This is not something I want you to worry about,’ the doctor had said, rubbing his hands together. ‘There could be a completely reasonable explanation for it.’
    Her appointment in Leeds, to get the results of the scan, was in a few days’ time. Until then she’d keep it to herself. No point in starting a panic.
    When her dizziness cleared she did a quick recce to make sure the house was secure. She was outside on the street within a few minutes, walking back towards Lord Mayor’s Walk where her own house was. She’d have something to eat and a bath and then she’d get into bed with Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘Glory be to God for dappled things ...’ But she’d keep her mobile on the bedside cabinet, wait for George or Sam to ring and let her know that he was back on the street.
     

5
     
    Marilyn was washing herself in the bathroom and taking her lithium, the first dose of the day, to correct the chemical imbalance in her brain cells when her mother, Ellen Eccles, crept into her daughter’s bedroom and scanned the walls. Marilyn had straightened the crumpled playing card and placed it in a frame. She’d hung it on the wall between a promotional photograph of Diamond Danny Mann and a collage of his press cuttings.
    The eight of spades, and written across it in red feltpen, Marilyn Eccles.
    Ellen sighed. She hoped it wasn’t going to be a repetition of the business with Jeremy Paxman: listening to Start the Week every Monday morning, watching Newsnight and University Challenge, and waiting for the postman in the morning, expecting a letter from the man.
    When she looked at Marilyn’s wall and the photograph of Danny Mann and his press cuttings she wondered why there wasn’t a photograph of her dead granddaughter there. She was confused for a moment because it was wrong of Marilyn not to have a photograph of her baby.
    But it was simple, the answer, because there were no photographs of the baby. It had been born dead and you don’t take photographs of dead babies. In a way, Ellen thought now, the playing card was a kind of code for her granddaughter. And she wondered exactly what it meant to her daughter, this playing card, the one item in the whole universe that had been handled by both Danny Mann and Marilyn.
    The absence of a photograph of the baby was problematic in other respects. Without a photograph people didn’t realize that Marilyn had been a mother. Because she was so small, exactiy one hundred and fifty centimetres, people regarded her as still a child herself. To compensate for her size Marilyn wore a belt with a steel buclde in the shape of a pentagram. Ellen could see the buckle now, dangling from the back of the chair by Marilyn’s dressing table.
    She wore anything that had a metallic colour or feel to it. Shoes with buckles, jingling bangles and necklaces, a hair-band in beaten copper and a silver chain on each ankle. Somehow, in her mind,