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For my abnormal and wonderful family.

To Morrow-on-Sea, to Morrow-on-Sea,

To the gulls with their cries, and the wind whistling free.

Dawn is late and growing ever later. It is sluggish these days, like he is. Still, he has a warm coat, and the light has just about caught up with him, slipping its fingers through the clouds and gingerly touching the freezing water at the horizon. He tucks his hands into his pockets and carries on up the shoreline. The gulls are awake and wheeling through the grey, raising their voices, chastising the sun for being slow to start. He had not wanted to rise either, but had prised himself from his bed.

He looks towards the far end of the beach, where cliffs bracket the world and excise the town beyond, preserving only what is hushing and weathered. Then he picks up his pace and looks back to see his own bootprints in the sand. If he is quick they will still be there to pass on the way back, but if he lingers, the tide will have turned and he will be a little higher up the beach, with the prints long gone beneath the water.

He breathes in the cold and salt. There is a day waiting ahead. Before it begins, walking is as necessary as breathing.

Now the light is stronger, and he can see something in the distance, on the shoreline. A spur between land, water, and sky. A notch in the horizon. He keeps his eyes on it as he moves forward, waiting for it to resolve into something knowable. In his mind, he runs through all the things he must do. He marvels at how short each day is, how the next 16 hours will disappear before he knows they have begun.

The shape wavers and blurs against the water. It is moving.

The breeze shears the thickness from his head. He is awake now. What must he accomplish before he climbs back into his bed tonight? The domestic, the business, the artistic concerns. Projects to progress, work to refine. Another day of patience, care, and genesis.

Slowly, he recognises the spur as a dark blob of human, and he begins to look for a dog to go with it, since it is only him and dog-walkers out at this hour. But there is no animal – none of that characteristic low to-and-fro from the water’s edge. Only a solitary restless spirit.

He thinks about his father, who had often muttered about time speeding up with age. He and his brother had laughed at it, in the long afternoons after school, and the dull grey Sundays of childhood. Inevitably, his father has posthumously carried the point.

His breath becomes tighter. The shoreline figure is small. Perhaps even child-sized. He speeds up now, uneasy, but the sand is cold and damp and resists his long legs.

He can see a hoodie and limbs. Not walking, but not staying still either – it raises and lowers its arm. Once, twice – violent. Its feet must be in the water. He keeps his eyes fixed on it.

A new wind springs up, drags back across the beach and pulls at his coat. He tries to locate meaning – a walker, a drunk, a lost child. He has found all these before. Something unfamiliar stirs, and he is scared.

The hooded shape stoops, then straightens, and all of it shudders, arm outflung.

The light rises higher above the horizon, and he begins to run.

It shudders again.

Finally, the distance closes.

‘Hello?’ His own voice surprises him.

The shape turns, realised instantly into a woman. Her left hand is clutched around some stones, and there is one in her right hand too. She looks at him, then turns back to the lapping water and throws the stone so hard it jerks a wave through her whole body. She takes another from her left hand and throws again.

The stones do not go very far; she is too small. But they land with all the force she intends, breaking the sea open for a brief moment.

She throws one after another until her hands are empty, and she is panting. Then she turns to look at him again. He exhales the breath that he has been holding. She nods once, then walks back along the beach, trainers obliterating his footprints.

Once upon a time, there was a weak king. His first wife was beautiful and virtuous, but she died giving birth to a daughter, and when the king married again this wife was also beautiful, but very cruel.

The new queen presented a meek and pious face to her husband, but the rest of the kingdom knew that she was filled with a terrible jealousy towards her stepchild. As this child grew, she too became very lovely, until she rivalled the queen’s own beauty.

When the child turned 13, the queen could bear it no longer, and called the child to her chambers. Here, the evil queen thrust three gold rings into her hand, saying, ‘With these rings, you must leave and make your own way in the world, never to return.’

The people of the kingdom all loved the child, and so the queen had her guards drive the child out into the woods, where she would receive no mercy from the wild animals. When the king asked where his daughter had gone, the queen told him the princess had stolen the precious rings and run away. The king wept bitter tears but chose to believe his deceitful wife.

In the forest, the girl’s own weeping soon attracted the attention of a passing wolf, who asked, ‘Oh child, why do you cry so?’

Not knowing who to trust, the girl told the wolf her sad story and showed him the three gold rings.

‘Those are pretty rings,’ said the greedy wolf, ‘let me take care of them for you. They are too precious to be lost.’

As soon as the child snatched her hand away, the wolf leapt forward, ready to devour her and take the rings for himself. But the child was too quick and ran away. In her rush to escape, the child dropped one of the rings, and this was picked up by the wolf.

Next, the child stumbled into a clearing where a wild boar lived. ‘Oh child, why do you cry so?’ the boar asked.

‘My stepmother has abandoned me, and a wolf has tried to eat me. I have lost a precious gold ring.’ She showed the boar the two remaining rings.

‘Those are pretty rings. Let me take care of them for you.’ And the boar lunged forward, scratching her ankles with his tusks. The child fled, dropping another gold ring.

Finally, she collapsed next to a cottage deep in the woods. Out came a kindly old woman who took her in and fed her and gave her a bed to sleep in. On the third day, the old woman asked the child’s story.

‘My stepmother has abandoned me, and a wolf has tried to eat me, and a boar to gore me. I have lost two gold rings, and I only have one left.’

The old woman reached out her wrinkled hand. ‘That is a pretty ring. Let me take care of it for you.’ And the witch turned the child into a sparrow.

The frightened bird dropped the last ring and flew away through the open window. She flew back to her father’s castle and in through the casement to where her father sat reading. She began to tell him her story, but all that came out was chirping, and the king got up and shooed the little bird from his chambers.

The sparrow-child flew away in despair, deep into the forest. There she passed many years, singing of her sorrows, and feeding on berries and insects.

One day, a prince from the neighbouring kingdom was passing through the woods, when he heard the pretty song of the sparrow. ‘What a lovely bird you are,’ he said, ‘come, sit here on the shoulder of my armour and sing to me while I pass through these woods.’

The sparrow was happy to have such handsome company, and gladly perched on his shoulder, singing all the while.

A little time had passed when across their path came the greedy wolf.

‘Good morning, oh prince,’ said the wolf, ‘let me escort you through these woods.’

But the prince recognised the wolf for the old sinner that he was, and ran him straight through with his sword. Out of the wolf’s belly dropped the gold ring, which the prince picked up and placed around the sparrow’s neck. ‘What a pretty ring, will you take care of it for me, little friend?’

Next, the boar crossed in front of the prince’s horse. Bowing low, the warty creature said, ‘Good morning, oh prince. Will you honour me with your company?’

But the prince slit the boar’s throat with one stroke, and out fell the second gold ring, which he also placed around the sparrow’s neck.

Finally, they reached the witch’s cottage in the middle of the woods, and the sparrow tried with all her might to warn the prince of the danger he was in, but all that came out was chirping.

The witch opened the door of the cottage, this time appearing as a beautiful young maiden. ‘Good morning, oh prince,’ said the witch, and bade him come inside.

But the prince was as virtuous as he was handsome, and he saw through her charms. He struck her through with his sword, and the witch fell to the ground dead, in her true form once more. From her finger, the prince took the last gold ring and placed it around the sparrow’s neck.

At the touch of the third gold ring, the sparrow was released from the spell and became a girl once more, although now full-grown into a princess of surpassing beauty. The prince and the princess were married and welcomed by the rejoicing people of the kingdom. The king saw the error of his ways, and the wicked queen was punished.

‘What do you want to do this weekend?’

‘Can we go swimming?’

‘Yeah, we could go swimming. Maybe some football in the park, if it isn’t raining?’

‘Yeah, let’s do that. Can we have a film night?’

‘Are you asking if you can have sweets?’

‘Can I?’

‘Maybe. I can hear your mum calling – go get ready. Have a good day, okay?’

‘Love you, Dad.’

‘Love you. Brush your teeth – don’t make Mum ask again, okay? Love you, bye.’

He waits until his son hangs up, holding on to the seconds, then puts the kettle on. He wants another coffee, but he’s already had two, and a third will make his hands tremble. In his twenties, he did some of his best work hungover. He sighs and stretches and his shoulder aches a little. He makes tea instead.

The goldsmith descends the stairs from his flat to the ground floor. At the front is the shop, filled with display cases and a window through which he can see the promenade and the sea. He pauses for a moment to watch the roll of the water, the white horses racing for land. Then he turns and crosses to the back of the open-plan space, behind the heavy workbench that halves the room. This is his studio, the place where he spends his hours with his head bent to his work. He puts his mug down and picks up the design for the ring, but it had come from his own hand, and this is no more than remembering.

Wax. The first step, without which there is no second.

He takes a pinch and begins to roll it in his palms, feeling it warm and soften. Then in two, roughly. This client had not wanted perfection. She had said she wanted to know her ring had been made by human hands, with the perfection of human error. He had liked her.

He rolls them one at a time into fine strings, pulls the lamp closer over the bench. The day is as light as it will get, which in November is not light enough – even with the windows, even at the seafront.

He takes the two strands – vines – and twists them together.

‘Two weeds, parasites, clinging to each other for eternity’ she had said, then her fiancé had laughed and looked at her with so much love that the goldsmith had turned away, humbled.

He reaches for a tool, a blade so small it could not harm a doll, and begins to nick and scratch roughness into the wax.

His shoulder pulls, and he stops to drink his lukewarm tea. He needs to make sure there is food in the fridge for Felix. Some of the yoghurts he likes. Spaghetti for tea, maybe. Felix’s mum likes when he eats with Dad – apparently with her, he is picky. The prospect of his son is a warm promise on a bleak morning, and he smiles.

Finally, the wax ring sits in a flask that has been the birthplace of hundreds, and he pours over a plaster setting mix, and sits back. It will take until the afternoon for the mould to harden.

Outside, the world is just about awake, and muffled figures process past the window, slivered and reassembled by metal bars. Beyond them, the tide is in, licking at the sea wall.

The goldsmith runs his hand through his hair, rolls down his sleeves and takes the jumper from the back of his stool. It is cold the moment he stops working.

He should check that Felix has clean socks – he is almost certain he washed some. He crosses and begins to climb the stairs back up to the flat, but midway he hears the tinkle of the shop door opening, and he turns around.

‘Hello?’ He takes the stairs quickly, but when he emerges the space is empty. There are only the bare floorboards, and the tasteful minimalism of glass cases at the front, and behind the workbench, silent machines and the lazy glint of dust motes.

It is nearly midday before he notices the neat stack of twenty-pound notes that is sitting on the shelf that had been home to a thumb-sized figurine of a standing bear.

The sun is low in the sky when the door buzzer goes. He looks up from his work, where he has lost track of time. He is not expecting anyone. He leaves his glasses on the workbench and crosses, preparing to greet a customer or a delivery driver. He pulls back the chain he had secured after the morning’s unseen visitor, and opens the door.

She is standing on the pavement. The smell of the sea, usually so much background, washes over him again, salty enough to be barren. She, too, frowns, and overhead, the gulls pause their conversation to observe these two humans at the edge of the world.

‘Do you buy gold?’ she asks eventually.

‘Uh, yes,’ the goldsmith answers, and takes a step back to let her in, out of the bitter damp.

Still watching him, she crosses the threshold and the cold comes biting after. He notices that under her coat is the same hoodie she had been wearing on the beach that morning. He hesitates, then shuts and locks the heavy door and follows her to the workbench. He picks up a notepad and tries to bring his thoughts to bear.

‘Uh – what’s your name?’

‘Ophelia.’

‘Ophelia…?’

‘Richards. Why?’ Her hair is loose now, the colour of conkers at full fruit.

‘In case you’re handling stolen goods and I have to contact the police,’ he admits, too disorientated to soften it for her.

‘Oh,’ she laughs suddenly, ‘I’m glad I lied then.’ Despite himself, he laughs too, and she studies this then reaches for the pad to write down an address half a mile away, just off the high street. The smell of the sea rolls from her hair.

He pauses, unmoored by the day, then blinks himself back into focus. ‘Okay, let’s see what you have.’

Ophelia takes a series of boxes from her backpack. She is tiny, sharp in her limbs and her movements. She might be a student at the local art college, he thinks, but no, standing close he can see the silken lines beneath her eyes, and in a few years they will deepen to match his.

‘I don’t know if they’re gold-plated or solid,’ she tells him.

He nods and opens the three boxes. The first contains a simple chain in rose gold. The second is a bracelet in yellow gold; heavier, older. The third box is velvet, worn around the hinges and in the centre at the front, where for decades, fingers have prised it open and shut in a daily ritual. Inside is a ring, a slim, simple band, but at the centre is an opal the size of a five-pence piece, crossed by veins of gold and red, the blue of peacock tails. It is so many things, hardened into beauty.

Ophelia watches him silently as he picks up each piece in turn, and examines the workmanship, the metal. He places the ring under the magnifying lamp and the hallmark agrees its quality.

‘Is it an engagement ring?’ he asks.

‘My mother’s.’

‘How did you come to have it?’ He flicks his eyes upwards.

‘She gave it to me.’ Ophelia’s voice is flat.

‘Is she – I’m sorry, is she still alive?’

‘Yes.’

He pauses and replaces it in its box. ‘I can’t buy it if she might ask for it back.’

‘She won’t.’

‘I can’t—’

‘It’s mine. She made that very clear.’ She holds his gaze without softening. In his chest is a cold tapping.

‘These are solid gold, very valuable. But the craftsmanship is excellent too. The bracelet is antique.’

‘I know they’re valuable. That’s why I’m selling them.’ She concedes nothing.

The goldsmith straightens up and looks at her, no longer pretending. Before his eyes she vacillates between the intangible and the intensely, irreducibly solid.

‘It’s Friday; come back on Monday,’ he says finally. ‘If you still want to sell them, I’ll buy them then.’

‘I want to sell them today.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ His own voice is strange to him.

‘I’m capable of my own decisions.’

‘I know that.’

Still she does not move. ‘If you did, you wouldn’t be refusing.’

‘I just – I don’t want you to do something impulsive and regret it.’

‘You wouldn’t refuse if I was a man.’

He feels it sting on his cheek. He lines up his tools to their places on the tray. ‘I would refuse if he was trying to sell me his mother’s jewellery after a fight.’

Ophelia flinches. The tapping in his chest gets harder, colder. He turns away and folds a polishing cloth.

‘I’ll keep it here, if you want,’ he says, ‘in the safe. It’s all eighteen- and twenty-four-carat. Worth in the thousands. And I’ll buy it after the weekend, if that’s still what you want.’

‘It’s what I want.’

‘Come back here Monday, at nine—’ he says. ‘Bring ID for the paperwork.’

Ophelia examines his face, and he tries to remember, for a moment, what he looks like. The clouds shift and the light crowns them with fire.

‘Fine.’

He nods and crosses the floor to unlock the door for her, conscious of her feet falling close behind his on the boards; a furious rebuke to the air around her, to him, to reality.

When she has already stepped out onto the street, she turns around, hair spreading over the front of her coat, hands deep in her pockets. ‘I didn’t know this was your shop. I’d never seen you before the beach this morning.’

He nods again. ‘A coincidence. Morrow’s a small place.’ He pauses, then holds a hand out. ‘My name’s Adam.’

She cannot get warm, but she never can and never could in Morrow-on-Sea. She has given up trying. Ophelia takes the winding route back to her flat, sticking close to the water for as long as she can. She lets the wind whip past her cheeks and take away the anger that is top-most. She wishes she could dig it all out and let the wind have it, but then what remained would be a papery husk and the wind might carry that off too.

The waves are a churning slate grey, but from the path that runs the length of the sea wall Ophelia can see a mother and child passing the time in anoraks and wellies at the water’s edge. They are there every day, and today the little girl has a bucket and her mum is pointing at something in the sand. The girl toddles and picks it up, holding it with great care in her infant hand. The mother says something that is inaudible, and the girl looks closer, reverent. Whatever it is, it is put in the bucket. Ophelia draws level, then passes. She never walks close enough for them to see the tears that drown her vision.

By the time she is at the headland, Ophelia has spotted the old man she is looking for, and sees he has his bin bags. She glances to check he has not noticed her, then settles herself on the bench set in close to the overhanging cliff face. The man goes about his afternoon ritual, back and forth over whatever the tide has not covered. Here and there, he stoops and picks up rubbish with a pair of kitchen tongs. Before he puts each piece in the bin liner, he shakes it gently to dislodge any sand, as though he is removing a thorn from the body and cannot bear to take any flesh with it. Then he tucks the litter away and moves on.

‘Happy birthday, darling!’

‘Hi Mum, Dad.’ She receives pecks on both cheeks from her father and an embrace from her mother.

‘Gosh, it’s been so long since you were home. It’s so nice to have you back. Come on, come on, we’ve got some champagne in the fridge with your name on it.’ Her mother flutters her towards the kitchen and its white expanse of countertop and barstool. ‘You’ve lost weight again! That dress is hanging off you.’

‘My weight hasn’t changed.’

‘You need to take care of yourself, darling.’

‘How’s the writing coming on, Ophy?’ her father asks. ‘I’ve been looking out for that magazine with your story in. Not many places seem to sell it.’

Ophelia’s mother gathers up champagne flutes, and her daughter watches her black-clad body and the mesmerising tumble of her silver hair.

‘I’ll send you a copy, Dad.’

On the kitchen island, in the blue glass bowl, there are three wrapped presents.

Ophelia takes a notebook from her backpack. She tucks her chin into her hoodie and begins to sketch the old man out with words, catching his stoop, his care, his unbranded jacket and thick-soled shoes. The face weathered by a lifetime in a dying town. She saw him with a teenage boy once, probably a grandson. Just the once though. One day in perhaps the 50 she has seen him. She imagines the old man’s sworn duty, his solemn oath. His anger. She writes it. It is the only way she can understand the world.

Adam is watching the black smudge of Ophelia’s retreating back when the postman approaches, hand raised in greeting.

‘Something for you, Mr Conlan.’ He has the flattened Somerset accent that Adam has almost ceased to notice in Morrow, but today, it jars anew. The postman rifles through the stack in his hand, and extracts a small padded Jiffy envelope, ‘Just the one today,’ then he puts his AirPods back in and continues his round.

Adam retreats into the relative warmth and closes the door behind him. He cannot tell if he is dizzy, or if the sensation is imagined, but he sits heavily on the stool behind the workbench. He takes off his glasses and raises his hand to rub his eyes, but his palm feels odd and sticky. He glances at it, then checks the Jiffy envelope in front of him, and sure enough, he can see a thin damp line along the bottom seam where something has leaked. He sighs and pulls it closer and notices a smell like iron filings. What had he ordered? He tries to remember. But his suppliers don’t package like this – no logo, no return address.

He pulls the tear strip, and the smell is stronger, staler. With thumb and middle finger, he widens the mouth of the envelope and tilts it towards the light. Something inside is not quite red, or grey, or pink, but somewhere in between, streaked with stringy white.

Adam drops it. It makes a thick, wet thud. His breathing becomes shallow.

Adam looks around him.

He looks down. Pulling the lamp over, he tears slowly along the other three sides of the packet and opens it flat. In the bubble-wrap lining, glazed by a clear blushing liquid, is a small heart.

He stares at the greying flesh, blank. It should not be there. It is a heart.

He looks up again, for an explanation, then back at it. He can see the black puckered opening of a valve. He recognises it from his art school days, when in anatomy class they had drafted sheet after sheet of all that makes a person.

Small. Too small to be human. An animal’s heart. For a second, Adam sees it like he is back in the drawing rooms. If he picked it up, it would sit on only a quarter of his palm.

But why would he pick up a heart?

Someone has sent him a heart.

‘To Ophelia – thirty-three years the guiding light of our lives, our pole star.’ Her mother raises a glass, and her father flushes with pleasure as he looks upon the two women he loves.

‘To Ophelia,’ he beams, ‘and to Marina, who somehow looked ravishing even after forty-eight hours of labour.’

They clink glasses, and her mother removes the silver candles from the Sachertorte to cut them each a slice.

‘How’s the gallery, Dad?’ Ophelia asks as her mother busies herself.

‘Oh, you know, same as ever, really. Couple of big pieces came in recently, which will make for a good Christmas, I expect. We’re still hiring for an assistant, you know. You could fit writing in round it; come and live back here.’

‘Thanks, Dad, but you don’t need me under your feet.’

Her father glances at his wife, then shrugs. ‘Well, we can’t have everything, I suppose.’

By the time she is done drawing the old man with words, he has gone. The cold is getting into her bones and she stands up and shakes herself off.

Slowly, she slides the backpack onto her shoulders. She needs to complete a draft of her book before Christmas, and the library’s local folklore collection sounds useful. But she has not slept yet. Sleep is something she still needs to be disciplined with, to remain on this tightrope, and the library will be open tomorrow.

Ophelia turns sharply and ascends the hill away from the sea and into town, and the refrain rattles inside her. To Morrow-on-Sea, to Morrow-on-Sea. To the gulls with their cries, and the wind whistling free.

She lets it.

Morrow is not a glamorous place, and as Ophelia reaches the high street, she begins to skirt takeaway bins that have been raided by foxes. Between the pound shop and the shuttered nail bar is a homeless man who has given up asking for change and stares dully at his feet.

Ophelia has been told that, in summer, tourists return Morrow to something of its former splendour. There are artists, pop-ups, concerts, hashtags and social media presence. She has been promised it is the next Margate by loyal middle-class locals and she suspects there is a grain of truth in it; the town has declined substantially since her childhood visits, but there are still the bijou spots. The goldsmith’s studio, for example.

Ophelia sidesteps a group of teenagers vaping in the middle of the pavement and pushes her hands deeper into her pockets.

The goldsmith had been a surprise, at the beach, and at his own door, she thinks. Black, concerned eyes scouring her.

She bridles. Adam Conlan cannot be 40, yet he had been paternal towards her, had treated her like a petulant child.

Had it been concern on his face? Had that been it? ‘My name’s Adam.’ His palm cool, firm. She could tell he was being gentle, careful with her fine bones the way he must be careful with soft metal.

Ophelia tries to stem the roll and tide of her thoughts.

‘Open it, darling.’ Marina’s eyes glitter. With difficulty, Ophelia works her fingers under the tight folds and tears the paper away.

Her father’s face is expectant as she opens the box.

