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That Saturday, just as Catriona Turville had been about to leave the house for her usual morning run, the postman delivered her sister Flora’s suicide note.

As she sat on the bottom tread of the staircase in her navy-blue tracksuit, the bright early Spring sunlight shining through the stained-glass panel of the front door and splashing the encaustic tiles of the hall floor with bars and blotches of red and blue, she wondered, while tying the laces of her new, alarmingly white trainers, how long their pristine cleanliness would survive the dog shit which lay in whorls like enormous worm-casts half-hidden by the long grass of the park, and speculated whether the overweight middle-aged man who had been sweating and panting over the exact same route at the exact same time rather too coincidentally for the previous three days, and who had appeared to gaze longingly after her as she effortlessly outpaced him, would get around either to speaking to her or assaulting her, when there was the clatter of heavy-shod feet on the tiled front path, a shadow behind the glass, and the white envelope fluttered through the letter box on to the coir mat.

She had had no premonition of disaster. She unhurriedly picked up the envelope. Recognising the sender from the small, precise handwriting of the address, she felt nothing other than mild curiosity. Her sister rarely if ever wrote letters. But there could be nothing bad, as otherwise Flora would surely have phoned. The telephone was her preferred method of communication. She phoned Catriona at least twice a week, usually for quite long conversations.

Catriona sat down at the kitchen table to read the letter, intrigued as to what news it could be that needed to be communicated in this manner, and quite glad of a genuine excuse to delay her departure and thereby upset the timetable of her fat fellow jogger.

Minutes later, the trivial concerns and inconveniences of London living brutally thrust back to the far distant periphery of her mental universe by the cataclysmic impact of the news, her body numb, she sat staring at the sheets of writing-paper in her hands, the warm, comfortable room at that moment become as cold and alien as one of the moons of Saturn.

She read the letter yet again, its words already imprinted on her memory.

The Old Mill

Ewescombe Lane,

Owlbury

Glos.

Friday morning

My dearest Cat,

There is no gentle way to tell you what I have decided to do directly I return from posting this letter. It will hurt you as it will hurt everyone I love and who loves me. By the time you receive this letter, the sister you know and love will be dead.

I’ve often thought of killing myself but I’ve never had the courage. But now I have found the drug to put an end to my suffering and to give me peace. Now I am afraid only of the loss of the dear faces which have been the only things that have kept me sane all these years.

I love you, you must know that. And I know you love me. But somehow, that love has never been enough to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Terrible things have happened to us, the memories of which are with us every waking moment and in our dreams, though no nightmare could ever be as bad as the reality.

We have never before spoken of such things, have we? They have spread their darkness over us so thickly that no light that we could generate would pierce it. Perhaps if we had talked, really talked about what happened all those years ago, things might have been different. But we never did and now we never shall.

I’m not blaming you, dearest Cat. Your remedy is to endure the unendurable in solitude, and by your power of mind to endeavour to forget the unforgettable. But I have never had your strength. I’ve decided I can’t go on any longer waking every day to the dreadful things inside my head.

What I am about to do may seem weak to you, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. I’m about to do the strongest thing I’ve done, to seize the remedy for my agony.

Please come directly you receive this. You must be here to help my darling Charlotte. I need you to use your strength for her.

I hope it’s going to be like one of those hospital anaesthetics where everything suddenly blanks out like a TV screen, except that this time there won’t be any nurse to say, ‘Welcome back, sweetheart’, a micro-second later.

I’ve chosen this weekend because it’s half-term. Bill is away in the States at a conference and won’t be back before Wednesday. Charlotte has gone to a study centre in Devon with her school for the entire week.

Now, you must destroy this letter and never tell anyone you received it. Charlotte must never know the secret of our past. It has destroyed our lives. It must not destroy hers.

Goodbye, my dear. As your old Wordsworth says, ‘We must grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.’

Love, hugs and kisses, my beloved, from your very dearest little sister Flora.

The words of Flora’s letter hammered inside her skull as if they were physical blows. For a hideous moment, like a storm-tossed lake of black polluted water spilling over the edge of a crumbling dam, those terrible

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CONTENTS

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