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him.
    A policewoman, fair hair straggling from an untidy bun under her crushed uniform hat, took her arm. Kate shook her hand off. Then the full horror exploded on her. She stared back at the collapsed frontage of the still glowing ruin. Jess – somewhere inside that inferno? No, no! Impossible.
    â€˜We’ll drive you to the hospital,’ the policewoman offered.
    But how could she leave? There might, by some miracle, be just a chance that … But then Eddie – badly hurt? She was torn apart.
    In a daze she let herself be manoeuvred into the rear of the police car. The girl climbed into the driving seat. Kate was aware of the dark outline of a man beside her. He turned briefly to look at her as the siren crudely broke out after the doors slammed. He had a round, expressionless, puppet face with a sharp nose.
    â€˜Cut that row,’ he ordered the girl, and leaned across to silence the siren and switch on the windscreen wipers. Twin jets of soapy water spurted up to dislodge the film of black detritus that had settled. The flip and slick of the blades on glass were the only sounds now above the low hum of the engine.
    The car swung out of the driveway and into leafy Windmill Lane, headlights stabbing the dark through a tunnel of golden trees. Nothing was real. Kate felt her heart beating up in her throat. She closed her eyes, hugged her chest tight, desperately hunting for the words of some prayer.
    There had been no point in their rushing. Eddie was no longer in the Casualty department.

    â€˜Gone to theatre,’ a doctor explained. Kate had a ludicrous vision of a floodlit Edwardian proscenium, all gilt plaster and cherubs. The ruby velvet curtains were closed, like a crematorium chapel’s after last viewing of the coffin. She found herself retching. A nurse brought her a chair. They were handling her like a Friday night drunk.
    In the surgical ward Eddie wasn’t expected back for at least an hour, and even then not awake enough to talk. Come back tomorrow, she was told: not too early.
    She wanted to insist she’d just wait there, not be in their way, simply hold his hand when he returned; but it was fear of her son’s embarrassment that held her back. Over-imaginative and by nature protective, she’d always forced herself not to fuss, never let the twins feel she smothered them. Even more so since losing Michael.
    She hadn’t known that one day she’d need them there so badly for herself.
    â€˜I have to go back to the fire,’ she said after they insisted that Eddie, with his injured head and chest, was in the safest hands possible. She believed they’d do their best, but had a fatalistic premonition. Distraught, and so recently widowed, she saw her little family being picked off, one by one.
    She was barely aware of being helped into a taxi. When it stopped she found she’d been delivered to the Greythorpe Hotel. She stood outside shivering on that early May morning as dawn slowly broke, and knew she couldn’t yet face the others.
    There was too much grief. Not only her own. Carlton had lost the home where he’d been born and lived in for most of his eighty years. If the reality of it hadn’t yet reached the old man, Claudia, totally aware, would be indomitably in command of both herself and him. Kate did not trust herself to be with them for now.
    She told the driver to take her to the Monkey Puzzle. From the pub she’d ring the family and explain she needed to be on her own at present.

    Which was far from the truth. But who was there now to be with?
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    The Monkey Puzzle was named after the monstrous tree in its forecourt, which lodged the dust and traffic pollution of almost a century. Desiccated and hang-dog, it was shamed by the sprucely painted version of its kind on the inn’s swinging sign.
    The pub boasted a second tree at the rear, where it dropped confetti-like blossom on the little square of lawn referred to as the Beer