‘Your ring,’ Ophelia says stupidly.

‘Yours now.’ Marina beams.

Ophelia pulls at the door wedged between two shopfronts. The damp sea air has swelled it shut again. She gives it a sharp tug and it opens, disgorging junk mail onto the hall floor, which she picks up and throws into the recycling bin on the pavement, then ascends the dark stairs to her flat.

It is warm-ish, or at least less cold than outside, and she hangs up her coat and backpack, kicks off the boots that rub and checks her trainers, which are wedged on top of the radiator and still soaking. She hovers between the tiny kitchen-living area and the bedroom. She is hungry but she is more tired, so she strips off her clothes and swaps them for a T-shirt and worn leggings, then climbs onto the deceptively comfortable mattress on the floor. She closes her eyes and waits.

‘Why?’

Her mother frowns. ‘What do you mean, darling?’

‘Why have you given me these?’

‘You’re thirty-three, darling. We thought it would be nice – three gifts. One piece of my jewellery, one of Grandma’s, one of Auntie Penelope’s. Women handing the flame to the next generation. I thought it was… poetic. Writerly.’ She smiles.

Ophelia is silent.

Her father looks from one to the other, then clears his throat. ‘Well, I for one want some more of this cake. Absolutely delicious.’

‘Absolutely, Charles.’ Her mother searches Ophelia’s face. ‘I hope the gifts are all right, darling. I just thought it was a nice idea.’

Ophelia throws back the duvet and goes to the kitchen.

‘You don’t know anyone who might send this sort of thing?’

‘A heart?’ Adam asks. DI William Kent waits mildly, patiently. ‘Uh, no. It’s not the sort of thing that usually…’

‘Well, quite,’ Kent agrees. The two men look down at the heart on the workbench. The policeman is perhaps only 45, but his neat grey suit, his neat grey beard, are so orderly, so unruffled, that it seems possible he might offer Adam a reasonable explanation; a way to set reality back in its place on this day that is unstuck, ungrounded, unreal.

Kent inspects the envelope again, turning it with purple-gloved hands. ‘As you say, no return address, no company logo. The Jiffy envelope would fit in any street postbox. Postmark is Birmingham. Do you have links to the area?’

‘None. I’ve visited twice in my life. Years ago, for trade shows.’ Adam begins pacing. ‘It has to be a practical joke, or a mistake.’

The policeman nods again thoughtfully. ‘It’s very clearly addressed to you. ADAM CONLAN, 38 The Promenade. It came through the letterbox?’

‘Uh, no. I was letting a client out. The postman handed it to me.’ Adam cannot untangle the two events in his mind. Ophelia Richards has nothing to do with the post, and yet it is impossible not to twin her with the arrival of this heart on his doorstep. He pushes the thought of her away and rakes through his confusion again, searching for friends or acquaintances, anyone who might see this as the punchline to some long-forgotten joke. ‘It might be totally random? Someone sticking a pin in the phonebook – whatever the equivalent is in the digital age – taking pleasure in freaking out a stranger.’

‘Hm,’ the policeman acknowledges the idea calmly, wiggling the deconstructed package into a plastic evidence bag. ‘And you say earlier on today someone came and took a gold bear?’

This morning is already a distant land. ‘I mean, they left money for it… I don’t know if the two things have anything to do with each other.’

‘And is there anyone you’ve had a row with recently, anybody who might want to give you a shock, send you a message?’

Adam had washed his hands three or four times while he waited for the police. He runs them through his hair but they still feel tainted. The light outside is weak as the afternoon slips away, and he is at a loss. ‘No. No. Where do you even get an animal heart?’ he asks. ‘I hope… you don’t think someone hurt an animal, do you?’

Kent smiles kindly. ‘Not any more or less than any meat hurts the animal. Offal is cheap from a butcher. My mum used to cook it all the time when we were kids.’ He pulls the nitrile glove off with a snap and opens his phone. He scrolls for a moment then shows Adam an image search full of familiar smooth muscle and elastic tissue. ‘It’s probably from a rabbit. Maybe a chicken. Five pounds a kilogram online.’

Adam feels queasy, but when he takes a deep breath, he realises the foetid smell from the heart is gone, sealed up in the evidence bag, and he can breathe a little easier.

‘I’ll log it as Malicious Communication. You know that I won’t be able to send it for testing, though? Hard to get forensics on less than attempted murder these days.’ Kent is rueful. ‘But sending someone a heart… it doesn’t seem like the whole of something. Without wishing to be alarmist, it seems more like the start.’

Adam feels a sickly crawling in his stomach. ‘Are we safe here? My son – I can’t risk him being exposed to,’ he trails off, his eyes drawn back to the evidence bag in Kent’s hand, ‘whatever this is.’

Kent frowns. ‘For now, I should say there’s no need to be actively worried. Sensible, a little vigilant perhaps, but not worried.’ He nods. ‘Keep in contact, Mr Conlan.’

Adam waits on the doorstep as the detective crosses the promenade to his car. The streetlamp comes on, and light bounces off Kent’s head into a silver halo. He sees the detective check his phone, and thinks he sees the twitch of a smile on his thin mouth. Then the policeman climbs into the car and, numbly, Adam shuts then locks the door.

In the crucible, the beads of gold become brighter, looser, holding themselves most luminous before their boundaries give way. Adam moves the torch closer and manipulates the tongs with his wrist; rotating, circling, coaxing the gold to liquid. He does not rush. There is nothing to be gained by rushing in this trade; it is all calm and patience, and this is why he has flourished.

In front of him is the shop floor, and behind, the ephemera and machinery of his work. At the back, behind a disused display panel, is the safe nested with precious metals and a handful of gemstones. So long a piece of his mental landscape, he does not usually notice it, but today, it is a tell-tale heart that he cannot still, calling his attention back and back again to Ophelia’s gold inside. He tries again to shake it off, but his own thuds heavily, and he can see that third heart, in the envelope, and forces blankness on himself.

Outside, beyond the security light, the dark is complete, but he knows the tide will have turned by now, and the beach is as it was this morning, slowly and then suddenly eaten up by the water.

It is nearly 7 o’clock. He needs to leave soon to collect Felix from football. He thinks of his son trudging muddily out of the sports complex, plastered with sweat and beaming, steaming dragon’s breath under the car park lamps. It is what love is made of.

The gold has melted. The crucible slips neatly into its place by the flask, and Adam sets the centrifuge spinning, pulling the gold into its mould, and forming a ring where before there was only absence.

Eventually, the spinning slows. The components of the centrifuge cease to blur and become distinguishable again. He retrieves the flask with tongs, ready to cool it. There is a quiet tik like rain on glass. He turns.

At the window is a face.

Pale.

Hollow.

Starving.

Adam drops the flask. He cries and jumps back as it hits the ground and spits out burning powder.

He looks up again and the face is gone. Still gripping the empty-mouthed tongs, he runs to the window, presses his cheek to the cold glass and tilts his face to look past the bars. Outside there is only black, and black.

She will replace me. She will creep into every fibre of my body and throw me out of it.

This mirror tells me all I need to know. So much beauty. A face of clean and shining skin. Eyes like violet almonds. Soft, red lips.

Soft, red, violet, soft, red, violet.

What use is beauty if it is not worshipped? It is an exquisite empty box. A rose never pollinated. The first minute signs of wilt already at the edges of the eyes.

I see her looking. Always peering. Hiding behind childish innocence. Soft, blue, pink. A snake waiting to strike.

She knows my time is limited.

I will give her three gold rings. That is enough. That is enough to travel somewhere new, become queen somewhere new. She might leave me here, with what little I possess, with my mirror.

Leave me.

That isn’t it. She holds down the backspace key. She tries again. What is it, at its core? What is the kernel that defines and explains it?

Ophelia exhales and fidgets. She waits. It’ll come.

Night has fallen, and in the street below Friday drinkers are out in force. She can hear the raucous clacking of overlapping, over-loud voices. One voice rises above the others, then is submerged in collective laughter or shouting. There is the crash of broken glass.

She looks back at her screen. Sometimes it’s best to let it rest. It will arrive when it’s ready. Her editor has said Ophelia’s short-story collection is selling well; this manuscript is not due for a few months yet.

Ophelia opens up another document and titles it ‘The Goldsmith’. She lets the cursor rest on the first line.

He is sudden. There when you turn around, having thought you were alone. He is from your own imagination. A conscience you thought you had shed.

He is arrogant, lupine. Then he moves and you see it is a trick of the light on the musculature, and it isn’t there at all. He is fatherly, he is reserved. He is—

Ophelia sits back on the sofa.

Is that who he had reminded her of? Here, in Morrow. But they do not look similar. Do not correspond in any way. Funny, though, that she should associate the two.

She rolls her head on her neck. The sofa is lumpy and uncomfortable. Perhaps with the money from the gold, she might find a small desk and a folding chair.

Ophelia closes the document and looks back at her manuscript.

That’s it – that’s the kernel of it. She leans forward to pour out what has arrived in her mind.

The screen of her phone lights up with an incoming message. She looks down and sees the icon of a pale face; it is her mother.

‘Luke!’

‘Adam!’ he replies with a mocking grin.

‘What are you doing here?’ Adam leans forward and hugs his brother across the threshold.

Luke returns the embrace warmly, holding his brother’s shoulders for a long second. ‘You smell like polish.’

Adam straightens up and looks at his blackened fingers. ‘Well, yeah. What are you doing here though?’

Luke waves his hand. ‘Am I a fucking vampire? Can you invite me in?’ he chides, and Adam steps back out of the residential doorway that is tucked round the side of the building like a kiss on the cheek.

Luke strips off his coat and scarf, and stamps his feet in protest at the coastal chill. ‘Jesus, you keep it cold.’

‘It’s warmer upstairs.’ Adam tries to process the surprise of his arrival.

‘Better be. Is Felix with you?’

‘Yeah, of course – started sleeping in lately though. I swear we didn’t do that until our teens. What are you – just, come up.’

The brothers creep up the stairs that lead to the flat, Adam with apprehension sitting low in his stomach. Luke crosses to put the kettle on and pulls out stoneware mugs, closing the cupboard quietly, finding all in its familiar place.

‘Is it Becca?’ Adam asks finally.

‘Yeah, she’s having one of her wobbles.’ Luke doesn’t turn from the counter.

One of the wobbles she has had half a dozen times in the last decade, deciding whether she really loves Luke. Adam’s heart sinks. Such a beautiful, intelligent woman. Such a callous one.

Adam quiets his anger and nods. ‘Yeah. Well, stay as long as you need to.’

‘Thanks, just the weekend. I need to be back at the lab on Monday.’

‘Busy?’

‘Testing a new polymer. Do you want me to explain it, or shall we give up the pretence that you understand chemistry?’

Adam snorts. ‘You can patronise me later. Felix will want to hear about it anyway.’

The light falling into the high-ceilinged open-plan room is bisected by the door’s shadow. The brothers stand in their respective places – Luke at the brightened counter, Adam by the doorway, Luke as fair as Adam is dark. Their father had once mentioned their mother’s ‘eastern’ heritage, but the blood appears only to have trickled down one side.

‘Want to talk about things?’

‘Not really.’ Luke hands Adam a mug.

‘Want to come swimming with me and Felix? I have spare trunks somewhere.’

Luke sighs. ‘Why do you go to that grotty leisure centre when you live opposite the sea?’

‘Have you tried swimming in the sea? In November?’ Adam raises his eyebrows. ‘Anyway, they redid the leisure centre, it’s not so bad anymore.’

‘I still dislike the idea on principle. And the new building is as hideous as the old one.’

‘You sound like Dad,’ Adam needles. ‘Do you want me to find the swimming trunks or not?’

‘Yeah, yeah, fine. Haven’t shaved my legs though.’

Luke twists the wedding band around his finger absent-mindedly, and Adam remembers the day he cast it, and the doubts he had suppressed for his brother’s sake. It reminds him.

‘I’ve left work out downstairs, let me just go and pack up.’

The goldsmith goes back down to his studio and tidies away the tools he has left on his bench, and the ring of vines he had been polishing at the wheel. In seeps the bittersweetness Luke’s visits always prompt, glad and sorry. He crosses to the main door at the front and gives it a pull to check that it is locked, and as he returns, his eye is caught by the burned patch on the floor, where he dropped the flask last night.

He climbs the stairs back up to the flat and pauses in the doorway to examine Luke’s tired, familiar, bemused profile, staring at the abstract prints on the wall.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Adam says, and Luke turns and raises his eyebrows.

‘Thanks?’

‘Yesterday there was… things were strange.’ Adam hesitates. Luke has come to him for a sort of refuge, and he doesn’t want to lay further burdens on those broad shoulders. But not to tell him would be an untenable omission, a withholding. He looks for a place to start. ‘I think someone is haunting me, sort of.’

‘What?’ They speak quietly, conscious of the child sleeping next door.

‘Yesterday someone stole from me.’

Luke looks alarmed. ‘Stole?’

‘Well, not exactly stole, because they paid.’ Adam sinks down opposite his brother and cleans the polish off his fingers with a rag. ‘Remember the little gold figures I make? Two inches high.’

‘I remember. Think I’ve seen similar in Dunelm.’

‘Shut up. Anyway, I went upstairs for something and the shop bell rang, so I went back down, but nobody was there. Then a few hours later, I noticed the bear standing on its hind legs was missing. Someone had left the money for it – a thousand in notes.’

‘A grand? Are you sure it’s them that’s doing the robbing?’ Luke raises his eyebrows. ‘Don’t you keep your door locked?’

‘I do now. But no. Not always in the daytime. The bear was the only piece on an open shelf, and I get more walk-in business when people don’t have to buzz.’

‘Rich tourists and the like?’

‘Something like that.’

Luke raises his eyebrows and puffs out his cheeks. ‘Did you check your camera?’

Adam shrugs. ‘It’s synced to go on when I set the alarm. It doesn’t record when I’m in there. That isn’t the weirdest part though.’

‘Right, of course not. Okay, tell me.’

‘Someone sent me an animal heart in the post.’ As he says it, Adam wants to laugh at the bleak absurdity. Luke looks blank, uncomprehending, as Adam had been when he opened the parcel.

‘A heart? Like, an actual physical…’

‘Yep. Probably from a rabbit.’

‘Right.’ Adam can see his brother trying to process these events into something logical, something that will stand up to rigorous scrutiny, as real life should.

‘I called the police. A guy called Kent turned up, took the heart as evidence. Told me to keep an eye out. Anyway, that wasn’t the end of it.’

Luke laughs, disbelieving. Dark lines extend from under his eyes, reaching for his cheekbones. ‘I’m sorry – what comes after someone sends you a fucking heart?’

Adam remembers the luminous face, and his body tenses. ‘Last night when I was working, someone was staring in at the window.’

‘People don’t ever just look in to see what a goldsmith does?’

‘They do, of course they do. But they look – they don’t stare like they’re starving. Like they want something.’ It is the first time Adam has acknowledged this to himself. He looks towards his son’s bedroom door. ‘They don’t run away.’

Luke shudders in unconscious sympathy. ‘Fuck. Sounds like one of Aunt Bridget’s fairy stories. A man or a woman?’

‘A man, I’m pretty sure. But, uh, I didn’t get a clear impression, details or anything like that.’

Luke’s eyebrows are nearly at his hairline. ‘Jesus, well, maybe start locking up better. Where am I going to stay next time if you’ve been axe-murdered?’

‘Thanks, you’re so fucking reassuring.’

‘That’s what brothers are for.’ Luke shrugs his massive shoulders. ‘Look, Adam, I don’t have to stay if you have too much of your own shit going—’

‘No. Don’t be stupid.’ Adam means it. His brother will always be welcome in his home, in his life.

Their faces crack into the twin grins that have sustained them across the years. Luke shakes his head. ‘You always were the eventful one. Is that the whole catalogue of uncanny events, or have you got more?’

Into Adam’s mind flashes copper hair and in his mouth he tastes salt, but before he can form any thoughts, a door clicks and Felix comes charging out of the bedroom and crashes into his uncle’s open arms.

‘Uncle Luke!’

‘Feeeeelix!’ Luke can still lift his nephew above his head and spin him round. They collapse together on the sofa in delighted giggling. ‘Did we wake you?’

Felix wriggles himself upright. ‘Dad didn’t tell me you were coming!’

‘Well, you didn’t tell me you’d grown into a giant. Anyway, Dad didn’t know. I snuck out of my house at the crack of dawn to drive down here and surprise you.’

Luke must have left Oxford early, Adam thinks, to get here by this hour. He watches as they wrestle, skinny pyjama-clad limbs sticking out from behind his brother’s gentle grappling hold. It expands in him.

‘Knock it off, both of you. Who wants breakfast?’

The water is freezing and, for a minute, Ophelia hesitates on the shower mat, working up the courage to get in. Perhaps she should just turn the temperature up today. Her hand rises from her side. No. She pulls it back. Then she takes a deep breath and puts her whole self under at once. To begin with, her body instinctively hunches itself, protecting her organs from the cold. But then, slowly, it uncurls like a fern.

In Florence, many years ago, the landlord had never bothered to fix the boiler in the grotty apartment he let to la ragazza inglese. Ophelia had asked him once, twice, but after that, she had been sunk too far in blackness to pursue it. It had been as much as she could manage to get dressed sometimes. To cook had been overwhelming; reading or writing, out of the question. The only thing she had managed each day was to cross the room and climb into the freezing shower. There, the water had beat down on her, drummed her with icy pins until she had had to acknowledge she was alive.

Gatta’s first appearance was at that time. A skinny ginger cat who had somehow found a way up and through the flaking balcony railings and into the single room. While Ophelia was in the shower, it had found the warm spot in the covers and curled up there. When she got back, it only raised its head and then lowered it again, and, not knowing what else to do, Ophelia had rested her head next to it, felt warmth through the dusty fur and its soft breathing, and the two bedraggled creatures had fallen asleep next to each other. When Ophelia woke, she had moved slowly to the cupboard and lifted her arms high enough to bring down a packet of crackers, and crumbled some into a saucer with water. The cat hopped down from the bed to eat it, and as she had watched the lapping tongue, Ophelia had lifted food to her own mouth.

Each day, when Ophelia had pulled herself from bed to stand in the frigid shower and feel herself living, the cat had crept in and waited amid the covers. After they slept, they ate.

Slowly, gatta had put on weight, looked less dusty, more sleek. Ophelia had stood more upright under the stream of the shower. Both still slept a lot.

Time passed, and gatta came every other day to nap and try what Ophelia now cooked. After that, it came every few days. Ophelia left the apartment to shop for food. Worked, sometimes, sitting on the floor.

Then, after two months, gatta did not come back at all; it was strong again and did not need Ophelia anymore. She had cried with happiness. By then, she was well enough to travel back to England, and shower in the cold there.

Ophelia climbs out of the shower, dries herself, pulls on the wintery layers of her clothes, her coat, her backpack, assembles all that she is, and goes out into the rain.

Adam swishes his feet through the water. It ripples and eddies, gripping tight to his ankles. The smell of chlorine is overpowering.

‘Is it different this time?’

‘She says it’s different every time,’ Luke sighs. He pulls himself up to sit next to Adam at the edge of the pool. A few metres away, Felix splashes around with a school friend they have bumped into.

Adam watches his son. ‘You still love her though?’ Luke kicks water at him. ‘All right then.’

‘It was easier for you and Julia, in a strange way,’ Luke muses.

‘Because it never involved feelings? Not love, anyway.’ Adam feels a familiar pang of guilt.

‘Yeah. I mean, of course there were complications, and all the practicalities. I know it was tough. But you were gaining a child you loved. You weren’t losing a partner.’

‘Mmm.’

‘You weren’t being told you were unlovable,’ Luke murmurs, just loud enough for his brother to hear over the shrieks of laughter that echo off tiles and water. Adam bumps his shoulder into Luke’s and they say nothing.

Felix turns a confident front flip under the surface, and Adam thinks how at home he is in the water.

‘Did Dad take us swimming? I don’t remember ever going in Oxford.’

‘Ha, Dad, in the water?’ They both try to picture their father, red hair, milk skin, dour jaw set hard, bobbing in a district swimming pool, and burst out laughing. To have possessed such a father would have been another life.

‘Stay where I can see you, Felix,’ Adam yells across, and his son waves and grins, curls plastered flat to his forehead. ‘No, I suppose just Aunt Bridget. Again.’

Adam remembers the tiny woman who still picked them up bodily when they were nearly teens, and threw them screaming with joy and terror off the Cork coast and into the chilly summer sea: ‘You won’t drown if you move your legs!’

‘God bless that woman. She did so much more than she ever needed to.’ Luke smiles.

‘She felt bad for us. Motherless waifs.’

Luke looks at Adam. Perhaps in that moment, Adam thinks, his brother misses their aunt, her holiday-time warmth, as much as he does.

Felix’s friend leaves, and Adam raises his hand to bid goodbye to the parents in their Crocs, arms full of towels and goggles. Felix splashes back over. ‘Did you see that flip? Mum taught me!’

‘Show me again,’ Uncle Luke encourages.

Felix bobs out further to show his best tricks.

‘He’s not self-conscious about it, is he?’

Adam shifts his legs. ‘About what?’

‘Two houses, two totally separate parents with their separate lives.’

Adam’s smile catches a little as his mouth lifts it. ‘It’s his normal. Mum and Dad love him, and Mum and Dad have separate places. Mum teaches at school, Dad makes jewellery. Mum is weekday, Dad is weekend. Doesn’t seem to have occurred to him yet that he might not like it.’

Felix swims back over, and they make a fuss of him. He sits up on the side between the two grown men, and under the harsh strip lighting, looks at one then the other, comparing uncle and father.

‘You don’t have any tattoos, Uncle Luke.’

‘I’m not cool enough for tattoos, Fee.’

‘You’re cool. You work in a lab!’ the boy protests as they laugh. He turns to his father. ‘What are the birds, Dad?’

Felix is always fascinated by the tattoos that run across Adam’s arms and shoulders, vanities from a past when Adam had believed himself in control of something.

‘A sparrow and a wren.’

‘The weeds look like that necklace you used to have in your shop.’

‘Good spot. That’s because they came from the same design.’

‘Can I have a tattoo, Dad?’

‘When you’re a grown-up. If Mum says so.’

Behind Felix, Adam can see Luke doubled over in silent laughter.

