Case Histories

Julia put on a great show of being hurt. "No, really, what I mean is your Henry seems just the ticket, you're lucky to have found someone who suits you. If I found someone who suited me I would settle down, believe me."

"I don't." Amelia looked at the eggs – like sickly, jaundiced eyes – and thought of her own eggs, a handful left, old and shrivelled like musty dried fruit where once they must have been bursting toward the light – "Come on, Milly, the food's getting cold. Milly?"

Amelia fled the room, running awkwardly up the stairs before throwing up in the bathroom toilet. They had scrubbed and bleached the toilet but it still bore the stains of years of careless use by Victor, and the very thought of him in here made her start to retch all over again.

"Milly, are you alright?" Julia's voice drifted up the stairs.

Amelia came out of the bathroom. She paused on the threshold of Olivia's room. It was the same as it had always been – the bed, stripped of all bedding, the small wardrobe and chest of drawers, all empty of clothing. All of the past seemed concentrated in this one little room. There was a ghost living in this house, Amelia thought, but it wasn't Olivia. It was her own self. The Amelia she would have been – should have been – if her family hadn't imploded.

And then suddenly, standing there in Olivia's decrepit bedroom, Amelia had what she could only term an epiphany – she thought this must be how people who received mystical visions felt, those who, like Sylvia, thought they heard the voice of God or felt grace tailing on them (although she knew it was actually evidence of an unstable temporal lobe). Amelia simply knew, and the knowledge was like a warm wave that passed through her body – Olivia was coming back. She might be coming back as no more than a shadow of grease and ash, but she was coming back. And someone had to be here to welcome her.

"Milly?"

Chapter 6. Theo

Every year he walked to the office in Parkside and then walked the two miles home again. The same pilgrimage for ten years now. A four-mile round-trip, each year a little more tiring because he was carrying more weight, but there was nothing any doctor could say that could scare Theo now.

When he arrived in Parkside he was out of breath and stood around on the pavement for a while before attempting the stairs. He rested with his hands on his thighs, inhaling and exhaling in slow determined breaths, like an athlete who had just run a hard race. Passersby gave him covert (and not so covert) looks indicating varying degrees of distaste, as if they were trying to imagine what terrible flaw in a person's character could allow him to become so fat.

He had been inside the building only three times in the last ten years. The other times he had simply made a lurking kind of obeisance on the pavement.

David Holroyd didn't die. He was still alive when the paramedics arrived and was taken to the hospital, where he was sewn up and where the blood of several strangers was pumped into him. Now he worked three days a week and the rest of the time he tended to the garden in his cottage in rural Norfolk.

The boardroom had been repainted and a new carpet laid over the indelible stain of Laura's blood, but no one who had been there that day was comfortable with the idea of going back, and within the year Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton moved to an ugly sixties office building near the Grafton Centre, reincarnated as simply "Holroyd and Stanton" because Theo gave up his partnership after Laura's death and never returned to work. He had enough in stocks and bonds and savings to finance his rather frugal life. The money he received from the criminal injuries compensation scheme was donated to the dogs' home where they had obtained Poppy.

The front door, once a handsome bottle green, was now painted white and no one had polished the brass for a long time. There was no security on the door – no locks or entry phone or surveillance camera. Anyone could still walk in unchallenged.

The brass plaque on the door that had once read, HOLROYD, WYRE, AND STANTON-SOLICITORS AND ATTORNEYS AT LAW had been replaced by a plastic one that announced, bliss – beauty therapy. Before Bliss it was the mysterious "Hellier plc," which came and went between the third and fourth anniversaries. After Hellier plc disappeared, the offices had lain empty for a long time before "JM Business Consultants" moved in. Theo went up there, on the sixth anniversary, on the pretense of asking about IT training, but the girl on reception frowned and said, "That's not what we do," although she didn't elucidate what it was that they did do, which looked to Theo to be not very much at all, unless it was acting as a collection depot for the large cardboard boxes that were stacked everywhere. He'd only wanted to have a look, see the place – the spot – but as well as the boxes blocking the hallway there were flimsy partition screens everywhere and he didn't want to make a fuss and frighten the girl.