It is, as Kent expected, a rabbit heart. One of his constables is the son of a butcher and tells him as much. Poor little creature. He thanks and dismisses the young man, blows on his tea and considers the mid-distance. His phone pings, and he smiles as he reads the message. Then he puts it down and turns his attention back to the paperwork that is infinitely less interesting than the reality of being sent an animal heart. He had told Adam Conlan he did not expect that this was the end of matters.

Leonard greets them rapturously and meows to let them know they are late to feed him, and that this is unacceptable.

‘Sorry, sorry.’ Adam edges past him and puts down Felix’s coat and bag. His eyes flick to the doormat for another parcel, but there is nothing.

‘Lenny, it’s not that late.’ Felix stoops to chastise the cat with a tickle. Leonard has finally lost his caution around the child, now that he doesn’t cry and toddle and grab.

‘Can you and Uncle Luke go up and feed him? I’ve got to put a mould to burn out in the kiln before Monday.’

‘Can I have some Skittles?’

‘We just had pizza.’ Adam raises his eyebrows.

Luke had taken them to Zizzi’s after swimming and the park, but he is not done indulging his nephew yet. ‘Shh, don’t tell Dad. Also, give me the purple ones,’ he whispers loudly and they scurry upstairs giggling.

Adam pulls his coat off and exhales a sudden wave of exhaustion. He had never learned from his own father that love is tiring; that its flipside is fear. All afternoon he has been on edge, scanning faces. He does not know what he had been watching for, over his brother’s shoulder, his son’s head – the pale face, another heart. He does not know. What he knows is that Felix must be kept safe.

Adam rotates his right shoulder, trying to get rid of the stiffness. Then he crosses to the workbench and checks the mould of a small disc pendant bearing ragwort. The mixture has set over the wax.

He crosses and switches on the microwave-sized kiln, then waits for it to get to temperature. His gaze falls on the display board that covers the safe. Adam pulls the board aside and turns the dial through its combination. Ophelia’s gold sits on top of the chest of plastic drawers that hold his raw materials and excess stock, and, carefully, he withdraws it.

At the workbench, he runs his fingers over the links in the necklace, the smooth interior band of the bracelet, the cold face of the opal ring. In his hands they are heavy, and he can feel the softness of their quality.

Ophelia had not worn any jewellery, he realises, not even a watch. He could see her bare wrists peeking out from her coat sleeves. Adam puts on his glasses and lifts the ring to the light. He doubts she has put these items against her skin, not since girlhood. He tries to imagine them on her but cannot. He finds he cannot remember her face, only her copper hair, and the coldness in his chest. And her anger.

Her anger had startled him – flung stones, sharp words – not because it had been directed at him, but because it had cut through him and past him and as aimed at something far beyond and unforgivable.

The indicator on the kiln makes a soft click. Adam packs the ring, the bracelet, the necklace, and returns them to the safe.

Above him, two pairs of feet clomp about, one heavy and one light. Suddenly, he cannot wait to join them. He places the flask in the kiln. His eyes linger for a moment on the window, then he goes upstairs.

A few leaves cling on, trying to emulate their evergreen cousins. In the dusk, the path is just visible as patches of trodden grey among the greens and browns of decomposing leaves, and Ophelia follows it, remembering the direction it takes.

Morrow Wood is small though as a child it had been vast and unending. If she chose, she could walk its full circumference in an hour now. But it has retained what it once had, in its dark-fingered trees and the hollows that appear from nowhere along the path; in the brambles that snatch; the pungent stalks and docks that fall underfoot; in the promise that beyond the next tree, there is something. Ophelia listens to her own footfall and the blackbirds calling. The gulls interrupt frequently, dislocated, visible above even when the sea that sits at the east edge of the forest is missing from view.

‘You mustn’t stop every two steps, Ophelia. We’ll never get anywhere if you do.’

‘What’s this one, Mummy?’

‘I don’t know, darling. Don’t pick it. It’s another weed.’

She wonders why they come out for a walk if they aren’t to look at anything, aren’t to touch anything, aren’t to run anywhere for the sheer joy of running. At least on the beach Mummy lets her fish in rock pools and draw endless worlds in the sand while she works on her sketches and watercolours.

‘Why don’t you paint in the woods, Mummy?’

Her mother’s lovely face creases at this. She gives it real thought. ‘The light isn’t… isn’t right. And the smell.’

‘You can’t smell paintings though,’ she persists, and her mother shakes her head.

‘It’s too gothic. The movement is wrong. There needs to be water.’

‘Does Daddy put the paintings in his gallery when they’re done?’

Mummy flicks her head irritably. ‘Move those chubby legs now, come on, I need to cook tea when we get back.’

‘Was Red Riding Hood a real person?’

‘Come along, Ophelia.’

Ophelia climbs a steep slope, slightly breathless. Had Dad come with them that time? Or had it been one of the holidays they took when he was too busy working, too busy to take the time off to go abroad, but keen that his girls have some fun?

Ophelia looks around and tries to get her bearings. The pictur-esque beach-side cottage they used to rent is long gone, replaced by more profitable, more anonymous holiday apartments, but the Neo Gothic folly must still be here in the woods.

It has been two months since she moved to Morrow-on-Sea, and this is the first time she has allowed herself to follow the tower’s beckoning call. All the years of self-destructive decisions have made her hesitant to trust her impulses, but today, she needs this.

There is a fork in the path, and she takes the more well-trodden of the tracks. It is more sheltered here than at the sea edge, and she unwinds the huge scarf she had bundled on top of her coat.

The woods smell strange, distinctive.

Ophelia agrees with this now she is older, in fact, about the age that her mother had been then. Inseparable from the fresh air is the musty underpinning of rot and moss and rhizome, and sea salt that has become trapped. But this excites Ophelia. It is as potent as the sea. She wonders how her mother could not create something here. She forges on, determined that the folly cannot hide forever in such a small area.

At head height on a tree, she passes a rime of honey-gold oozing from a fungus. She stops to look at it. It glistens, eager to be in the open. Perhaps there is gold hidden in the folly tower too. She has never been inside.

She will write it.

The sky begins to mizzle again, not strong enough to put a hood up, but enough to wet the face and cling in her hair. It has been 20 minutes now, and there is a strange and constant suspense in her movement, expecting at each break in the trees to see the faux-medieval tower, but being disappointed time after time.

Then it appears, from one moment to the next, grey stone rupturing the sky. Ophelia stops at the treeline of the clearing. Yes, this is it. In the purple-orange dusk. This is the image she has carried with her since childhood, in front of her again. She feels the pull in her stomach.

She had dreamed of it, when she was young. In her waking life, populated with princesses, dragons, fairies, witches. And in her sleeping, where it loomed with indistinct meaning, somewhere between fantasy and nightmare. Every summer she had come back to it, trying to understand what it meant and why it had rooted strongly in her, until they had not come again.

The knight rushed to the lady, but he was too late to break the spell. The wicked stepmother’s curse had caught up with her at last, and she was doomed to spend a hundred years as the wind that blew through the valley, and the rain that fell, and the stars that shone down on it. And the knight took to one knee, and pledged that there he would remain for a hundred years, to feel her stroke his cheek on a breezy morning, to know the raindrops run down his palms, and to bathe in the light of the stars.’

Adam lets Felix take the scuffed book of fairy tales from him to pour over the pictures. This one is an ethereal watercolour. The woman gossamer, swept long, holding her willow shape for the last moments before she falls to enchantment. The knight is upon his knee, sword planted in the ground.

‘Did you read this when you were little?’ his son asks, amazed that something could be so old.

‘Yes. It was my favourite.’ Adam can still feel the cotton covers of his duvet and all the hours he lay in bed reading, dimly aware of the sound of his father downstairs, scratching line after line onto architectural diagrams. In his own room, Luke must have slept, or perhaps he was reading too.

Felix wriggles deeper into the covers, delighted to be in Adam’s double bed while Uncle Luke borrows his. He rolls himself into a sausage with the duvet. ‘Why are the step-mums always baddies?’

‘In these stories?’ The question takes Adam unawares. ‘I don’t know. I guess in the old days people didn’t always have a lot of money, a lot of food. Times were hard. If – if someone lost their mother, and their father remarried, perhaps they were worried they’d be left out, that everything would go to the step-mum, the new children. There might be jealousy. It’s not like that in real life, not now.’

‘There’s enough food?’ Felix asks from within the duvet.

‘Yeah. And enough love. It’s not a limited supply. You can love lots of people.’

‘What about wolves? They’re baddies too.’

Adam lies on his stomach next to Felix and pretends to roll him off the side of the bed, catching him before he falls and pulling him back on. Felix shrieks with glee.

‘I’m not calming you down before bed, am I?’

‘No. Do it again!’

Adam does. ‘Wolves. There used to be lots of forests in Europe, lots of wolves. Which, if you have sheep and every-thing – live in the countryside – then that would be scary.’

‘So they made them baddies in stories?’

‘Yeah. Come on, lie with your head on the pillow now. You can’t sleep like that.’

Felix snuggles into the hollow of his dad’s shoulder and rests his head there. Adam closes his eyes and feels the familiar weight, the steadiness of the little body breathing. For a moment, his own body relaxes. Then Adam kisses his crown. ‘Are you looking after Mum?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Listening to her. Helping her out at bedtime.’

He feels Felix nod, eager to please. Immediately, Adam regrets it. He shouldn’t ask his son to carry the burden of his sins. It is not Felix’s fault that Julia manages four of the seven bedtimes a week. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console. It had been Aunt Bridget’s favourite prayer.

‘Okay. Sleep tight. Love you.’ Adam reaches over and turns out the bedside lamp. He feels Felix hesitate. ‘What is it?’

‘Can you stay until I fall asleep?’

‘Yeah. Okay.’

To Morrow-on-Sea, to Morrow-on-Sea,

To the gulls with their cries, and the wind whistling free.

The refrain echoes and echoes. The tower in the woods has thawed something.

Ophelia takes the steep cliff path down onto the beach, avoiding the black patches which could be bladderwrack or might be dog shit. The council have turned off the streetlights on the beachfront to save money off-season, but the moon is up now and enough to walk by, reflected in the pale brightness of the sand and shingle.

In the near darkness, she moves with that ease she finds with the erasure of her own body when she cannot see it, when she can only hear her own thoughts in the rush and turn of the waves. It all comes then, the words and pictures. They move with her, seep into her bodiless body and fill it up with the meaning that has escaped her, until she knows all that she needs to and drinks it up with the wind and cold and salt. The water breaks against a groyne and throws spray onto her skin. She stops and scribbles in her notebook; she will decipher it in the morning.

Ophelia moves with a sort of restless relentlessness over the uneven sand, until something glints and catches her eye. Someone has left a sacrifice of stones and driftwood, like a miniature burial mound. What would she bury? On the very top is a piece of sea glass. She picks it up and runs it between thumb and finger. Green and worn smooth at the edges. She had collected a hundred of these when she was young, and she wonders whether it was a child or an adult who left it here as an offering to the sea. It is a generous gift.

Fury burns her in an instant and she hurls the shard into dark water.

‘Why are you giving me these? These are all pieces of wedding jewellery.’

‘But Ophelia, darling, you’ve never shown any interest in gett-ing married. How will I be able to give them to you otherwise?’ Her mother tucks back her silver hair. ‘They’ll look so lovely on your fair skin.’

‘Don’t be like that, Ophy,’ her dad intervenes half-heartedly.

It is another beautiful sacrifice her mother has made, another piece of selflessness to be admired.

‘I’m more than a mirror to reflect you,’ she hisses, feeling the familiar flood of yearning and estrangement, ‘you didn’t have to be like this. I wish you’d kept painting after me.’

‘What does that have to do with anything?’ Marina flushes.

‘Now, come on, Ophelia, your mother is doing a very generous thing here.’ Charles becomes stern.

‘You could have chosen differently. We could both have been happier.’

Marina darkens. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Ophelia turns away.

Marina rearranges something inside and brushes a tear from her eye. She gathers a gentle smile and rests a hand on her daughter’s arm. ‘I only wanted to make you happy.’

Charles looks at her with adoration.

‘Jesus, it’s knackering. I mean, it’s fun, I love it. But how do you look after a child every weekend?’ Luke lies back on the sofa and looks at the ceiling. Adam tips his head back too.

‘I know. And I don’t even get the weekday grind. The school run. The mental load.’

‘You do the dentist appointments and whatever though, right?’

‘Yeah. I do what I can. My work is flexible. Hers isn’t.’

Luke drops his head sideways to look at him. ‘You’re doing well. You’re doing right. By both of them.’

Adam looks back at the ceiling. ‘Mm.’

They sit in comfortable silence for a while, listening to the churn and break of the waves outside.

‘No more hearts today?’ Luke asks lightly.

‘No. Nothing. Maybe I dreamed yesterday.’

The wind rises and drops; they can hear it in the sea. Finally, Luke stirs. ‘What do you think it would have been like if Mum had lived?’

Adam thinks about this. ‘Guess it would depend if she was like Aunt Bridget, or if she was like Dad.’

‘Maybe Dad wouldn’t have been like Dad if Mum hadn’t died. Might have been a bit more joyful,’ Luke searches the air with his hands, ‘less of a dick.’

Adam snorts. ‘Hard to imagine, really. Remember when I broke my arm?’

‘I remember,’ Luke sighs. After all, he had been the one to pick the crying ten-year-old off the pavement and guide him to their father in his study – always his brother’s keeper.

What are you doing climbing trees, Adam? I’ve told you, your irresponsible behaviour has consequences not just for yourself, but for others. We’ll have to go to A&E now, and take valuable time out of my day and the doctor’s. And Luke, you ought to have stopped him – you’re his older brother.

‘Do you remember Mum at all?’ Adam asks.

‘No more than you. An impression of warmth and a nice smell. Love. But maybe I superimposed that later.’ Luke smooths his bright hair. ‘I wonder if she might have taught us more.’

Adam frowns at the ceiling. ‘About what?’

‘I don’t know. Feelings. Relationships maybe.’

‘Are you wondering if it would be different with Becca?’

Luke examines the pendant lamp minutely.

Adam’s heart contracts. ‘You know you deserve to be treated better?’

His brother keeps staring at the lamp. ‘I know,’ he says quietly.

‘Don’t go back this time. She’ll keep hurting you.’ There is a lump in Adam’s throat. It gets harder when he sees the crinkles at the edges of Luke’s eyes. Adam knows the conclusion is foregone.

‘Love doesn’t make sense. I need her.’

They can hear the white horses breaking themselves against the sand.

Luke sits up and shakes it off. ‘Anyway, you charging for these sessions or what, Freud?’

‘Fuck off.’

The alarm goes on Adam’s phone. ‘Kiln cycle is done. I’m going to switch it off for the night. If Felix wakes, tell him to go back to bed, I’ll be in soon.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

Adam takes the stairs quietly and pushes back dark hair that pales with every new grey. Irish twins, Luke is only ten months older than him, but Adam wonders if their mother’s death had affected Luke more, since by then his brother had been a toddler. Probably they have both been fucked by it, Luke has only better realised how, and has accepted that he will return again and again to a woman whose affection changes with the weather.

The goldsmith flicks the light on in the shop. The face is at the window.

Pale.

Hand cupped around ravenous eyes.

They pull back, but fear and anger start a sudden bitter coursing, and Adam is shouting to stop. He runs across the shop floor and undoes the door chain as quickly as he can. He is out into the street and under the security light, looking left and right at empty night.

‘What do you want?’ Adam shouts, then lowers his voice because Felix is asleep above. ‘Why did you send me a heart? Why take the bear?’

He crosses the pavement and with a glance to check the tide is not in, climbs over the seawall, drops down to the concrete ramp below, and sprints onto the beach.

‘Come back,’ he spins and scans the sand for figures. ‘I’m not angry,’ he yells, and curses himself for sounding angry. ‘I just want to know what you want.’ His voice reverberates in the empty air, bouncing off salt particles. ‘What do you want? Leave us alone.’

Adam takes a guess and runs away from the cliffs topped by Morrow Wood and towards the cove that has a path up to the town. He is dragged forward by compulsion, by the need to know, to protect Felix from whoever is haunting them, and it pulls him over the uneven sand minute after minute until his legs ache and his lungs are made sore by the freezing, rough air. All the while, he searches for the man whose face had been filled with its own compulsion.

In the moonlight, patches of beach appear quickly, shadows promising that if he keeps moving, he will find his man, yet leaving the promise broken over and again.

When, finally, he can run no further, Adam folds over with his hands on his knees. He hates to give it up, and lifts his head to scan the shore one last time.

Ophelia looks back at him from the steps cut next to the cliff.

Ophelia had drawn back to the steps at the sound of shouting, ready to leave, until the long shape of Adam Conlan stumbled out of the sand. He is breathless and wears only a jumper against the freezing night. At his neck is gooseflesh. He has been running – she can see the rapid rise and fall of his chest.

The goldsmith meets her gaze. His eyebrows knit together, and he appraises her in unsurprised surprise. He stays there, doubled over, for a few seconds, counting her features, and she is confronted with the knowledge of herself. The self she had dissolved in the dark and her writing. It hurts.

For a moment, Adam’s eyes switch to look past her. He is searching for his object. Ophelia wonders what it is. She opens her mouth to ask, and closes it again. His eyes shift back to her. He can see the bleached, crumbling marrow of her bones.

Then he straightens, nods once, and turns to walk back down the beach towards his home. She exhales and the breath turns to vapour.

Once upon a time, there was a pair of princes, one as bright as the sun, the other as dark as a moonless night. Both were honourable young men who pleased their father greatly. But only one could inherit the crown, and the king had long ago decided it would be the older and fairer of the two.

Pitying his younger son, the king told him that if he married a princess, he would bestow great riches upon him, and so it was that the younger son set out on his horse.

Before long, the prince found himself in a dark wood with only a sparrow for company. There he slew a wolf, a boar, and a witch. As soon as he had done so, the sparrow was released from its enchantment and turned back into a princess, and the two were married amid great rejoicing.

Now the prince had a beautiful bride, and his own father fulfilled his promise and made them rich beyond measure. So happy was the prince, that he had the head of the boar mounted above the bed in his chamber, and the pelt of the wolf turned into a fine hunting jacket.

In no time at all, the couple had a child, whom they named Felicity for the joy she brought, and to celebrate, a great hunt was organised. The prince wore his new wolfskin jacket for the first time and rode out with his men and his dogs so that they might provide for the Christening feast. Yet when they caught sight of a hind, the prince was possessed of a wild and savage fury, such as belonged to an animal. He sprang from his horse and chased after the deer on foot, sinking his teeth into its haunches.

When, next day, the hunt continued, the prince again leapt from his horse, but this time the deer escaped, so he turned upon the hounds and ripped the throat from his favourite. By this time, his eyes had become yellow, and his teeth long and cruel.

That evening, a great feast was held and wine flowed freely, until the prince retired with his wife, who was more in love with him than ever. That night, howling was heard as though from within the walls of the castle, and no one slept a wink.

In the morning, the nursemaid went to the cradle of the baby princess, and it was empty, save for her cap and a drop of blood.

And the moral of the tale is to be careful of the skin you wear, for it is better to be a poorly clothed human, than to don the pelt of a wolf.

Luke is waiting by the window when Adam staggers in, his muscles suddenly seized up with the cold. He tells him what happened but omits Ophelia, the woman who wants to sell her mother’s gold, who appears like a sign on the shore.

‘For Christ’s sake. He sent you a heart. He’s been watching the shop; taken your work.’ In silhouette, Luke is an angry Norse god, so large that he overshadows long, lean Adam. ‘What are you thinking chasing this madman? I thought you’d outgrown this impulsive shit. He could have attacked you – had a knife, anything.’

Adam flinches. They both know what Luke is remembering. Of all the turbulent nights of Adam’s earlier days, Luke had been there for only a handful. But they had been enough, and there might have been no more if Luke had not been there when Adam had a knife pulled on him by the boyfriend of a woman he had been fooling around with. Luke had calmly stepped between them, apologised for his brother, and led him from harm.

Adam looks at Luke’s disappointed face, and it hurts all the more because Adam had thought he had changed too.

Luke looks stern a moment longer, but that is all he can manage, and then he exhales. ‘Jesus, drama just follows you, doesn’t it?’

Adam takes the peace offering. ‘We aren’t all stoic research chemists.’

‘Bloody arty cunt.’ Luke throws an arm around him. ‘Just – don’t do it again, okay?’ He sighs. ‘I need you in one piece. So does Felix.’

Adam clasps his arm. ‘You’re right. I promise.’

When Adam climbs into bed, Felix rolls over in his sleep and snuggles into his side, and Adam holds him close, still shaking from the cold and adrenaline. His intention had been to protect his son, but the risk he had taken was too great.

Your irresponsible behaviour has consequences not just for yourself, but for others.

The smell of Felix’s warm, sweaty hair tickles his nose, and Adam knows his life is not his own; his mistakes have the power to harm his son, and when he is so faulty, the thought is terrifying. Whatever Adam’s part in sparking these events, Felix cannot pay for the sins of the father.

In the dark, he opens his phone and sends DI Kent an email. He tries to close his eyes, but they open themselves again, and the hours drip past with suffocating stillness; sleep the friend whose visit never comes. He listens as Felix’s breath escapes in quiet whispers, and it reminds him of all those exhausted hours he had held Felix as a baby. Finally, his son murmurs in his sleep and turns away.

Sunday dawns reluctantly, and Adam rises early to make coffee and watch the sea from the living room window. The tide is right in and the weather has turned for the worse. Rain scatters against the window and the whole view lurches in grey.

Slowly, Luke then Felix rises. They breakfast. Luke says it is too wet to go for a walk, and they drive to the supermarket and stop for a coffee. The carousel turns in Adam’s mind all the while. Bear, heart, eyes, autumn hair. Sand, gold, windowpane.

Luke cooks a roast for lunch and Adam watches him slowly fall silent, and knows that in his usual domesticity, Becca makes the gravy. They sit down late to eat. Adam declines the beef. The smell of the juices is too dank and familiar. They play a few rounds of Uno.

Adam reminds Felix to pack his school bag and check he has his uniform for the next day. Luke subtly checks his phone more and more often. At 4 o’clock, he says he should get going and wraps Felix in his arms. ‘Get Dad to bring you to Oxford one weekend soon, okay?’

Felix holds back his tears and nods.

‘Go carefully.’ Adam embraces his brother, and under his breath tells him to return if he needs to.

‘Take care.’

They wave to him from the flat window until his car has wound away.

Adam cooks tea and gets Felix ready for the next day. Exhausted, again and again, the goldsmith pushes away the knowledge that tomorrow, Ophelia returns.

‘You’re so stressed, Dad,’ Felix chides as he makes great hops across the wet sand, looking back to see how far he has travelled.

‘Mate, I drop you off one morning a week. I can’t get you there late.’

‘Would Mum tell you off?’ Felix looks curious.

‘No, she wouldn’t tell me off. But she would be right to.’

‘We’re always early to breakfast club. Mum says school is my third house.’

‘She’s not wrong,’ Adam admits. His son doesn’t sound unhappy about it. ‘Are the kids in her class nice?’

Felix considers the distant and grown-up world of year fours. ‘Yeah.’

‘Do you ever play with them?’

‘No, Dad, they’re in Juniors.’

‘What are you in?’

‘Infants.’

‘And you can’t play together?’

‘They eat lunch after us,’ Felix says scornfully.

The day is cloudy but dry and when the goldsmith carefully scans the beach and the rocks, he can see a long way in each direction. Apart from a handful of familiar dog-walkers, they are by themselves.

They reach the cliff steps where Ophelia had been two nights before, and Felix clambers up so fast, Adam calls to him, ‘The steps are damp, okay?’

‘Mum lets me do them two at a time.’

‘Right.’ Adam has never thought of himself as an anxious parent, but slowly the idea is opening up to him.

They reach the top of the stairs and take the alley between bungalows to arrive at the school gates.

‘Morning, Felix,’ chirrups the blonde TA on duty.

‘Morning, Mrs Ruthers,’ he chirps back.

Adam walks him round to the entrance of the hall, where Felix’s mother is waiting. Felix runs across the playground when he sees her, and she opens her arms wide and scoops him up. It is the best part of Adam’s week, seeing the love these two have for each other. Each time, he witnesses a gentle miracle.

Julia plops her son back down and picks Leonard’s fur off his green school jumper. ‘Good weekend with Dad?’

‘Uncle Luke came, it was the best!’ Felix dances, holding her hand, ‘we had pizza.’

‘I didn’t know Luke was coming.’ Julia looks up at Adam. Her shrewd brown eyes ask a question, and imperceptibly, Adam nods.

‘Yes, well, it was a nice surprise. How was the spa weekend?’ he asks.

‘Good. Relaxing,’ she says efficiently, so wholly a teacher, from the hair twisted back into a plastic claw clip, to the calf-high flat boots that she wears from October until April each year. He feels a surge of warmth towards her.

‘I’m glad. Well, I’ve got to get back to work now Fee.’ Adam kneels and his son throws his arms around his neck. He squeezes tight and kisses his head. ‘See you Friday.’

William Kent checks his emails. He frowns and forwards Adam Conlan’s message.

Culvers – what do you think about this? I’m uneasy.

Ophelia wakes like a flicked switch. There is never any drowsi-ness or confusion. She is asleep, and then she is not. She swivels and rolls off the mattress onto the floor. She pulls on socks and walks through to the neatly swept living area to put the coffee pot on the hob.

The water heats, percolates, hisses, and against the rich and rising smell of espresso, Ophelia sets out the day ahead with the order she has learned to impose on herself. She needs to pack lunch, then exercise. She did not finish at the library on Saturday; she will return today, after the goldsmith’s. She will need to stop at the shops on the way home to buy ingredients for tea.

Ophelia pours her first coffee and gets out a saucepan for porridge. She cannot stand the chattering of the radio, but opens the window a crack for fresh air, and hears the town waking up. Unconsciously, she checks the sill for a ginger cat.

As Ophelia eats her breakfast, she makes a salad with leftovers, packs an apple and a banana, fills a bottle with water. These are deposited in her backpack with her notebook, her ID. Does she need anything else for the goldsmith’s? She wonders if he will hand her cash or whether she will need her bank details ready. She orders and reorders herself into the safe existence of boundaries.

Finally, she pulls on leggings and a vest, and gooseflesh bursts onto her unsunned skin, but then she opens up her laptop, and begins to follow a yoga video. As she leans forward into a downward dog, her vest gapes open and she can see the small black chasm between near-absent breasts. She breathes deeply through her nose. She is too sinewy to embody the soft, red, violet grace of her mother. To be the muse as well as the artist that Marina had been. She lowers her hips to hold a plank, and stays there, as unwavering as the instructor on the screen.

Every day when she exercises, she thinks of her mother’s body, so perfect; loved and persecuted by its owner. Her own body. She wishes she had no ambition towards beauty – is that possible? When had she ever learned anything but at her mother’s feet? An unwilling extension of her. All those years, all those childhood years, and the teenaged ones that had crept miserably after. The toxicity of feeling, entanglement, dependency, resentment. What she had heard and argued about, read, painted, written. What happened here in Morrow. When in her twenties she had fled to Italy and sought difference and comfort and made only the same empty, restless life over again. There is nothing but the past and there is nothing in the past she wants.

She is beginning to sweat now, to feel the lactic ache of the muscles in her arms, thighs, calves. She lunges and lifts and bends and holds. Slowly but surely, the movement does its work. As endorphins flood her brain, the words slow. Now she knows that she does not move only because her mother abhors fatness; there is also this, there is a moment’s peace.

The sun takes mercy on Morrow and, although it has not yet broken the frost on the windowsills and gardens, it sits high and bright in the sky, watching the morning’s progress.

Ophelia leaves her flat and the run-down high street. She follows an invisible thread down the concrete steps onto the beach, across the sand, towards Adam Conlan, to whom she will sell her family’s gold.

A simple transaction.

It will be good to have it done. To owe nothing. When they next meet wordlessly on the night sands, there will be nothing to say. She pulls the sleeves of her thick jumper over her fingertips as the wind strokes and whips the coast.

There is the goldsmith’s studio above the seawall, at the near end of the rank of boutiques and antiques shops that line the good end of the promenade, the end that has saved itself from Morrow’s slow decline. They are Edwardian buildings, pastel fronts; charmingly modernised inside so that the light spills onto exposed floorboards and high ceilings.

Ophelia climbs the ramp to the empty pavement, quiet, because the other shops will not open until 10 o’clock at least, if they bother to open at all on an off-season Monday. More unsettled than she can understand, she presses the buzzer and stands back to wait. She pulls her duffle coat tighter and waits under whooping gulls. To Morrow-on-Sea, to Morrow-on-Sea.

There is no answer. She buzzes again. The light on the security camera blinks down at her, catching her small shifting form, the strange grit she can feel under her skin.

She hears no sign of movement, and peers through the barred window. The lights are not on, and the interior is hard to make out, but it is messier than she remembers. Adam had struck her as precise.

Ophelia takes a step back and tilts her head up. He almost certainly lives in the flat above the shop so she walks around to the alley to look for the entrance.

The door gapes open-mouthed, begging, pleading. The frame is splintered where the locks have been gouged at the top and bottom, and the face of the wall is scarred by a thick, clotted smear.

Ophelia’s stomach hollows.

The wind gusts down the alley. Salt and blood hang interchangeably in the air, and she cannot tell which is in her mouth and in her nose. Something lifts and falls gently. She steps closer. A scrap of skin, unable to shed itself from the wide bloodstain.

Through the open door, the hallway is unlit, breadcrumbed by wood splinters. She can see another door barely clinging to its frame, beyond which is Adam Conlan’s workshop, and silence. Ophelia hears her own heart, her own breath.

She looks around, assesses, decides. She dials the emergency services and leaves her phone on the ground in the alley.

Ophelia’s gold sits in open boxes. He has examined, weighed, recorded it, prepared a receipt. Worth eight thousand pounds altogether, and it would sit in the palm of his hand. This necklace will melt down to form part of a commission from a regular client. The bracelet is easy to recycle. It is the opal in the ring that presents the challenge, the potential. He examines its milky, blue-veined sheen. It contains so many possibilities, infinite new stories for itself.

Adam is restless but forces himself through the motions of a normal Monday morning. Planning for the week ahead; emails and designs to send; people to appease. He is in demand, his dealer Moira says, can he squeeze in another commission, is there anything new to sell?

DI Kent has replied to say he will visit later in the day, to call 999 if the face at the window appears again. The message is reassuring, like the policeman himself. Yet Adam’s eyes flick upwards again and again to the window, watching for the approach of a golden-red head. Fearing and desiring to see it. Wondering if, instead, he will see eyes in a pale face. The door is locked.

When his phone goes, he jumps.

‘Jesus.’ He picks it up. ‘Hello, Adam Conlan speaking.’

‘Mr Conlan? Hello, it’s Mrs Beal at St Mary’s. Nothing serious, but poor Felix has been sick.’

‘Felix? What’s happened?’

‘He’s vomited a couple of times now. Looking very wan, poor sausage. Ms Becker asked us to call you to pick him up.’

‘Yeah, yeah, of course. I’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes.’

Adam’s mind leaps back to Felix little more than an hour ago, hugging his mum outside breakfast club. He had seemed his usual sunshine self. Poor kid.

Disorientated, the goldsmith closes his laptop. There is nothing out on his bench except Ophelia’s gold. He closes the boxes and quickly slips them into the drawer underneath.

The school secretary spots him through the reception window before he even buzzes, and waves him in cheerfully.

Adam tries not to sound panicked. ‘Is Felix okay?’

‘Little poppet has been sick a few times. It’ll just be water left now, I expect.’ She gives her matronly smile and bustles Adam down the hallway to a cupboard labelled Sick Room. The door is ajar, and he can smell the acrid tang before he pushes it fully open. Felix sits propped up with pillows on a cot, clutching a cardboard bowl. His mother is wedged in the chair that just about fits alongside.

‘Hi Adam, thanks for coming,’ Julia greets him.

‘No problem. How you feeling, Fee?’ He sits on the bed and pushes Felix’s flaxen locks out of his eyes. His forehead is sweaty to the touch.

‘Not very well, Dad,’ he replies feebly, and Adam feels his heart crack in his chest.

‘Ah well, let’s get you home, shall we? Lots of telly on the sofa. An ice lolly later, if you’re up to it? You’ve got some in the freezer, haven’t you?’ He turns to Julia.

‘Of course. There are always ice lollies in the freezer.’ Julia reaches out and strokes Felix’s head too. ‘Brave boy.’ For a moment, they look like a normal family.

Then Julia lays a hand on Adam’s arm, ‘I’ve just got to speak to Dad for a moment,’ she tells Felix, and they step into the corridor. ‘He didn’t eat any dairy this morning, did he?’

‘No, course not. Oat milk and cornflakes. Poor guy.’

‘Stomach bug then,’ she sighs, ‘no shortage of those around at the moment.’ Julia, a school veteran, never seems to get ill. ‘I’ll come home at lunchtime. Mrs Morris will manage PE on her own this afternoon.’

Adam goes back and scoops Felix up in his arms, and his son nestles a tired head on his chest, bowl balanced in his lap. The office ladies melt at the sight of Felix; the school’s shared child. ‘Feel better, poppet.’

How many people love his son, Adam thinks for a moment, and amid the exhaustion and unease, is profoundly grateful.

Julia’s house is round the corner. Close enough to carry a vomiting child to. They pause once for Felix to retch in Adam’s arms, but nothing comes up. The key lives next to Adam’s own on the key ring, and he lets them in, depositing Felix on the sofa. He covers his son with a blanket and peels the shoes and socks off his feet.

Julia comes home earlier in the end, after mid-morning break. Adam knows that what makes her formidable as a teacher is the secret capacity of her heart, and nothing occupies it more than her son.

Away from the neat suburban terrace he checks his phone. He had messaged Ophelia to cancel and apologise but she hasn’t replied. Overhead the seagulls wheel, and he turns towards the beach to walk the shoreline home, inhaling the fresh salt air and clearing out the central heating and the lingering smell of sick.

Adam walks quickly with his head down, hands tucked into his pockets, shielding himself from the wind. There are other shoe prints in the sand, and, unthinking, he follows them home. It is not until he is nearly across the beach that Adam raises his head and sees the inappropriate gaiety of the blue and red lights that reel over the front of his shop and onto the sand. He runs the last few yards up the slipway. Two police cars and an ambulance are parked on the pavement and a small crowd of onlookers mill behind a cordon.

Felix.

His first thought is twinned with the relief that he is safe at Julia’s. But confusion and dread traipse close behind. Ophelia.

Once upon a time, there was a man of means who had everything he wanted in the world, save for a wife and child. This lack frustrated him, and so one day, he went to the finest sculptor in the town, and bade him sculpt him what he was missing, ‘inset with hearts of gold, and tongues of silver too, so that they may speak to please me, and love me best.’ The sculptor was a godly man, and pleaded that it was against nature to create living, breathing creatures. But the rich man became angry and threatened the sculptor, who was afraid to defy such an influential person.

The sculptor crafted a wife who was fine and fair, and lovely beyond comparison. The child was sweet as summer cherries. And each had a heart of gold and a tongue of silver. The wealthy man was delighted, and together they lived happily for many months. Everything his wife did was charming, and everything his child did gave him the greatest pleasure. They spoke only to please him and loved him best of all things.

‘Truly,’ he said, after their first Michaelmas together, ‘there can be no happier man than I.’

And so that no man might be happier than the one they loved best, his wife and child cut out his heart.

They lead Adam Conlan in and Ophelia shivers like someone has walked over her grave.

‘It’s not your blood,’ she says.

‘No.’ His tone is strained. ‘And it’s not yours?’

‘No.’ She looks at her own body unthinkingly, then back at him. ‘You’ve been robbed.’

Adam turns away from Ophelia and notices the glass on the floor for the first time, and his relief dies at the hands of confusion. ‘I don’t—’

DI Kent steps forward. ‘Mr Conlan, I’m glad you’re safe. I’ve been worried about you.’

Adam isn’t sure if he is surprised to see the policeman. He nods vacantly, struggling with this new world. ‘My work is gone.’

‘Yes. I’m very sorry, I believe it is.’

Adam feels a child’s desire to ask him to explain everything: what has happened, what is happening?

Ophelia watches Adam. Brow furrowed and skin pinched.

Kent surveys them both, a tender presence, more shepherd than guard. ‘Your email – you said someone has been hanging around, peering in through windows? I’m sorry to say that I was right – a rabbit heart in the post was not the end of something. The work that’s gone is gold, I presume?’

Gold. The word is cold in the cold room. ‘The cabinets – there were half a dozen pieces in each.’

‘Hmm. And is it just the pieces in the cabinets that were taken?’

Adam turns in a helpless little circle, then towards the safe. A white-suited technician is fussing over it, the paper suit scuffling like a bride’s silk. They nod permission. He crosses to check it, and finds it still locked. He opens it.

‘Everything is still here. It wasn’t opened. The tools have been left too. All the equipment.’

‘Is that surprising?’ Kent enquires.

Is it? Adam stares again at the empty shelves. Half his soul resides in Felix, and the rest he has dropped in the crucible, piece by piece, and now a stranger has it. He can feel Ophelia’s gaze on him. ‘Maybe? Some of the tools, the machinery, is very expensive. Specialist. There’s a secondary market. But it’s just the work itself that’s gone – the gold that was in the cabinets, not the safe.’

The detective makes a note. ‘Can you take Ms Richards to the station for a formal statement now please, Karim?’

A uniformed officer by the door nods and extends a hand. Adam watches Ophelia rise from her chair, hair moving over her shoulders, clinging to the fibres of her coat. With unexpected grace, she picks a path across the debris to the door where PC Karim assists her over the splinters of wood. For a moment, she looks back at Adam, face unreadable.

William Kent waits until she has gone, then turns to the goldsmith. ‘Ms Richards is a friend?’

Adam shakes his head. ‘Customer. She was selling me her— shit…’ He reaches for the drawer of the workbench. In the split seconds before he pulls it open there are split futures waiting. He has no control over them, and in this blankness, he is almost curious which path it will be.

He opens it. Ophelia’s gold is gone.

His breath hisses out, and the policeman continues to regard him patiently.

This path then.

Adam takes his glasses off and rubs his face. He can feel sharp stubble nicking against his palm.

‘Last week, Ophelia, Ms Richards, came in to sell me some gold she had been given by family – the postman delivered the heart just after she left. I’d told her to come back today – nine o’clock – I’d buy the gold, and keep it safe here until then. I didn’t.’

‘Mm. But you knew her before that?’ asks the neat policeman.

Adam is taken by surprise. ‘No. Barely more than strangers. I’d seen her around locally perhaps, but no, nothing more.’

You would remember Ophelia Richards, Kent thinks, with that hair. And she would remember Adam Conlan too, with his Aran jumper, shearling jacket. Conlan is a man ageing out of cooler youth with rare grace.

Kent lays the barb gently. ‘If she’s little more than a stranger, why did she risk coming in here when she thought you had been attacked?’

‘She came in after all this?’

‘We’ll take a proper statement at the station. But she says she turned up for your appointment and when no one answered at the front, she went round the side. Found the door broken open, bloodstains. She rang emergency services and came in. A good Samaritan to do that for a near stranger. Still, she was lucky no one was inside.’

‘Lucky.’ Adam looks at the shards at his feet.

Kent shrugs and changes direction. ‘Why weren’t you here for your appointment?’

‘Uh,’ Adam tries to focus, ‘my son was sick. I got called to pick him up from school. I took him to his mum’s house and stayed there for a while.’

‘You would usually have been here on a Monday morning?’

‘Yes.’

Kent waits in quiet contemplation.

‘Whose blood is outside?’ Adam asks.

Where will I find tongues of silver and hearts of gold? How can I give life where there should be none? In short, I should not. No, I should not. I will not. No.

And yet – yet I will. A stronger man would refuse and pay the price.

But the price is too, too dear. Too dear to me.

At a word from that gentleman, my business would fail, and my dear wife and children would starve.

To save my own, I will summon a family for him from this block of marble. I will defy the laws of heaven and earth.

What he asks – I can perform.

But where will I find tongues of silver and hearts of gold?

There is a goldsmith. He has made rings for the Queen herself. I will ask him if he will damn himself, as I do.

‘We don’t know who the blood belongs to.’ Kent pockets his notebook. ‘Your camera at the front – how much does that capture?’

‘Not much more than the front step. It starts recording when I set the alarm.’

Kent tilts his head. ‘But there was no alarm going off when we arrived.’

‘Oh.’ He is right. Apart from the quiet professional murmur of police staff and the shrill gulls outside, it is eerily quiet.

Adam picks across the glass to the keypad and turns to Kent. ‘It’s still set. They came through the side entrance for the flat and then broke an internal door to get in here.’ He unlocks the heavy front door and a sharp blip blip warns him to enter the code before the alarm goes off. ‘I don’t think they ever touched the shop door.’

They. The salt air steals through the jamb and the goldsmith feels woozy. Thieves have been here. Someone’s thick blood is on the wall. He wants to sit down, but Kent seems intent on having this interview in the ruins of the studio.

‘You don’t have a camera or an alarm for the residential side?’

‘It’s a small, remote workshop, not Hatton Garden. It was more to deter casual robbery, clumsy stuff from addicts. Insurance were happy enough with the arrangement. Fuck, insurance—’ The implications are all unravelling for Adam now, spinning and unwinding from the metaphysical to the practical.

‘And do you know roughly the value of the work that went missing?’

‘Jesus—,’ he can hear Aunt Bridget tut— ‘maybe fifty to sixty thousand? Less, if you melted it down and just sold the raw material.’

But his soul hadn’t resided in the monetary value. Neither had the worth of Ophelia’s safety.

‘Now tell me again what happened when you saw the face at the window, and every single thing that happened this morning.’

Adam obeys, and Kent listens carefully. By the end, the goldsmith is exhausted. ‘I messaged Ophelia to apologise for missing the appointment and to tell her I would be back soon, but I think you were already here by then.’

‘Yes, I believe Ms Richards’ phone is with PC Karim now.’

‘She’s okay though?’

Kent smiles. ‘Yes, she’s fine.’ He takes hold of Adam’s elbow and guides him out into the fresh air.

Tongues of silver. Hearts of gold.

The sculptor had come, cap in hand, to ask him, caught in the agony of his own perdition. The goldsmith had laughed. ‘What, sir? You thought I would spit at you? Claw at your eyes?’

For the goldsmith was not a man like the sculptor, not a man of flea-bitten conscience. For when, considered the goldsmith, had there ever been a place for conscience in creation?

And so, he had agreed that the sculptor should have the hearts and tongues. That they should have hearts and tongues.

At once, the goldsmith set about his art with the greatest diligence and genius. He sourced the purest gold and silver. He took the utmost care.

But when he carved the moulds for the tongues, he used a cat’s wicked tongue for his model. And when he made the hearts, he studied the hearts of goats and dogs. And when the goldsmith melted the metal in his crucible, the wealthy man cried out in his sleep, for he dreamed that he was doomed.

Charles Perrault had published the first version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in the eighteenth century. Weaving together the stories French peasants told, he had tied them neatly with a bow of literature and morality. There are many types of wolf, Perrault had written, and the most dangerous is the one who is charming.

Ophelia watches Adam Conlan emerge onto the grey steps of Morrow-on-Sea Police Station. He is wearing his shearling jacket, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

‘A lamb died so you could wear that.’ Ophelia climbs down from the wall she has been waiting on.

Adam looks alarmed, then weary. ‘That’s what vanity does, I suppose.’

‘What happened?’ she asks.

‘I have no fucking idea.’ He had said as much in his statement, and again, as he sat with a lukewarm coffee on the police station sofa, and handed over endless details of his life: work, Felix’s school, insurance, Julia; clients, Moira, his dealer. The nothings he knew of the face at the window, the sender of the heart.

He is much taller than her, and Ophelia’s face is tilted up to talk with him. Her features are sharp, hair luminous in the afternoon sun. Adam is suddenly reminded of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings he had once studied.

‘Someone really sent you a heart?’ she asks.

‘Yes. Are you… smiling?’

‘Not deliberately. It’s just very gothic.’

He raises his eyebrows. ‘Well – yeah.’ Then he remembers and his breath rushes out. ‘Your gold is gone. I’d removed it from the safe. I should have locked it up before I left. My son—’

‘He was sick. The PC said. It was taken then?’

‘Your mother’s jewellery, yes.’

‘Mine.’

‘Yes. Fuck, I’m sorry.’

Suddenly she bursts out laughing; silver peals she can’t help escaping her throat. Her mother’s rejected gift, the goldsmith’s best intentions – stolen away.

Adam laughs too and raises a hand to his forehead. He is in a fever dream that will not break.

‘I’ll pay you for it, of course.’

She frowns. ‘It’s gone. You can’t use it.’

‘But I lost it. I told you I’d keep it safe.’

Ophelia raises an eyebrow. ‘You can’t afford to pay me right now.’

He sighs. ‘Maybe not, but that isn’t your fault. Hopefully insurance will pay out quickly. It was worth just over eight thousand.’

Ophelia laughs again, this time in disbelief. ‘My mother gave me eight thousand pounds of jewellery?’ Marina can afford it, of course, but nonetheless she has outdone herself in this round of their ceaseless push-and-pull. Ophelia continues slowly, ‘All right, I’ll take a deposit until the jewellery is found or insurance pays out.’

‘How much?’

‘A story.’

His dark face creases. ‘What? I don’t—’

No, she thinks, there is nothing lupine about him.

‘I found your online portfolio. Some of your work is inspired by fairy tales. Baskets, apples, wolves, stars, boars, those tiny gold rings in a necklace. I want to know what stories they’re telling.’

‘Why would you. You can have a story for free. I owe you money, Ophelia. A lot.’

‘I don’t want your money. I want to know.’

‘That’s not—’ Adam reaches for any anchor he can find.

‘Money can wait.’ Ophelia shifts her backpack onto her shoulder and tucks her hand into her coat pocket. ‘Go back to your shop. Go back to your son.’

So, she waited for him.

William Kent watches their parting from the reflective-filmed window of his office. They make a striking pair.

Adam Conlan walks away in a daze, out of the car park and down the street towards the seafront. Then the top of his head disappears from view.

Well, there is plenty of work for Kent to get on with. A thousand enquiries to begin. All Kent knows for sure is that this crime was premeditated. The use of the side door is proof of that – to know that the shop door was alarmed but that the residential door was not. That through this was an inner door connecting to the shop. No, this was not one of Morrow’s low-skilled vagabonds or desperate addicts; not an opportunist.

The first question is whether whoever it was had intended to find Adam Conlan there, at his usual Monday work. Whether the intention had not only been to take from the goldsmith, but to hurt him. Had this desire been foiled only by a child’s sickness?

The second question is whether Adam Conlan robbed him-self.

Kent sticks his head out of the office and asks PC Culvers to put out a bulletin to all A&Es in Somerset county. Whoever the blood belongs to, they will need medical attention, if they can reach it. It has taken Kent many years to perfect the impression that gore does not disturb him.

‘Right you are,’ comes Culvers’ voice.

And the third question – Ophelia Richards. She is new to the town, yet has been there at every turn in Adam Conlan’s tragedy, and Kent thinks this must be fate or guilt, but is unsure which.

He returns to his desk as his phone chimes, and he looks down at the message. Tea in fridge. You didn’t do bins, arsehole. Long walk on Saturday? x

He grins.

The moon is still full, perhaps at the very beginning of its wane. Ophelia crosses the top of the sand dunes in its light. The wind is sharp and carries loose grains of sand that stick to her lips and hair. She brushes them away and turns to climb back down the other side, towards the beach. If Ophelia cannot sleep, she allows herself to go for a walk, but it is time she gets back now to try again. She places her feet carefully amid the clumps of grass and scrub, feeling the loose sand at the top change and become softer and stickier as she descends the hollow. In the marshy flat at the bottom are rivulets of sea water, and in those, the drowned moon.

‘We’re reading Hamlet in English. Ophelia goes mad and drowns. Isn’t it a bit morbid to name your baby after a drowned woman?’

Marina tuts. ‘Finish your supper, darling.’

‘I don’t like shepherd’s pie.’

‘It took me all afternoon to cook, the least you can do is stop scribbling for a few minutes and eat some.’

Ophelia puts aside the notebook and pushes food around the plate, smushing the mashed potato so that mince pops out from underneath.

‘Stop it. You’re too old to play with your food.’

She puts her fork down and rubs her forefinger along the grain of the walnut dining table. ‘Why Ophelia?’

‘I didn’t name you after the Ophelia in the play. I named you after the Millais painting. It’s one of my favourites, you know that. Besides, you came out with that hair.’

‘But the Millais painting is of the Ophelia from the play. She’s literally drowning in the picture. And she’s not even beautiful and drowning, she’s beautiful because she’s drowning.’

‘Elizabeth Siddal modelled for it, if that makes you feel better. Millais didn’t actually drown someone,’ her mother snaps.

‘Well, duh. So why not name me Elizabeth instead? She was an artist too, you know, she wasn’t just a muse. People forget that. Ruskin thought she was a genius. Rossetti borrowed her ideas and—’

‘I know,’ her mother snarls. ‘I am perfectly aware of how overlooked a woman artist is.’

Ophelia falls silent and scowls at her plate. She drops her fork. ‘I have homework to do.’

‘Fine. Fine.’

Ophelia lets herself back into her flat and removes her wellies and coat. Underneath are the leggings and T-shirt that serve as pyjamas. Right now, her mother will be sound asleep next to her father in their Georgian flat in Clifton, Ophelia’s childhood home. Marina will be in her winter pyjamas, single-breasted brushed cotton, perhaps teal, perhaps in an unexpected print that would suit no one but her. On her bedside table will be one of the classics, or an exhibition catalogue, closed neatly with a bookmark.

Ophelia thinks of the blood on the goldsmith’s wall. She wants to climb in next to her mother and snuggle in her arms.

‘How long will it take you to replace the work that was stolen?’ Kent surveys Adam Conlan’s workshop. The cabinets have been taken away for examination, but otherwise there is no sign that yesterday this place had been robbed. The floor is clear, the tools in their rows upon the walls, and the goldsmith already hard at work when Kent had buzzed.

‘Six months, maybe. I already have commissions that need completing so replacing the lost pieces will need to fit around those.’ He wonders where the pieces are now, in whose hands they are pulsing. ‘Do you think they’ll have melted them down by now?’

The workshop radiator is on, and Kent removes his scarf and wool coat. ‘They’d be stupid not to. Melt them down and no one can identify the metal as stolen. Far less risky than holding on to them whole. I’m sorry.’

Adam knows he can remake each object, but still feels a sense of loss.

Leonard makes himself known, slinking in with a loud meow and winding himself around Kent’s legs.

‘Hello there, kitten,’ the policeman leans down and scratches the cat under his chin and behind the ears. Leonard purrs. ‘I hope you weren’t scared yesterday?’

‘Leonard, no. He’ll get fur all over your suit.’

It is too late, there is already hair on Kent’s navy trouser legs, but the immaculate policeman does not seem to mind in the least.

‘Oh well.’ He straightens up. ‘You seem surprisingly fresh today, if you don’t mind me saying.’

Adam shrugs. ‘Nothing to do apart from go back to work.’

He had slept like he was dead. He had dropped in on Felix with more ice lollies, and found him pale but improving. A twenty-four-hour bug, Julia said, before Adam told her about the robbery and she had become a well-meaning inquisition. ‘What if you had been there? What if Felix hadn’t been sick? What if he had been with you?’ It was a fear that Adam had been trying to prevent budding and he had walked home while it blossomed and unfurled, then stayed up until two in the morning sweeping up the shards of his shop. When he had gone to bed, he had fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep. Perhaps his body had known what he needed to survive.

Kent surveys the place with his usual sanguinity. ‘I’m obliged to let you know that your insurance company have asked for full access to the case.’

‘Oh.’ Adam had sent a short email that morning, expecting to be phoned for a thousand details. ‘Is that standard?’

Kent shrugs and goes back to winning the affections of Leonard, who shamelessly rolls over to ask for more.

The penny drops. Kent watches from the corner of his eye as he keeps tickling the cat’s head.

‘They think I was involved?’

‘They have to examine all eventualities before they make a payout.’

‘Why would I steal my own work?’

Kent waits for him to work through the logic. Adam’s shoulders sink. ‘An insurance job. I could melt down the gold, claim the insurance, and use the gold again without anyone realising. Make sixty thousand overnight.’

‘That would be one way to do it.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘I reserve all judgement,’ says the policeman.

And he does. The goldsmith certainly doesn’t seem the type. But Kent has been a copper long enough to have left certainty behind. Someone knew how to avoid the camera and alarm. Indeed, they only have Conlan’s word for it that the robbery took place while he was out collecting his son. What is there to say that he had not staged the burglary before he left? Either way, Kent will determine the truth to the law’s satisfaction.

Adam’s reality is shifting like tide sands. He sinks onto his work stool, and Kent feels sorry for him. He is intensely likeable, somehow.

‘If you didn’t do it, the evidence will bear that out and insurance will have to pay. Just sit tight, all right?’

Adam breathes heavily. For the first time in eight years, he feels the urge to smoke.

‘Do you have someone you can talk to about all this? Friends? Your ex?’ Kent asks.

‘She isn’t my ex. Uh – my brother. I’ll talk to Luke.’ Yet somehow the idea of telling Luke horrifies Adam most of all. His brother is perhaps the one person in the world who understands who he is; his life here; how he made it. He cannot face his brother’s kindness right now. ‘Do you know who the blood belongs to yet? Can I wash it off?’

‘It’ll take time to get results. Backlogs and the like, you understand. But, yes, you can wash it off when you feel ready.’

‘Is it… is it even safe to have my son here?’

Kent feels Adam’s pain in his chest. He smiles soothingly. ‘There’ll be an unmarked car outside for the next few days. You’ll be safe.’

Outside the goldsmith’s studio, a man palms a packet from his dealer and shuffles down the slipway to get high in the almost shelter of the cove. Kent will tell his drugs colleagues about this dealing spot, for all the good it will do.

He sighs and walks down the promenade, nodding at the two plain-clothes officers sitting in a Toyota, then shuffles back into his car, pulling his coat off. The tribulations of the seaside winter-freezing outside, overheated within. Damp everywhere.

‘Call Culvers,’ Kent instructs his car Bluetooth.

Kent is a Morrow boy, through and through. Even when he left for university, he returned every other weekend to eat his mother’s roast and wind up his younger sister. Because he is born and bred, he has no illusions about the town. About its highs and lows. The money that comes in summer and disappears with the good weather.

The line rings and rings, and Kent rolls his eyes but smiles.

Permanent in Morrow are the stolid middle classes, the few truly wealthy, and outnumbering them by many fold, the struggling. The people who grow poorer each year, stranded as public services recede and collapse. And just as permanent are the leeches, the exploiters, the misery-peddlers, and the breadcrumb-lives that fall between the cracks to feed them. Kent knows them all.

The call goes to voicemail. ‘No, don’t pick up the phone, Culvers, I’m just your boss. Anyway, I need to do door-to-door on neighbours. I’m coming back to check in on resourcing first, but as a priority can you start a deep background check on Conlan, and first-on-the-scene, Ophelia Richards? See where the rest of the team are on digging out known professional operators in the area.’ He is about to hang up. ‘Is there any birthday cake left in the breakroom? Never mind. Back soon.’

He indicates left and drives past the sand dunes, up the steep hill back towards the station, passing the scaffold-clad Morrow Hotel Royal. It is being turned into chic flats for young people seeking lives outside the city; the gentrification a rising tide that will not lift all boats. He cuts past the traffic-heavy high street and winds through the soulless business park towards the station.

He checks his phone once he has parked up. Nothing from Culvers, but a WhatsApp is waiting.

Walk – do we have to invite your sister and bf? I love them but I’d rather it was just the two of us x

He thinks for a second. If you want me to bore you about wildflowers for three hours, then of course it can just be the two of us x

His phone pings instantly. I’ll text Sally. Will cook fresh when you’re back. Linguine no good reheated. Try to make it a reasonable time? X

I always try x

She moves around the showroom of King & Lampard with alabaster precision. The cleaner has left a smear on one of the cases; she tuts and removes it with a microfibre cloth. Perfection is a standard their clients expect without knowing it; they simply bridle when they are met with imperfection. She too has been raised this way, and finds it unacceptable.

Moira’s phone buzzes and she reaches for it without looking, knowing who it will be. She scrutinises the cabinet, but there are no further flaws. She looks down at the message.

I can’t find Donepezil. Did you move? Are you coming?

With nude manicured nails, she taps back. They are in the cupboard above the sink, Daddy. I will be there later. Mary left you lunch – did you remember? Use oven gloves to take the casserole pot off the range or you will burn yourself.

She exhales heavily.

Her phone buzzes again. This time a call. She presses speakerphone.

‘Adam. Tell me everything. No—’ she picks up the microfibre cloth and begins to fold it. ‘No, tell me how you are. Tell me how you’re doing.’

The goldsmith’s voice fills the room. ‘Moira – it’s good to hear your voice. Did the police call you? I should have told you they’d be in contact.’

‘It’s fine, Adam. Are you coping, are you all right? That’s the question.’

She can hear him take a deep breath. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m all right.’

‘Good.’ She says briskly. ‘And you’ll tell me if you aren’t?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she presses the cloth into a neat square. ‘Now, the details, and then we can work out the best way forward.’

‘You’re a rock, Moira.’

Adam’s voice reverberates off the cabinets a hundred miles away, while his dealer nods and interjects here and there. Which piece? – I had a buyer interested in that last week. Does the officer in charge seem competent? If insurance aren’t cooperative, there are a few good solicitors we’ve used in the past.

‘It will be all right, Adam,’ Moira says eventually. ‘Trust me.’

And in Morrow, Adam knows that he does. And that if Moira says it will all be okay, then perhaps it will. She has been there for him forever. Perhaps all that seems insurmountable now will become a trial he will pass through, to emerge, newborn, on the other side.

Cawree cawree.

Ophelia tips her head back to listen to the gulls as she waits for Adam to answer the buzzer. Sometimes she is tempted to shriek back at them, to join in the conversation. When Adam answers, he wears his customary expression of mild concern.

‘I’ve told you so many times – you must stop writing while you walk. I’m so sorry. Ophelia, will you please apologise?’

She lowers her notebook and apologises to the man she has bumped into. Her mother is wearing a white lace dress with a boat-neck and next to her, Ophelia feels every inch of her awkward teenage body. She shrinks back into her cardigan and looks at her notebook.

‘That’s quite all right,’ says the man, ‘never apologise for creating.’

Then Adam smiles, and it is gone.

‘You were robbed yesterday and you still don’t check the peephole?’

‘Yesterday I lost you eight thousand pounds and you asked for a story, so maybe we’re both slow to learn.’ Adam steps back to admit her and she steps into the warm.

Ophelia can see he is midway through something. His workbench is a neat maelstrom of tools and there is the tang of metal and compounds in the air like perfume. She puts her backpack on the floor and crosses to examine what he is making, and Adam follows.

In a small clamp on the workbench sits a ring. The gold band glows under the work lamp, but it is missing its eyes and the empty sockets wait patiently to be filled with the rubies in an adjacent tray.

‘Don’t stop because of me,’ she says.

Adam raises his eyebrows, but takes the instruction. He settles himself back on his stool and reaches for one of the rubies with tweezers finer than Ophelia has ever seen. With a steady hand, he sets it in an empty socket, and makes imperceptible adjustments to its placement. He sets the tweezers down and without looking, his hand reaches for another tool. With it, he begins to close the gold teeth around the stone, biting it softly so it rests secure in its new home.

He loses his hesitancy when he works, Ophelia realises. There is none of the caution, the wariness, but a calm and fluid force to his hands, to his body. Years at the bench appear and disappear in the cords and ridges of his forearm; there is the smallest hunch in his right shoulder.

She sheds her coat and moves around the workbench to stand beside him and take an approximation of his perspective; that of a god in the process of creation. Adam places the other two stones and tries to push away the smell of the sea.

‘Can you pass that file, there?’ She hands it to him and he begins to smooth out the claw settings so they will not catch clothes or precious skin.

‘Who is this for?’ Ophelia asks.

‘A client in London. His wife’s birthday.’

‘A surprise?’

Adam nods. ‘Repeat business, I already know her ring size.’ His eyes move to Ophelia’s hand, resting on the workbench. The nails are short, bare of varnish. ‘Your hands are very small. H probably. Most commercial places start at a J. Your mother’s ring would have dropped off without resizing.’

‘Well, I never intended to wear it.’

‘Why is that?’ he asks, rotating the ring for a better angle and sliding the file along it, once, twice. He blows away a fine silt of gold dust.

‘Because it didn’t fit.’ Ophelia is so deadpan, Adam finds himself chuckling.

He continues his work and Ophelia looks at the rows of tools on the wall alongside them. Compasses, dowels, hammers, pliers, files, fine hand saws. The grain of the workbench, scarred and pitted and ready for more. She wants to know what each tool does; what Adam has made with each; the millions of years of metal and stone to have passed under them, sat on human skin and absorbed love and misery. Nothing new under the sun and a billion years in Adam’s palms. In his lungs there must be gold dust.

It is hot, it twitches a few times but stops before her father’s cries have died away. The child looks curiously at where it rests in her palm.

Her mother puts the knife down and smiles brilliantly. ‘Clear away and I will call for our supper, dear one.’ The fire crackles and her tongue slivers silver as she talks. ‘We have worked hard today. Your father will not want anything to eat though.’

Her mother hums to herself as she rings a handbell to summon the servant. The child looks back down at her hand: the hunk of red muscle has become shiny and heavy. In her own chest, she begins to feel the unfamiliar thud of a muscle pumping blood.

The young girl who brings them their meals opens the door and begins to scream wildly, piercingly. The child drops the gold heart and covers her ears. What is this noise? What is this in her chest, the pounding, the seething shivers? The servant girl disappears down the corridor, shouting and crying.

For the first time, the child feels fear, she feels panic. She feels.

She whirls around and spots the huge armoire and climbs inside to escape the noise, the chaos. The door closes just as other servants rush into the room.

‘Good afternoon, why are you here? Why are you not in the stables?’ she hears her mother ask the heavy-footstepped men that the child cannot see.

She has killed him, the monster has killed our master. She has cut out his heart. She is unnatural. She has killed him – look at the blood. Oh, the master, oh. Oh, the monster, the witch. The child can hear the kitchen women’s voices now.

‘Yes,’ she hears her mother say placidly, ‘now no one may feel happier than your master. There can be no happier man than he. Are we not so blessed by his good fortune?’

There is more screaming and wailing. The child can hear the scuffling and shuffling of many people moving, and the sound made by a body falling to the floor. But she does not hear her mother’s voice. Her mother does not utter a word. She cannot see her mother’s pleasant, pliant face, half smiling and exposing a lick of silver tongue, as she lets them kill her.

The sun is low and Adam puts the kettle on. ‘Tea, coffee?’

‘Anything as long as it’s hot.’ Ophelia has got chilled in spite of the radiator and pulls her duffle coat and scarf back over her jumper. ‘How badly will the break-in affect the business?’

‘I don’t know.’ He reaches for the tea bags. ‘Insurance might not pay out,’ he admits, ‘not if they think I did it myself.’

Ophelia looks at him sharply. ‘Is that what they think?’

‘I don’t know. I hope not. But it would be possible, wouldn’t it? I don’t know if they have to prove that I did it or whether they can simply withhold the money.’

‘But you didn’t, and you’ll lose a small fortune. Surely the police know that?’

Adam examines her face. ‘I hope so. DI Kent came by earlier, and didn’t seem sold one way or the other. You believe me, though?’

He hands Ophelia a mug, and she looks back, unflinching. ‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because lambs aren’t thieves.’

Adam frowns. ‘I’m not a lamb. There’s very little innocence left here.’

She studies him, then her brows knit again. ‘Am I a suspect?’

‘No,’ he responds swiftly.

‘Why not?’

Adam casts about, unnerved by the idea. ‘Why would you be? You came in here to see if I was hurt – to help.’

Ophelia seems amused at the prospect of being a suspect, ‘I suppose – I suppose it might look like I had been scouting this place out. Come in here to sell you gold, rob you, steal my own gold back plus extra, then arrive first on the scene so there’s a good explanation if they find my fingerprints, DNA, whatever forensics. I might even get a second payout from you for the lost gold.’

Adam raises his eyebrows. ‘Did you?’

‘No, although now I’ve thought about it, perhaps I should have. Would have been quite profitable.’ She drinks her tea.

‘It would have been better.’ Adam’s gaze returns to his cup. ‘You shouldn’t have been dragged into this – your gold should have been in the safe. That was my fault. And you put yourself at risk coming to check on me. Thank you. You shouldn’t have done it.’

Ophelia shrugs and traces the nicks in the workbench with her fingertips. ‘Will the business survive losing so much?’

Adam has been calculating the same all day. ‘Just about. Dad died last year and I inherited some money. But I wanted to buy a house, rent it out, get some financial security for Felix so he could study, do whatever it is he loves when he’s older. If I had to, I could use it on the business instead. It wasn’t what I wanted.’ He can hear Aunt Bridget telling them not to walk along the crumbling brick wall at the back of her Cork bungalow. You’ll fall when you least expect it, boys. It’s hubris. His shoulders sag, then a note of panic enters his voice. ‘Fuck, what if I go to prison? What would happen to Felix?’

Ophelia turns back towards him and shakes her head, surprisingly, reassuringly firm. ‘You won’t. Even if the police suspect you were involved, there won’t be the evidence to charge you because you didn’t do it. You’ll be okay. Insurance, that’s another matter. I don’t know if they’ll pay you.’

She puts her mug down and takes Adam’s hand. He feels the fear settling. ‘You’re right.’

She lets go. He replaces his glasses and exhales heavily.

‘I’m sorry you lost your dad. Rough year.’

Adam nods. He can still feel her cool palm. ‘Thanks. It’s okay though; we weren’t close. Mum died when we were babies, so it was just him, me and my brother growing up. I’m not sure he managed well. He was a cold man.’

‘You’re an orphan then?’

Adam frowns. ‘I’d never thought about it like that. I suppose.’ The word feels right.

Ophelia feels for the threads. ‘He met his grandson – Felix? – at least?’

A smile cracks across Adam’s face. ‘Actually, he adored Felix, after the initial shock.’

Ophelia’s face cannot help but reply to this statement of love and she smiles too. ‘Felix must have been precious to him. You and your partner weren’t planning a baby?’ she ventures.

Adam looks at the floorboards. She knows she has pulled on the thread, and reviles herself. She should not do this. Not to him, now.

‘No, I didn’t have a partner.’

‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me.’ She tries to close the wound again.

‘No, it’s okay. Julia and I – it was a one-night stand. Back when I lived in London. She was up for one of her friends’ birthdays on a night out.’ He cannot meet Ophelia’s eyes. ‘I used to be less careful of others.’

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. It wasn’t fair.’

He laughs and then looks at her. ‘I didn’t have to tell you. You think it’s ill-gotten gains?’

Ophelia had expected anger, deserves it.

‘So ask me,’ Adam says.

She is not sure what to do with this generosity. She feels her way forward. ‘Why did you move away from London? To try and make it work with Julia here?’

‘God no, we would never have worked. Not as partners. Nothing in common. I mean, I offered but I think her precise words were “I’d rather pull my own teeth out”, which I took to mean no.’

‘So why?’

‘To be around.’

Because his father had been right. Because he had fucked around. Because he had created a whole and perfect human life without even meaning to, out of his emptiness and selfishness. Because Julia had gone to endless antenatal appointments and when she had said they weren’t a couple, the gazes of judgement had fallen upon her and not him. Because she had carried the weight of Felix in her body, and even now, however much Adam tries, she will always bear the greater weight of Felix’s life. Because he loves Felix and respects Julia, and this is the least that he could do when their lives are the consequence of his actions. Ophelia watches his face, and he lets her see this. The first time he has let anyone see it, and she does not look away.

‘Was it murder?’ Her voice is half horrified and half hopeful.

‘No, a robbery. But it appears one of the people involved has been rather badly hurt.’ Kent is hyper-conscious of the handmade plates and bowls stacked behind him in the pottery shop next door to the goldsmith’s. He tries not to move too much lest his coat send them crashing.

‘Thank goodness. It would have been dreadful if anything had happened – he has a little boy, you know. If one of the burglars got hurt during the course of it, I can’t say I have any sympathy. No honour among thieves, as they say.’ Barbara Dessell looks bohemian in her black slacks and smock, but Kent can sense the steely conservatism of the Morrow middle-classes running through her.

‘Mr Conlan is a well-liked member of the community?’

‘Morrow isn’t a community anymore, I’m afraid, not like it used to be. But he’s a nice neighbour. Very sweet son. They seem like a nice family, although I don’t think he’s with the mum, unfortunately.’

Kent asks what she has seen and heard, what glimpses of the uncanny, the unusual, have passed her by, but Barbara smoothes back her grey hair and shakes her head. ‘We only open Tuesday to Saturday. I live up towards Kewstoke, so I wasn’t here yesterday.’ She runs a finger under her thin lip, trying to pin down anything that might be helpful. ‘There are an awful lot of drug addicts around town, and we do see them regularly. It could well have been one of them. I’ve reported them so many times, but…’ She looks at him reprovingly.

Kent gives a straitened smile, and thanks her for her time.

He leaves the pottery shop with the unpleasant feeling of being weighed against values he does not share, but that is the point, he reminds himself. He could easily have a PC do these door-to-door enquiries, but if he always delegated, he would take his fingers away from the pulse of the town he serves. Without it, how can he see the coursing desires of Morrow’s people – the frustrations, the jealousy, covetousness, purity and love that they hold at their core? Without time in their midst, how will he be able to understand his colleagues; for what are guards but men with sticks?

Kent makes to go to the next shop along, a clothes boutique by the looks of it – linen tunics and chunky jewellery – but he notices the light from the goldsmith’s window, and discreetly glances through.

There, on the floorboards, Adam and Ophelia sit like two halves of a shell.

Ophelia is sitting on the wooden floorboards when he turns back from the safe. She has her eyes closed, letting the low sun warm the lids.

He watches. In repose, she looks almost happy.

‘Why are you in Morrow?’

She opens her eyes. ‘I used to come here as a child, on holiday. I came back to write.’

‘Write what?’

She seems unsure how to answer. She does not talk to many people, Adam realises with a wrench.

‘The story of Morrow. The people here, the birds, the sea, the woods,’ she carefully breathes in the dusk, ‘fairy tales and folktales. What a place is, how it understands itself. Or at least, how I understand what it understands,’ she tries to pin it down. ‘Its portrait. Recording it and imagining it at the same time. If that makes any sense.’

He lowers himself to the ground and stretches out his legs. Yes, it makes sense. ‘That’s why you were interested in what I make, the fairy tale work?’ He sets down a cloth and lays out the items that he had taken from the safe.

Ophelia’s breath stops. She picks them up, one at a time, and turns them in her fingers. They are exquisite, cold and hard and yet ephemeral. Too precious to be real. The tiny features of a loaf of bread, an apple, an axe, a single wood anemone, a wolf with its head raised in a hungry cry. She wants to sink into them, absorb them, live in their perfection.

Adam watches her examine them, and sees them anew. They are strange objects to have made, he knows.

Ophelia tears her eyes away. ‘Where’s Red Riding Hood? The grandma?’

He shakes his head. ‘It doesn’t work like that. They aren’t single tales – they aren’t fixed.’

Ophelia lays them on the cloth, first in one order, then in another. He sees her lips move.

‘They reconfigure,’ she says finally, ‘slip in and out of one another? Infinite possible stories.’

‘Yes, precisely.’

She is clear-eyed as the dawn. ‘Because they embody what fairy tales are. Tales that mutated in the telling. Carrying fears about poverty, loss, violence. Dreams of love and riches. Discarding what the teller didn’t care about and picking up what they did. Making a good story out of the universal and the specific.’

Adam remembers Felix. Why are the step-mums always baddies?

‘Recording and imagining at the same time,’ he smiles wryly, ‘then sold to wealthy people.’

Ophelia reaches out to the cloth that separates them and picks the apple up again, watching the weak sunlight move over its surface.

Adam feels the cold tapping in his chest, and now he knows it is fear. He looks away.

‘Someone was hurt here.’ Ophelia’s voice calls him back. ‘That blood on the wall, that I thought was yours. Someone was really, badly hurt.’

Adam tries to make sense of it. Of the possibility of violence. Of danger. The ache of the idea of Felix comes to him.

‘There was a gold bear,’ he tells her. ‘It wasn’t stolen yesterday. It was taken on Friday, before you came. Someone snuck in, left money for it. And the night I saw you on the beach, I was chasing after someone who had been looking in at the window,’ he turns it over, ‘your ghost maybe.’

Ophelia frowns. It seems fitting that she is a harbinger.

‘Did you see anyone that night, on the beach?’ He looks at her, cross-legged, unbowed. She has been there at each change of tide, but he tries over and over, and cannot make himself suspect her. Too much flesh is vulnerable. Too much of her is a fellow traveller.

‘Only you,’ her fingers play with a loose thread in her jumper, ‘why would anyone sneak in to take a figurine but leave money? And then rob you?… And send you a heart.’

Adam puts his head in his hands. ‘I can’t think of a convincing reason. It’s all so—’

‘Eerie.’

‘Yes. Gothic. Bloody.’

‘Somewhere in this town, someone is walking around with a lump of skin sheared off,’ she says faintly, her head turned towards the hallway, and the side door out to the alley.

‘Are they walking around?’ Adam asks. ‘Or are they too badly hurt?’

They sit silently.

‘Tell me a different story,’ Ophelia asks.

‘The one you came for?’

She nods, and the sun dips before making another bid for the day.

‘You have some strange methods of debt collection.’

‘Tomorrow, I’ll come back and break your fingers,’ she reassures him.

‘Thank you.’

Her breath is audible in the quiet of the studio. Adam rubs his sore shoulder as he collects his thoughts. ‘A Morrow tale. One from a book I picked up here. It’s where I got the idea for the necklace you saw online, with the three rings.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Once upon a time, there was a weak king. His first wife was beautiful and virtuous, but she died giving birth to a daughter, and when the king married again, this wife was also beautiful, but very cruel.’

From the sky, the sea’s movement loses some of its urgency, its shoreside impression of forward-rush and reeling back. As the gulls see it, the waves are lithe lines on the surface of the water, taking independence from the body only at its edges, where they meet the beach and cliffs in a foamy spray. Likewise, the cliffs and dunes lose their grandeur in this flattening of the world. There is no need to feel their steepness when one can fly. How peculiar that humans choose to walk.

The town itself takes on a different aspect too; its buildings, fences, roads, bridges manifesting as a series of blocks and dots and lines. To human eyes, the town is a drab mishmash of concrete greys and browns, smeared and flecked with green. But birds see more than that, their eyes attuned to a greater spectrum of colours so that in the ultraviolet light of the sun, the world sings.

Circling overhead, the pates and shoulders on the seafront and in the streets of the town offer the gulls the promise of food. Even in winter, they have so much of it that it is barely worthwhile heading out to sea to find fish or to hunt in the rock pools. Sandwich crusts, takeaway cartons, sticky wells of spilled drink, chips, crisps, and the hyper-sweetness of discarded candy floss. The earth abounds with it. This is a good place to be.

‘What the fuck? Are you okay?’

‘Hi Luke. Did Julia call you?’

‘No, she didn’t. I just got off the phone with a copper.’

‘The police called you?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d been robbed?’

‘I was going to – it’s been busy, okay? What did the police want from you?’

‘Is Felix okay? Jesus Christ, are you okay?’

‘I’m okay. We’re all okay. Calm down. Are you by a road or something? I can’t hear you properly.’

‘I stepped out of the lab. There’s traffic… I’m glad you’re all right.’

‘So – the police?’

‘Jesus, yes, the police. They called to ask whether I’d seen anything when I was there for the weekend. Druggies hanging round, people casing the joint, that sort of thing. I told them about the face at the window. Not that I’d seen it, but that you had.’

‘Fuck, they want to corroborate my story.’

‘What?’

‘They think it might be an insurance job.’

‘What? Don’t be bloody stupid, Adam, it’s all routine.’

‘Is it? What I said sounds like madness – stolen bears and mysterious faces no one else sees, someone sending me a heart in the post. If I was a cop, I wouldn’t believe me, Luke.’

‘Just… wait a moment. I’m coming Friday, all right? I can’t miss polymer testing tomorrow or Thursday but I can ditch Friday.’

‘You don’t need to—’

‘Shut up – I’m coming.’

At his desk, William Kent moves the pieces around, patient, lucid. There are not many yet. Plenty still missing. There is a robbery of high value goods. A bloodstain, belonging to neither victim nor witness. An alarm system evaded.

And CCTV of the doorstep.

In the footage, there is no trace of Adam Conlan’s spectre at the window. Instead, one of Kent’s junior staff has sent him a clip from Tuesday lunchtime last week, and its double again on Thursday. The policeman watches these clips side by side on his computer screen: in both, the man with the lanyard buzzes at the door and waits in poorly concealed agitation.

‘So, what did you want to talk to me about?’

It is breaktime, and Julia has escaped the staffroom to meet Adam at a Costa on the high street. She takes a sip of her latte.

‘Well, I was going to tell you anyway, but this robbery drama has forced the pace. I’m seeing someone.’

Adam grins, the first time all day. ‘That’s great. Who is he?’

Julia straightens up her cup and saucer. ‘A teacher at school. Patrick.’

‘Is he – nice?’ Adam is unsure what to say.

Julia guffaws. ‘Give it up, Adam. He’s very nice. Very kind. I’m not telling you because I want your approval or your permission.’

Adam sighs with relief. ‘All right then. Good. I’d already assumed you were,’ he gestures uselessly, ‘dating.’

‘Quite right. I’m telling you because we’ve been dating for a while now, and I want to tell Felix.’

‘Oh.’ The thought has occurred to Adam in the abstract over the years, but the reality takes him by surprise. ‘Oh, yeah, of course.’

Julia waits patiently for him to take it in. ‘Right, well, we went away for the weekend for the first time.’ Of course, the spa weekend, with a friend. Adam had been slow there. ‘Naturally, the police are checking you weren’t robbed by the disgruntled mother of your child and needed to know where I had been, and with whom.’

‘Ahh. Sorry.’

‘Yes, so.’ Julia wraps her cardigan around herself and checks her watch unconsciously. ‘So, of course, I’ve told them I was with Patrick at the spa, but I didn’t want it getting back to you before we had a chance to talk.’

Adam is touched. ‘Right. Thanks. So, you want Felix to meet Patrick?’

‘Felix has met him a hundred times – he’s a teacher at St Mary’s. But yes, I want him to know that Patrick and I are boyfriend and girlfriend. Stupid terms at this age, but probably the best way to describe it to a seven-year-old.’

Adam realises he is beaming. ‘Good, that’s good. I’m happy for you.’

Despite herself, Julia blushes. ‘He’s a good person.’

‘I’m sure he is. And lucky.’ Adam knows there is one person in the world who cares for Felix’s happiness and safety as much as he does, and she would not risk these things. If Julia has chosen Patrick, it is because Patrick is worthy.

‘Well, flying visit. I need to get back and set up for Geography. Don’t ask me how, but one of the kids chewed the globe last week and I need to sellotape it back onto the base.’

‘We lead different lives.’

‘Yes, we do.’ Julia pulls on her cagoule and picks up her tote bag. She pours the rest of her coffee into a Cath Kidston flask and gives Adam a friendly pat on the shoulder. ‘You should think about seeing people too. You deserve to be happy. Felix should see you happy.’

The late morning sky is low and heavy, resting its leaden belly on the clifftop where Ophelia walks. The wind is urgent, and she errs away from the edge, where thrift and grass cling on in clumps. From the path, she can still see the sea, making dark laps at itself and the beach, ceaseless, restless, like it had been in her childhood. She thinks of Adam Conlan, living at the edge of the world.

She could not afford to rent a flat with a sea view. A place to watch from, to be watched by the sea. Below her, waves crest and break on each other and the shingle. The sea watches without care, Ophelia thinks, observing the cycle of the seasons, caught in its own churn, renewing itself each second with the passing of the waves, the interchange of molecules carried back and forth under the twice-daily tug of the moon. On its bed, a fish expires in the same moment another hatches, and a patch of algae blooms. Time is nothing when you have all of it, always ancient, always newly born.

The rain begins to speckle. Ophelia had wanted to observe walkers this morning, but no one is out in this weather when they do not have to be. She takes a last look at the grey compression of sea and sky at the horizon, and turns around for home.

The path is steep; shale and shingle move under her trainers and she has to focus on where she is stepping. Sound whips past her ears. The wind, the water, the birds. She thinks she hears something else. She keeps picking her way downwards. Might it be less slippery to walk through the tussocks that border the path? Or will they be slick with sea mist? What will she write today? How will she express the past and present and future of Morrow with the scant and infinite capacity of words?

There it is again. A voice, maybe. Ophelia lifts her head to look around. No one is on the path above or below.

But there. A woman’s voice.

She looks down at the beach and a pink smudge is signalling frantically. Ophelia’s skin prickles, and she moves faster, strains for the words; vainly leans towards them as she walks.

It is the beach mother she sees each day. Ophelia immediately checks but, thank god, the toddler is the dot at her side. What then? Ophelia begins to run, a scudding, graceless progress down the scattering gravel of the cliff path. She slips and lands heavily on her wrist. She gets back up and continues. The woman picks up her child and runs to meet her as the track finally reaches the beach.

‘Somebody’s in the water – I can see someone in the water.’ The woman turns and points. The toddler clings to her hips and shoulders with her whole body, caught without comprehension in a parent’s fear.

Ophelia scans the waves. For a few seconds, she cannot see it, then she makes out grey against grey. Clothes pocketing air, holding a person at the surface. They wash back and forth with the movement of the water, making no struggle for their own life.

‘Take the baby somewhere she can’t see,’ Ophelia tells the woman, ‘call nine nine nine, ask for ambulance and coast-guard.’

Ophelia hears the woman murmuring to her child, grappling one-handed for her phone as she jogs to the sea wall. ‘It’s all right, angel. No worries, okay? Mumma is gonna make a quick call. Everything’s all right, Isla-baby. Home for a biscuit soon, yeah?’

But Ophelia has already turned and is running across the sucking field of the sand. She stops to pull her trainers off and strips away her coat. The first waves cover her toes and she gasps out at the cold, but it is only reflex. She cannot feel it. This is no broken shower, but an ocean, and a life on her own has taught Ophelia not to panic, not to feel in the moment but to save it for later. To preserve herself, she has learned to ignore pain when it is not useful.

Ophelia keeps her eyes fixed on the shape, 20 metres out. The expensive education her mother had curated for her had been packed with swimming galas and outdoors pursuits. She is a strong swimmer, but she knows that is nothing to the sea. Close to shore, she could still easily drown in November waters. She wades until she is waist-deep, ignores the shuddering protest of her limbs and launches into a front crawl. The salt stings her eyes, and she can feel the rhythmic swell and drag of the waves propelling her forward and pulling her back. Her clothes are soaked and heavy already.

Ophelia breathes as steadily as she can and keeps moving, checking the position of the shape each time she lifts her head. Her hair streams out behind her and bobs with the water. She catches a mouthful and coughs it back up. She is slowly getting closer.

Ophelia fights the urge to turn and look back at the shore; to check whether help is coming. That is something out of her control. She pushes forward, kicking hard as the waves surge and conserving her energy as they pull back.

Finally, she reaches her fingertips out and grabs a handful of material. Face down. Short hair. A man.

Ophelia pulls him close. Treading water as best she can, she takes hold of his shoulders and twists them. There is no help from him, no movement at all. He stays on his front. The cold is seeping past the numbness imposed by adrenaline. It is burning in her arms and legs, fingers, toes. She is shuddering. She will not last much longer. She needs to get back to shore. Unable to feel her own grip, she tries one more time and pulls at his shoulders. A forward movement of the water nudges him, and he turns onto his back.

He is dead, as she had known. His face is grotesque, water-bloated. Streaked livid green and red. His features are too far removed from anything living to know what he had looked like. She turns her gaze away, presses down on the thoughts, the sickness, pushes the image from her mind as far as the water will take it. His palms float to the surface now, blue with immersion. In her numbness, Ophelia is 13 again. In the doorway, watching the wheeling of his blue-stained palms.

A wave washes over them both. Ophelia fights to the surface. Her mind is blank. All she knows is that she has to get back to shore. She throws a forearm around the body’s neck, no longer careful of life. She lies back and kicks and kicks, like she had once been taught in a lifesaving course. He bobs along the surface, parallel to her body thrashing below. Ophelia can half see the sky above her, and the black dots in her vision. Her legs are failing.

Finally, hands grab her. Someone pries her arm from around the man’s neck. Her feet brush pebbles and sand.

Work is where Adam finds himself. Where he soothes all the things he feels, and wants to feel, and should not. Where he is whoever he is beyond being a father.

Adam can feel the sensation in his fingertips, the thrill of rough paper that grips the graphite as he sketches, the lines flowing from his hands. He had dreamed last night and does not want to remember the dream.

He lets it leave him and find the paper.

His client has asked for a choker. He can see it, complete, on her long, slim neck. Is it her neck?

There are reaching branches, tides that clasp and twine each other. In the golden leaf-foam, the suggestion of a shell or a blossom; where it will sit on the trachea, in the hollow between her collarbones, a tidal pool with flesh just visible in the aperture, at the seabed.

The lines of Adam’s work have become softer over the last eight years, have loosened their angularity and taken on more of the sea beyond his window, the swells and rags of waves.

He turns to the stack of books beside him. He finds the cursed woman in the fairy tale collection, examines the curling ivy at her feet; pulls a botanical guide towards him and examines the plant more closely. Then he unearths a book of Irish folktales, takes another look at ‘Dover Beach’ in his copy of Matthew Arnold, re-thumbs his William Morris catalogue. It finds its way through his veins, into the muscles of his arm, the tendons in his wrist. There is the surge of control, of power, of creation. Another part of him is here now.

He looks down at what he has drawn.

Yes.

His shoulders relax. His blood runs easier for a minute.

The sea had soak’d his heart through.

Ophelia had not seen the man again after she had been pulled from the water. The passers-by had covered him with their coats, and Ophelia had been taken to the ambulance and wrapped in a foil blanket as the police arrived.

The line from Homer persists in her dazed compliance, trailing and echoing as the paramedics check her pulse, blood pressure, oxygenation in the back of the ambulance. She is declared cold but otherwise none the worse for wear, and clothes and a thermos of tea appear from the kindness of people who live near the sea, and understand what it is like to be wet. She changes into the oversized joggers and a jumper in the back of the ambulance, then waits with the travel mug for whatever must happen now.

‘Well, hon, you’ve had a busy morning.’ A middle-aged PC shuffles in to sit next to Ophelia on the stretcher trolley, pulling the doors shut again against the wind and activity outside.

‘Mm,’ Ophelia agrees.

The PC tucks back blonde hair and locates her pocketbook in her vest. ‘Bit of a shock – weren’t expecting that when you got up this morning, were you? You’re all right now. Warming up?’ She surveys Ophelia with brisk care.

‘A bit.’ Ophelia is still shivering. All of her aches as she regains sensation.

PC Culvers takes her account patiently. This woman has seen bodies washed up before. There is no fuss or excitement about her. ‘You did a brave thing, my love, but you could have died. He wasn’t getting any deader, so I’d advise you leave it to the coastguard next time.’

‘Who is he?’ Ophelia asks.

‘That, we don’t know yet. There’ll be all sorts of ID processes before we can say for sure.’

‘He’d been in the water for a while, hadn’t he?’ Ophelia can see the angry red, blue, green of his face and body.

Culvers scrutinises her, judging how best to protect her from what she has already seen. ‘Best not to dwell on it. Spend a few days doing things you enjoy – telly, reading, shopping – whatever takes your mind off it.’

The image is already beginning to distort in Ophelia’s mind’s eye. His eyes open, eyes shut, hair short, hair long and fanning out in the water. ID processes. If she had not made it back to shore, would someone have had to identify her? Would it have been her mother?

‘You can leave when you’re ready. We’ll be in touch in the next few days with any further questions, and whatnot. But you should go and be with someone. Partner, friends or family. Can I drop you somewhere?’

Ophelia shakes her head. ‘My friend lives at the end of the beach. I’ll walk there now.’

Culvers purses her lips. ‘Mm, all right then. If you’re up to it. Take care of yourself, right? The shock will sink in over the next few days. Might take you by surprise.’

Once upon a time, the child escaped the cupboard where she had hid as her mother was killed, and climbed down the outside of the house. She found herself in the town she barely knew. She had not grown up there, because she had not grown. Still unused to this hot and busy head she had gained, and the pain from the scrapes and bruises she had made, she wondered where she should go now. If they found her, they would slaughter her like her mother.

Although now she had a heart that beat, the child still had the silver tongue she had been made with. She walked out into the thoroughfare and asked the first passer-by she saw, ‘Excuse me, good madam, but where will I find the goldsmith?’

‘What a polite and beautiful child! You may find the goldsmith there, by the crossroads.’

The child thanked her and walked there directly.

When she knocked on the door, the goldsmith answered, and at once he recognised his own work.

‘Why are you here?’ he demanded.

‘We have killed our father, and his servants have killed my mother. I wish for you to keep me safe here.’

‘You stupid child – I will give you no sanctuary,’ replied the furious and frightened goldsmith.

‘You must,’ replied the child, ‘they will kill me.’

‘I have no use for a child.’

‘A child does not have a use, sir. I am here because you made me.’

Outside, Ophelia feels herself returning. The wind gives back the current of words that ceases so infrequently, whips and whispers her skin back from scarification to feeling. The jumper smells of someone else’s detergent and it’s as though she is walking with a stranger, and alone.

Outside the suspended animation of the ambulance, her body suddenly realises all the fuel it had is gone, and she shakes with hunger. Her arm is sore and, as she walks, she rolls the sleeve up and finds a wide graze, studded with gravel, and remembers how she fell running down the cliff path.

The story of the three rings, Ophelia had heard that one before. Or a version of it. Her feet print the sand, trainers dry only because she had left them on the shore. But that is the point – the story the goldsmith had told her carries the same themes of loss, abandonment, transfiguration, love, riches, as the other versions that have danced these themes. What distinguishes them are the pieces that at each turn have been removed, substituted, embellished. The joggers are soft but too big and she tightens the drawstring. The king knows what the queen has done; the king does not know; the evil queen escapes; she is executed; the child is a sparrow; she is a blackbird. Told around a winter hearth, the narrator revised their grandmother’s tale. Gave the queen the name of their despised sister-in-law. Paused to settle the baby and forgot where they had got to. Pulled a body out of the sea.

Ophelia can see the studio. The distance closes slowly like it had in the water. She has not acknowledged it to herself. She ought to. She stills the swift feet of other thoughts and reminds herself where she has chosen to go, so that later she will not be able to pretend to herself that she had not, though maybe later she will know why. Her wrist aches.

‘Come up.’

He does not ask for an explanation when she washes up like a selkie. He is not her mother, does not demand to know why, is unconditional. She is freezing and tired, so he ushers her up the internal staircase to the flat. Her hair is damp, he notices as he climbs behind her. This time he knows why she smells like the sea.

‘Sit down.’

Adam puts on the kettle and when he turns back around, she has curled up into the corner of the sofa, knees tucked under arms in a cold knot, the survivor of a shipwreck. He finds Felix’s hot water bottle and gives her a blanket and tea. Then Adam goes back to the stove. It is lunchtime and she is shaking. He has nothing much in the cupboards, but there is always pasta and some carbohydrates will do her good.

There is the sound of the water boiling in the pan, and the rain hitting the windows. He can taste sea salt and starch in the air. Shifts marking themselves before he can catch them.

‘Do you have a plaster?’ Her voice is a surprise.

‘Yeah, let me get one.’ Adam turns the gas down low and dries his hands.

He fetches the first aid box he keeps under the bathroom sink for Felix’s scrapes, and when he comes back she has pulled up the sleeve of the jumper that clearly is not hers.

Red stipples the length of her forearm, and Adam turns it to find the limits of the graze.

‘Hold still, I’ll get these out.’ He puts on his glasses and lays her arm across a flannel on his thigh. He finds the tweezers in the green bag and works to clean the wound, wiping carefully with antiseptic after he removes each piece of grit.

The antiseptic is a sweet sting on the new pits of open flesh. Ophelia watches Adam work with the same care as when he had set rubies in the ring. Breath even, touch firm, calm, so matter-of-fact it is comforting.

‘I went into the sea to pull a man out.’

He keeps working. She sees his brows knit. ‘Alive?’

‘No.’

‘You knew him?’

‘No.’

‘Hold that pad there.’ She presses the gauze over the clean red skin. Adam takes a dressing and cuts it to the right size. He turns her arm so he can follow the angle of the muscle and peels the backing off, places the dressing over the wound and smoothes it down into a second skin.

He folds the bits of plastic and grit into the bloodied tissue and puts them in the bin. He washes his hands, like a surgeon, then turns the hob off and pours steaming pasta into a colander.

‘You need to eat.’

Before long, news of the merchant’s death, and that of his wife after him, spread through the town. The butcher whispered it to the baker, the baker to his wife, his wife to the washer-woman, and so on and so forth until all the town was quite a-bristle with horror.

‘We must find the child,’ said the butcher.

‘We must kill the child,’ said the baker.

‘The child is just as monstrous as the mother,’ said the baker’s wife.

And so it was that soon the sculptor was blamed for having created such abominations, and he was killed in the market square, and his wife and children driven from the town.

The goldsmith knew it was too dangerous to remain any longer, for the townspeople would soon seek to avenge the death of their foremost citizen upon him also. In the dead of night, he and the silver-tongued child snuck away from the town and into the forest.

Deeper and deeper into the woods they passed, until soon they were quite lost. Cold, exhausted, and hungry, the goldsmith fell to sobbing, and the child comforted him.

‘Look, Father’ – for she had quickly taken to calling him Father – ‘look, there is a cottage.’

And there in the woods, they found a cottage that had once belonged to an old witch, before she had been killed by a brave prince. There they found warmth and shelter.

Ophelia feels warm. Full and sleepy like a child after a hot bath.

Adam had eaten with her in silence, then moved to the desk by the big sash window. She can hear the scratching of his pencil on the drawing board and the faint noise of the sea beyond the glass. If she turns her head, she can see his back moving and, over his shoulder, the minute details of a design. She rubs her socks across the sofa cushions, enjoying the friction on the soles of her feet. She tips her head back to feel it resting.

All afternoon, Adam has let her stay there, without questions, without awkwardness, working quietly, until the man in the sea seems very far away. Slowly, the cloud-cloaked sun begins to set and runs uneven seams of gold through the sky. The flat glows darkened amber and Adam switches on a lamp at the desk. The peace lulls her, until she almost forgets who she is. How much longer can she stay like this, in the warm? Nothing like this can last.

Adam lifts his head and reaches for a different pencil. Ophelia examines his sharpened profile. The copper has seeped back into her hair as it dries. She takes a lock in her mouth and sucks it. It is as salty as kelp. She lets it drop to her shoulder.

Suddenly, Ophelia feels a desperation she cannot understand. She gets up.

‘Is this about paying me back?’

Adam turns from the desk. ‘No.’

She moves closer. ‘Then what?’

He looks back at the drawings he has made and does not reply.

‘Then what?’ she insists.

‘Then nothing. It’s about helping someone who needed help.’

‘You just help anyone who washes up here?’

‘Of course not. Just – you came to me, okay? You knocked on the door looking like something shit had happened. What did you think I was going to do? Send you back out in the rain? You pulled a body out of the water. Jesus, this town.’ His arms drop to his sides. His fingertips are black with graphite. ‘You came to me, and that’s okay. It’s okay, Ophelia.’

The sun drops and it is finally dark. Is Ophelia so abject? Adam has known it from the first; he has always tried to help her like a stray child.

‘It’s not pity.’ He catches it. Standing opposite his chair, her eyes are level with his, which are dark, fearful. ‘If one of the two of us is pitiful, it’s not you.’

Can he know all the ways she is decaying, corrupted? She wants him to; he does not deserve to be deceived. She sees the tiny, exquisite details of the bracelet he has been drawing, the loping brambles, the leaves and blossoms and fruits, and back down at his stained hands. She takes one and feels a thorn pierce the flesh.

‘I don’t pity you.’

Adam feels his eyes prickle with tears. In his chest is the cold thumping. Ophelia slides his hand under her jumper to the bare skin of her back, a sensation he has not felt in eight years. He is strung between fear and the urgent need to pull her in.

‘I came to you,’ she says.

With his other hand, Adam reaches for her hair, feels it between his fingers. Like silk-sheathed wire. He lets it go, and shakes his head.

‘I came to you,’ she tells him again.

‘I can’t. I’ve fucked enough up. What if—’

‘It’s taken care of.’

‘Nothing is certain.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

She steps in. He is still sitting, and now he has to tilt his head to look up at her. Against his hand is her warm skin, her anger. Her loneliness. His own. Had he intended it to last forever? Ophelia’s gaze wavers. She thinks he does not want her. She does not know what he dreams about.

Adam feels the brush of her skin on his fingertips as she moves away.

‘No.’ He pulls her back. Her lips are parted, and he kisses her. ‘Please—’

She presses against him and he can feel the rivets of bone and muscle in her body. She tastes like rain and sea spray, and he cannot drink enough. He pulls her onto him. He can hear her breath as his fingers reach behind her neck. He pulls her jumper over her head, then his, and then it is skin against skin, her hair in his hands. The taste of salt. The white plaster and her flushed lips.

William Kent steps back from the buzzer and glances up and down Bond Street. It is too early for the affluent shoppers, but he can see neatly manicured sales assistants bustling about, perfecting the dazzle of their windows.

Kent stands in front of a highly polished door, adorned with a highly polished brass plaque. King & Lampard, Fine Art, Antiques and Jewellery. It is opened by a tall, slim woman in her early forties, and she bestows an assured smile upon him.

‘You must be DI Kent. Moira King, how do you do?’

Kent had expected an art dealer named Moira to be older, but that was posh people, he supposed. The rich could be a Moira at any age, where others couldn’t be a Moira in a lifetime.

‘I am. Thank you for seeing me.’ They share a firm hand-shake. ‘You’re Adam Conlan’s dealer, I believe?’

‘In the UK and Europe, yes. We use co-agents for dealing further afield.’ Moira leads him into a showroom that is somehow velvet in atmosphere, and they sit on high stools across a glass counter. ‘Dreadful news about poor Adam. Is he all right?’

‘Shaken, I think, but managing.’

The dealer nods sympathetically. ‘An awful shock for him. I’ve spoken to him on the phone, and of course, we’ll support him however we can. With that in mind, is there anything at all useful I can tell you, Detective?’

‘You can tell me how business is going. Is Mr Conlan selling much, doing well?’

‘Absolutely. Adam’s work is very sought after, and we’ve built quite the waiting list for bespoke commissions. The lone artisan is an alluring figure, and of course, his work is exquisite.’ She shakes her well-groomed head. ‘This robbery is a nasty setback for him, and for King & Lampard.’

Kent makes notes. ‘As you can imagine, we’re trying to establish who was behind the theft. Given how elegantly the alarm system was avoided, it seems likely this was a premeditated crime. The question is whether they intended to find Mr Conlan there as well.’

Moira’s throat bobs almost imperceptibly as she swallows this distasteful concept, and Kent is fascinated by her genteel poise. She shakes her head. ‘You think that the heart he received in the post was a threat? A precursor to real violence?’

Kent does not know. He wishes it was not possible that Adam had posted himself the heart. That it was not possible that the robbery, as Culvers keeps pointing out, could have been staged by the goldsmith himself. But Kent does not know, and it disturbs him. ‘He would ordinarily be at work on a Monday morning. Even the most professional operator couldn’t predict a child’s tummy bug would take him away. And, as you’re aware, a bloodstain was found at the scene. Something of a violent nature took place.’

Moira exhales, then clears her throat with a clipped cough. ‘Well. Deeply unpleasant.’

Kent nods. ‘Is there anyone you can think of who would send a heart? Has anyone been showing undue interest in Mr Conlan’s work?’

‘Well, like I said, Adam’s work is extremely popular, so we have many enquiries. Nothing lurid, thank goodness. That said,’ Moira raises a finger as though to pause herself, and she purses her lips, ‘I do remember one gentleman a while back, at some networking event or another. Something about him struck me as odd – or his questions did. He was interested in where Adam was based, in his studio, whether he could visit. I didn’t think much of it at the time but perhaps I should have done? There are plenty of unwell people in the world.’

Kent nods, considers, then offers his phone to Moira and shows her the CCTV picture of the man on the doorstep, frozen as he waits in vain for Adam to answer. ‘Is this him?’

Moira takes the phone and her green eyes are magnified under a pair of rimless glasses. She zooms in and out considering it. ‘Of course, the resolution isn’t terribly good. I wouldn’t want to put the wrong person in a bind. But yes, I think it might be.’

‘If you remember a name, any details of where you met?’

She frowns. ‘So frustrating, I can’t immediately say. But I shall go back through my diary, it was a few months ago now.’

‘I’d be very grateful.’ Kent nods. Under his hand, under the glass, objects scintillate with gold and silver, gems, facets, and the ivory of long-dead animals.

‘I really do want to help.’ Moira sounds suddenly earnest and twitches at the pearl stud in her ear. ‘I love Adam to pieces, you know. I don’t think life has always been easy for him.’ For the first time she laughs. ‘Do you know, I think he’s quite gullible sometimes. Maybe not gullible, that’s unfair – innocent, perhaps. Tends to ascribe people good intentions, which they may not possess. It’s charming he has retained that throughout his eventful existence. But I’m glad I deal for him, protect his interests.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ Kent agrees. Moira has put her finger on precisely the quality he has identified in the goldsmith.

The policeman’s eyes are drawn again to the jewel case that rests beneath his hands. There is a slim silver tie pin resting amid more ostentatious fare. Moira’s gaze follows.

‘Do you know anything about fine jewellery, Detective Kent?’ A question that could have been coy and flirtatious is no-nonsense from her mouth.

Kent laughs at the idea. ‘I know that there are many beautiful things, and that they’re often worth a lot of money, but that’s about it, I’m afraid.’

Moira smiles wryly. ‘A simplification, but not an unfair one.’

On a whim, she turns to a cabinet behind her and unlocks it with one of a dozen keys kept on a discreet loop inside her jacket. She withdraws a velvet case like Kent had seen at Adam Conlan’s workshop, but much bigger. With clean movements halfway between conservation and performance, she opens the box and turns it towards the policeman, so that he can view the filigreed silver and sapphire tiara inside.

‘1867, Austrian. What forms my livelihood is the notion that this coronet is worth more than the sum of its parts. That if I sold you the same weight in silver and sapphires, it would be less valuable than this object – because this has been made with genius and with care. It is art.’

Kent leans towards it. He has seen kilos of heroin and half a million in cash before, but this tiara comes from an alien world. It is something from the high-end period dramas he enjoys with a takeaway at the end of the week. ‘It’s stunning.’

‘I quite agree. I just hope whoever robbed Adam understands that about what they took. That they don’t melt his work down in the heat of avarice. I hope they’re calculated enough to understand his work is valuable. That there’s a distinction between art and bullion.’

‘I hope so too.’

‘And Adam himself… I hope he’s taking care. I sincerely hope the culprits were not intending to find him at work.’ A phone buzzes in her blazer pocket, and she checks the message. She frowns and taps a reply then slips it away again. ‘Apologies, my father is getting on. He becomes anxious if he doesn’t hear back quickly.’

‘No need to apologise,’ Kent assures her, ‘family is family.’ And he means it, although he wonders what Moira King’s upbringing was like, and what sort of parent it took to produce a daughter of such a polished and impeccable cut.

Before he leaves, Kent looks back down at the silver tie pin in the case. ‘Excuse me, how much is this?’

Moira names a price that is ludicrous for a pin, but is not out of Kent’s reach. ‘A special occasion?’ She smiles.

‘A birthday.’ Kent looks at it more closely. ‘I’ll take it.’

As he steps back onto Bond Street holding a cord-handled bag, he smiles to himself and takes out his phone.

Are you the last person in the office to still wear a tie? X

As he boards the train back from Paddington to Morrow, his phone pings.

Some of us have standards. At watercolour tonight. Rigatoni in the tupperware with blue lid x

She cannot get warm, but she never can and never could in Morrow-on-Sea. She would be colder still though, if she did not have the blanket that covers her, and Adam’s body next to hers on the sofa.

Ophelia props herself up to look at him while he sleeps. His head and torso lean on the cushions but his arm trails off the sofa, hanging mid-air, so that he looks like an artist’s study. She looks down at her wrist and thighs and smiles to see faint charcoal smears.

Ophelia lifts herself carefully off the sofa so she does not wake Adam, and crosses to the desk. She tidies it and straightens the beautiful draftwork on the board. Then, for the first time, she goes to the bedroom, where the clear morning light falls in. It surprises her to realise she is reminded of her own room at home, which Marina pointedly keeps immaculate for her thrice yearly visits. Books are stacked neatly, two-deep on shelves, spanning from the technical to the artistic, from children’s treasuries to Keats. A neatly turned-down bed. A lamp and a second pair of glasses on the bedside table.

Ophelia slides open drawers and borrows socks and a long-sleeved T-shirt, withdraws from this space she has not asked permission to be. She crosses the wooden boards to the stove and silently opens cupboards until she finds a coffee pot.

While she waits for the pot to boil, Ophelia watches out of the window. The tide is right out and sand stretches its wet brown arm into the distance. Little black stitches tick to and fro – birds searching the loam for their breakfast. Perhaps they would have been feeding on the man by now, if she had not gone into the sea and deprived them of a larger meal. The mackerel colours of his face swim into her vision. What had happened to this man; to a human life? When she turns around, Adam has opened his eyes and is watching her.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Fine. Coffee?’

She fills two cups and perches on the arm of the sofa. Adam has pulled himself upright and is awkwardly half-covered with the blanket.

‘Thanks.’

They drink silently, eyes fixed on their cups. Ophelia wants to look at his tattoos again, half glimpsed last night, but she cannot raise her head.

She feels Adam’s warm eyes on her. ‘This is so much better than what I make.’

Then she can speak again. ‘Well, I lived in Italy for a few years in my twenties. Learned how to do it properly.’

‘It’s much, much better.’

‘Grazie.’

The pictures on his skin look like the drawings on his desk. Briars and weeds to get trapped in, hollows and spaces that open unexpectedly to bareness. Later, she will write them down.

‘God, I’m too old to sleep on the sofa.’ Adam winces and turns his shoulder. ‘Why do you look so fresh?’

Ophelia had slept better than she has in months. She pulls her hair back from her face and her fingers catch in a tangle. ‘Do you have a brush?’

‘Uh… just a comb, will that do? In the bathroom cabinet.’

By the time Ophelia comes back, he has pulled on his discarded clothes, a sweet sort of modesty.

‘You look like her,’ Adam says.

‘My mother?’

He wrinkles his brow and laughs. ‘Ophelia. Millais’. The one with Elizabeth Siddal.’

‘Oh.’ Of course that is what he meant.

Adam turns back to his coffee. ‘You think about your mother a lot?’

Ophelia busies herself combing out her hair. She works methodically, from top to bottom in even strokes, pausing at tangles and slowly picking them apart. Her foot rests easily against his. As far as Adam can tell, she has no regrets about the night.

‘Mum – Marina – is gorgeous. Stunning. No one has ever met her and not thought so. She was a muse as well as an artist. She was well known as both, for a while.’

‘Did that make it complicated when you were younger?’ Adam tries to imagine Ophelia as a child, holding her beautiful mother’s hand, trailing in her wake.

‘She stopped working after I was born.’

‘She couldn’t keep painting after a baby?’

Adam sees it suddenly under her skin, the anger he recognises. ‘She could have if she wanted to. It was difficult for mothers then – now, even – but Dad always said he’d support her. But she didn’t want to really. Easier to hide behind a child than to start again and risk failing. Motherhood was a sacrifice she leaned into.’

‘She resented motherhood then?’

‘She resented me. I was supposed to be a totem for her brilliance.’ Ophelia sounds suddenly detached. ‘I wasn’t supposed to have a voice of my own.’

He hesitates, confused. ‘But you still talk? Visit for birthdays.’

Ophelia stops combing and looks at him. ‘I love her.’

Adam sees it, burning in her heart. A greater part of her than anything else. But it hurts you.

‘And your dad?’

‘Dad. He’s an art dealer; owns a gallery in Bristol. He loves me, but he worships Marina. He’s never really wanted to know.’ She finishes combing and moves from the arm of the sofa to sit next to Adam. Her hair shines. Her father is a coward.

‘I’m meant to see my dealer today,’ Adam says, remembering. ‘Up in London. I owe Moira a lot. My whole career really.’

Loyal, indefatigable Moira has been with Adam from the beginning – as a young man fresh out of art school, finding him an apprenticeship with a goldsmith; on his own for the first time, trying to set up shop, putting him on the radar so that he didn’t fail in his first year; making his career possible, then profitable.

Adam laughs. ‘Moira and my brother Luke. The people who keep me standing up.’

‘And Felix?’ Ophelia smiles.

‘And Felix. Julia too, in her way.’

At that moment, Leonard bumps through the cat flap and shakes himself out. He spots Ophelia and freezes. Adam feels Ophelia’s body tense. He is about to shoo Leonard away, but then Ophelia drops to the floor on her knees and reaches out to him like Mary Magdalene for Christ’s feet, and, more dog than cat, Leonard trots over to rub his solid ginger body along the length of her arm, purring. Adam hears her murmur something that sounds like gato and sees there are tears in her eyes.

After the prince had slain his own baby on the night of her Christening feast, he fled into the dawn, still wearing his wolf-pelt coat, howling with such evil that it chilled the very bones of all who heard him, and his wife died of sorrow for all that had passed.

The wolf-prince tore through the woods until he reached the old witch’s cottage. There he found a very beautiful woman – his wife’s stepmother, who had been banished for sending the princess away with three gold rings. Together, they lived for many years, and the queen gave birth to litter after litter of wolf pups.

Ophelia kisses him before she leaves. He can feel it on his mouth still when he finds his phone and makes his morning call to Felix. She had said no more about the man in the sea, but Adam had seen it when she had glanced from the front step to the beach, then turned to walk by the roads instead.

Felix is bright this morning, all trace of illness long gone. ‘Can we go swimming again this weekend, Dad?’

‘Sure. No pizza this time though.’

‘What about Skittles?’

‘Maybe. Glad you feel better, Fee.’

‘You sound happy, Dad. Is everything better now from when the shop got burgled?’

‘Yeah, it’ll all be okay. Don’t worry yourself. I’ll pick you up after football tomorrow, okay? Love you.’

Adam makes a pot of coffee that tastes nothing like the one Ophelia had made. Leonard mithers him for breakfast, and Adam sits on the floor next to him while he eats, stroking him absentmindedly.

He glances at the sofa, at Ophelia’s empty mug. What has he done? He thought he had moved past these reckless decisions. The impulsive following of desire. He has a son now, a business, next year he will be 40. He has been robbed, he is in trouble with the police. He is worthless. He drops his head back and laughs. Leonard pauses eating and looks up at him quizzically.

‘I don’t know either, Lenny.’

There is a buzz at the door. His pulse lifts. Ophelia.

After the prince had slain his own baby on the night of her Christening feast, he tried to flee the castle, but he was soon stopped by guards whom the King himself had sent. The wolf-prince fought hard, but even he could not escape the wrath of the guards who had loved the baby princess so well. When he had been butchered, the captain of the guards peeled off the wolf-pelt coat and turned to present it to the sorrowing princess.

The sun bounced off the captain’s shining hair as she bowed and said, ‘Bit of a shock – weren’t expecting that when you got up this morning, were you? You’re all right now. Warming up?’

‘Were you expecting someone else?’ William Kent enquires genially.

‘Uh, no, sorry. I’m still waking up. Come in.’ Adam steps back. As he closes the door, he glances at the patch of whitish blue where he had scrubbed away the bloodstain with bleach.

The studio is not open yet, and Adam leads the detective up to the flat.

‘Late night?’ Kent asks politely.

‘Uh, yeah, sort of.’ Adam puts the kettle on. ‘Is there any news?’

‘Some developments, certainly. I wonder if you recognise this man? He buzzed twice last week, around twelve thirty both times. You weren’t in, so that camera of yours caught him.’ Kent shows Adam the CCTV images.

‘Not a clue. Maybe a prospective customer? Or a salesman of some kind, energy or broadband, with the lanyard? I was in London twice last week, to see Moira King, my dealer, then visiting a client.’

‘Ah yes, Moira King. A very astute woman.’ Kent nods, making notes.

‘You’ve talked to Moira?’

‘All a natural part of enquiries,’ Kent says soothingly, ‘she’s quite the champion of your work.’

‘Yeah, well, I’d be lost without her.’ Adam begins to get out more mugs, hands uncharacteristically clumsy. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Yes, yesterday Ophelia Richards pulled a body out of the sea.’

Adam’s stomach lurches, he turns. ‘Yeah, I heard.’

‘The deceased had these in his pockets.’ Kent produces an evidence bag from his coat. Pressed grotesquely against the plastic film are a gold pomegranate, a locket, and Ophelia’s ring.

‘Fuck.’ Adam reaches for them.

Kent lets him take the bag. ‘That’s a positive identification then – these are your work?’

‘This is mine. These were stolen. They were… they were on the man in the sea, the dead man?’

‘The murdered man. We’re waiting on a full post-mortem, of course. But we don’t think he drowned. There’s a substantial head wound, and there’s very little doubt it occurred before he entered the water. In fact, it looks as though his head was dashed against a hard surface – maybe a wall.’

The goldsmith has gone completely white. Kent reaches out and gently takes back the evidence bag. He scrutinises Adam’s face, looking for truth in the shock.

‘When you’re ready, I’m going to show you a photograph of this man. It’s not pleasant. But we need to know if you recognise him.’

Adam Conlan nods absently, and Kent passes his phone again. ‘Five foot eleven, white, brown hair, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, but it’s hard to tell after a few days in the water. Autopsy and dental will provide a better idea.’

The photograph of the man’s head has been cropped to show as little of the wound as possible, but it is not possible to disguise his deadness, the violence of the sea and the elements upon his skin, the discolouration of early decay. Adam looks as briefly as he can, but it is not brief enough.

‘Jesus. No, I don’t—’

Kent nods and takes his phone back. ‘Take a couple of deep breaths.’

Adam doubles over, each breath more nauseating than the last. Kent rests a hand on his back.

‘We’re still looking for the rest of the missing gold. A dive team will go down later today in the area he was found. But the tides probably took him out and brought him back in, so the rest of it could be anywhere in a hundred square miles of seabed.’

Adam straightens up as much as he can.

‘Of course,’ continues Kent, ‘he may never have possessed the rest of the gold.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the most reasonable hypothesis is that this man was in on the robbery, and that he was killed by the other person or persons involved. Perhaps a dispute over how to split the proceeds or cover their tracks. Then he was dragged the short distance and dumped – the sea was at high tide, only ten, fifteen metres to cover. A cold job on a November morning, heavy, but the beach was deserted. The other shops were closed – no witnesses.’

Adam’s eyes slide to the floor. Below them is the space where he spends all his working hours, the greater portion of his life. A place he has been joined by Felix, Julia, Luke, Ophelia. Below them, a man’s head was struck so hard he died. Adam covers his mouth with his hand.

‘It’s likely that the killer kept the rest of the gold. These three pieces were found in an inside jacket pocket – either the killer missed them in the rush to dispose of the body, or they didn’t know this man had stashed goods he didn’t intend to share.’

‘This is madness. Someone died here. Ophelia found the man who died here?’

‘Mmm. You don’t know anyone matching the man’s description, even if his face isn’t quite… recognisable?’ Kent asks equably. He picks up the blanket from the sofa and idly folds it. He can see the exact moment the implication hits Adam. The sudden collapse of his shoulders, the shattering of whatever life he had woken to that day.

Of all the things Adam has been and done, he has never hit another man. He has never felt the aggression he has sometimes seen in others. He grips the counter. The policeman slides in and out of focus and the waves are roaring in his head.

He feels Kent’s grip on his shoulder and elbow, guiding him to the sofa – is this what having a mother is like? The policeman’s soothing voice is telling him to sit down, it’s a lot to take in. A mother who wonders if you have killed a man.

His glazed eyes pass over his desk, and Adam remembers the wide red birthmark on Ophelia’s stomach, like a hole made by the jaws of an animal.

‘Ophelia Richards,’ Kent says, as though he has stolen into Adam’s mind, ‘tell me more about her.’

‘What do you mean?’ He tries to breathe.

‘What is she doing in Morrow?’

Adam shakes his head. ‘Uh. Writing a book. A story about Morrow. She remembers it from her childhood… Why are you asking me?’

‘And why does she keep appearing here, at your door?’

‘She—’ the goldsmith starts, then falters. ‘She was selling her mother’s gold.’

Kent raises his eyebrows. He does not know who is in danger from whom. He wants to protect both Adam and Ophelia; from each other, from themselves, perhaps. But this role as Morrow’s shepherd is a tortured one. Both had the opportunity to rob the shop – Adam in the night, or early morning; Ophelia, when Adam was out collecting his son. But she could not have known Felix would be poorly – she could not possibly have hoped to overpower Adam herself. If the dead man was her accomplice, was this tiny woman capable of breaking a man’s head against the wall and dragging him to the sea? Surely, that was a job for the strong hands of the goldsmith.

Kent looks about and brings over the wastepaper basket that sits beside the desk at the window. He notices a minutely detailed drawing of a bracelet pinned to the draftboard. He places the bin in front of Adam in case he is sick.

And the gold, the insurance? Either of them would profit. Who is the trespasser, and who the victim? He saw them sitting together on the floorboards, downstairs, a slice of some suspended heaven – is it both of them? Are both wolf, or both lamb?

Simon had taken Kent to an exhibition once, Rossetti, he thinks. He had been happy to drift in Simon’s wake, smiling at the back of his head as he cooed over jewel-toned canvasses. But there had been one that had caught Kent’s eye, a man and a long-haired woman embracing as they fell through stars, a pair of long-robed men watching in sorrow. ‘Paolo and Francesca da Rimini,’ Simon had said. ‘Francesca was married to Paolo’s cruel older brother but they fell in love, and the brother killed them both. Rossetti painted them clinging to each other as they were depicted in Dante’s Inferno. That’s Dante and Virgil looking on.’

‘Why are they falling through stars? Because they’re star-crossed lovers?’

‘They aren’t stars. It’s hellfire – it was adultery. They’re clinging to each other through Hell.’

In front of him, Adam’s dark head is cradled in his hands. Kent does not know precisely what he is witnessing. But he could not bear to be like those men, looking on.

After the prince had slain his own baby on the night of her Christening feast, he fled into the dawn, peeling off his wolf-pelt coat, howling with such sorrow that it chilled the very bones of all who heard him.

The wolf-prince tore through the woods until he reached the old witch’s cottage. There he found a terrified man and a pale child with a silver tongue.

She needs to exercise. The dead man, the sea-bloated body. Adam’s body. Gatta’s return. There are too many new stimuli. She feels the high and the panic. The world a shaken-up snow globe that she needs to settle with routine.

Ophelia lets herself into her flat and can feel the first flakes of calm drifting down. Here is the lumpy sofa. The stack of library books she had left by her laptop yesterday. The cast-iron pan on the hob, one of the few possessions that she has brought with her from place to place.

Outside it had been bitter, tiding real winter, but in here warmth has travelled up from the flat below. Ophelia crosses into her bedroom and strips off her coat and shoes, the jumper and joggers from the unknown Good Samaritan, Adam’s T-shirt and socks. The dressing Adam had placed on her arm sticks fast. In the bathroom, she twists the shower knob and lets water run onto the tiles flecked with the black mould that no amount of bleach has ever dislodged. She is shivering from her walk home, but no, she knows that she must stick to this ritual – the shower must be cold. Short, perhaps, but cold. After she exercises, she can shower again, in the warm, and scrub every inch of herself, behind her ears and knees and between her toes like she had been taught as a child.

The shower is indeed miserable and brief, but as Ophelia steps out, she breathes a sigh of relief. It is settling a little. She almost expects to see gatta when she turns – or Leonard, as she is known here. She dresses in her own clothes, makes her own coffee, eats some fruit. Then Ophelia walks back to the bedroom, to the plywood wardrobe and opens it. On the inside of the door is a narrow, full-length mirror.

Wan, tired, one good night’s sleep no remedy for the years; there are lines descending at a steep angle from the inner corner of her eye, cutting their way to her cheek. Her body is thin but imperfect in so many ways. Her hair is in disarray from the walk and the shower – Ophelia takes up her brush and begins to smooth the thick locks again. What had Adam seen that he had wanted? She has never known, never understood, when men have reached for her. But I am not beautiful. She smiles though, to know that he had reached for her; had really wanted her – she had felt that.

Ophelia’s hair takes on its proper sheen again, even in the dull light. Threads of red and gold and bronze and chestnut, rippling as the brush moves over them.

And grey.

Ophelia pauses and leans closer to the mirror. There, she is sure. She runs the brush through again and catches it. A single grey strand, a little wirier than the others. She examines it. Her first grey hair.

She twists it between forefinger and thumb. What should she do with it? Leave it, or pluck it out? It seems like a weighty decision to make.

As she stands wondering, snowflakes begin to fall, real ones that she can see through the panes of her grimy window. Ophelia laughs in disbelief and crosses to watch as the individual flakes quickly build in momentum, gathering pace and thickness, already speckling the road so that soon the white space will outstrip the black. If ever there has been a sign that she must calm her snow-globe mind, this is it. Ophelia laughs aloud again.

She fetches her laptop from the sofa and loads a pilates video. Snow, at the seaside. This is her first winter in Morrow, her childhood trips only ever a summer occurrence. She rolls down her spine, dips to clasp her calves with her arms. What happens next? Does it settle or blow into the sea? She rolls up, stretches her arms wide and carves them in twin arcs until they meet above her head. Is Adam watching the snow at this moment, from the window of his flat, from his workshop?

She promises herself that later she will go for a walk in the whiteness. Not to the beach though, not today. Red and green bloom like algae over skin, across an eye. Across the face of a man whose mother held him in her arms as a baby. When he was a child, someone had hoped for him. Almost certainly he had visited the seaside, if not here then, somewhere else. Run in and out of the surf with a child’s bare spindled legs.

Ophelia cannot think like this. It is too like madness. She shakes it away and glides a leg forward, preparing to lean into a lunge, when her phone rings. Her heart sinks. Only one person calls her. She hesitates, but suddenly she needs to hear another human voice.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Morning, darling. How are you?’ Marina is bright, voice liquid silk.

‘Not bad, chilly,’ Ophelia replies unthinkingly.

‘I thought it would be less exposed in London.’

‘Uh—’

Marina catches the barely mouthed syllable with both hands. ‘You are still in Brixton, aren’t you?’

Ophelia could kick herself. ‘Oh, no, not quite. The tenancy ended and I thought it would be nice to be out of London for a bit.’

‘When did that happen, darling?’

‘Very recently, just a couple of weeks ago. How are you and Daddy?’ She tries to steer the ship away from the rocks.

‘Fine, darling, fine. Where are you then?’

‘Sorry, Mum. I was going to tell you – you know what moving is like. There’s so much to organise, and it just totally slipped my mind.’

Marina sounds hurt. ‘It does worry me just a little when you don’t tell us you’ve moved. What if there was an emergency or you had an accident? We wouldn’t know where to find you, or even what part of the country you’re in.’

‘You’re right, Mum. I’m sorry.’

‘So? Where are you this time, darling?’

‘Oh poppet, what are we going to do with you? Poor lamb.’ Marina gently brushes her daughter’s long strands away from her face. ‘Here, stay leaned forward – like that.’ She holds the plastic mixing bowl on Ophelia’s lap, her other arm wrapped around her skinny shoulders. Ophelia is down to her Winnie-the-Pooh pyjamas, too short on her eight-year-old legs, but she has already got vomit on the floral ones, the navy ones, and the butterfly pair. She can hear the washing machine chugging around in the background, then in her body, heaving, churning, rising in her throat.

‘Mum—’

‘I’m here, Ophy. That’s all right, let it out now.’

She leans over the bowl and the vomit streams out again.

‘I’m in Morrow-on-Sea.’

There is silence at the end of the line. Ophelia closes her eyes. She hears Marina inhale.

‘You’re in Morrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not? I like the sea.’

Her mother is silent again. Ophelia crosses to the window and watches the snow falling, furious now, thick and whirling, carried on a harsh wind that lands the flakes layer on layer, weakening the outlines of the buildings with this repeated attrition.

‘Have you ever been back, Mum?’

‘No,’ Marina snaps.

Outside, the snow blankets and smothers.

‘Have a bit of lemonade – there, just a sip. Not too much at once.’ Marina puts the cup to her daughter’s lips and Ophelia takes a little. It is so fresh and sweet after the sour acid of the vomit. She tilts her head so she can look at her mum. For the first time she can remember, Marina is a mess. Her hair is scraped into a greasy bun and she wears her old tracksuit. She is smiling down at Ophelia, who feels weak and wretched. Marina tucks a blanket back round her.

‘Let’s have 101 Dalmatians, hey?’ She gets up and finds the video cassette, and rewinds it to the beginning of the tape. The blue and white fairy tale castle of the Walt Disney logo illuminates the screen accompanied by a swell of music and Ophelia nestles into her mother’s side. Marina cuddles her.

After a while, she pauses so that Ophelia can throw up the little bit of lemonade, then she clears her up and they settle back down to watch again. It is the happiest 90 minutes of Ophelia’s life.

‘Why are you back there, Ophelia? What are you looking for?’

‘I can come back if I choose, Mum. I spent my childhood here.’

‘Don’t exaggerate.’

‘We came every year.’

‘So what? Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again?’ Her voice is harsh. ‘No. Look forward, Ophelia. Whatever closure you keep seeking, you’re not going to find it. Not in Morrow, not anywhere. Women don’t get the privilege of closure. We just keep going.’

Ophelia’s face burns. She turns from the window, and after the blinding whiteness of the snow, sees the flat and her life – seedy and itinerant. She feels the urge to hurt Marina.

‘I sold the gold.’

‘What?’

‘Your ring. Grandma’s bracelet, Auntie Penelope’s necklace. I sold them to a local goldsmith. He’ll have melted them down by now. They’re gone.’

There is a long silence, then Marina’s voice is guttural. ‘How could you?’

‘You gave them to me. You insisted. They were mine to sell.’

‘You did this to hurt me. To punish me, because you’ve always thought I wasn’t a good enough mother.’

‘You gave them to me to hurt me. Because I didn’t worship your sacrifices by making the same ones.’ Ophelia feels her voice become hysterical.

‘You are spiteful and wicked. This is why you’ll remain alone.’ Marina hangs up.

Ophelia’s eyes blur with tears. She turns to the window and looks out into the icing-sugar void, the unblunted knife in her chest.

The brief audacity of human contact has been held up to her by her mother’s mirror, and she knows she is too wretched to deserve Adam. She is not made for his warm body, but to pull what is dead out of the cold sea.

This is why she will remain alone.

In its fairy ring of beeches and tree stumps, the tower waits for the blanketing of nightfall. The twilight settles down, purple over the tree tops, and pulls the shade down lower and lower until it is unquiet night. The rustle of the undergrowth and the bark of a fox are the beginning, but not the end, of what takes place in the cold, thin black air.

At the base of the folly, the uncut foliage waves and whispers against the stone. Ivy creeps up its body, and the narrow windows peek out between heart-shaped leaves.

At the top of the tower, under the clouds, a sharp wind weaves through the crenellations. The crows that roost there mock it. What is wind to them?

Beneath them, the gold sits, unclaimed, in its drifts.

The whole of the tower stands timeless and waiting.

On her mattress, in her flat, she waits at its door and can’t get in.

‘I’ve been looking back through my diary. I think it must have been the Jeweller’s Convention. The big annual one in London. The gentleman in Adam’s CCTV photographs approached me after a panel event I had spoken at. If you contact the convention organisers, they’ll have a list of delegates for the weekend but I’m afraid it’ll run into the thousands.’

Kent’s phone is clamped to his ear in the meeting room that has been established as the case hub. It is packed with a dozen officers and the clamouring of printers and phones, the crinkle of KitKat wrappers and wreathing vape smoke. And Kent can hear nothing but Moira King’s soothing, polished voice, smooth as the pearls she wears in her other world.

‘Well, I appreciate you looking it up for me, Ms King. I’ll certainly get the delegate list run down regardless.’

‘My pleasure. How’s poor Adam faring?’

Kent pauses. ‘He’s had better weeks.’

He rings off and sees an email pop to the top of his inbox. His stomach turns. Right. He finds himself looking around the crowded room for Culvers’ bright head, and smiles to catch himself doing it. She isn’t here.

On instinct, he rises and sidles past the trestle tables that have been squeezed into the meeting room. Morrow hasn’t had a murder for a year or two, and there is an unfamiliar energy running through the normally jaded atmosphere.

Through the safety glass of the door, Kent spots Culvers. He opens it to let a young PC with a tray of mugs wobble past, then pursues his quarry to where she stands in front of the clapped-out vending machine.

‘Boss?’

‘How do you feel about autopsies, Culvers?’

‘Prefer the cinema, really.’ Kent chokes on his laughter. She shrugs. ‘Yeah. They’re all right.’

‘Great. Right.’

He hovers, like a teenager trying to ask a crush on a date. She is not fooled. ‘Shall I come with you, Boss?’

‘Would you mind? It’s easier when there’s company.’

She waves a hand in assent, then leans down to pull her crisps out of the vending machine. ‘Did I ever tell you I was an assistant at a funeral home for a while, after my Olevels?’

Kent’s eyebrows clash together in surprise. She has never mentioned it during all the years they’ve worked together. ‘You’re a dark horse, Culvers.’

‘I like to preserve an air of mystery about my person. Quaver?’

‘Why haven’t they found the man at the window? Or this bloke with the lanyard? Or whoever took the gold bear? Posted the heart? I saw half a dozen addicts on the drive through town – any of them could have done it. It doesn’t make sense to focus on you.’ Luke’s skin is blanched by snow and tiredness.

The brothers’ footsteps wind and thread across the covered beach, and Adam breathes out a foggy, disconsolate laugh and pulls his hat further down over his ears. His brother looks almost as worried as he does.

Luke inhales frozen air and blows out dragon’s breath. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t need me freaking out. I’m here to help you. Let’s be logical about this.’

This is why Adam needs Luke. His steady, analytical mind, and the tolerance he has always had for his little brother’s eventful life. The love they bear for each other is unarticulated and profound.

The goldsmith hunches his shoulders and pieces together all he knows. ‘I’ve been robbed, I’m suspected of fraud and murder,’ he pauses, ‘and I’m seeing someone.’

Luke stops and looks at Adam. ‘You’re joking?’ Adam stops too. ‘I mean, I’m happy for you, but talk about timing.’

‘Right?’ Adam starts walking again, towards the shrouded cliffs. It is too cold to stand still. It isn’t the sort of snow that insulates the world when it settles; instead the sea wind picks up flakes and throws them with saltwater fury, flecking living things with the cold.

‘Is she a girlfriend or…?’

‘I don’t know what it is. I just know I shouldn’t have dragged Ophelia into this mess.’

Where the white blanket meets the incoming tide, it is washed thin and ragged, mirroring the translucency of the waves, so that if the brothers had been higher, on the coastal path, they would have seen two seas rushing to meet one another; one pearly, the other green-grey.

Luke rests a gloved hand on his brother’s shoulder. Adam slumps his forehead onto it and closes his eyes for a moment.

‘What have insurance said?’ Luke asks encouragingly.

‘Fuck knows, nothing yet. But they’re not going to pay out if I’m suspected of robbery and murder.’

‘Mate, it doesn’t matter. You didn’t do it.’

‘But the police—’

‘You didn’t do it,’ Luke says firmly, ‘so there won’t be any evidence to charge you. It’ll be shit while they investigate, but you just have to ride it out. I’ll be here with you. So will Julia. So will Felix. Maybe even this Ophelia.’

Adam shakes his head.

The tide makes a lunge at the next inch of white, and the next. In reply, the snow begins to fall again.

‘You know what the cold reminds me of?’ Adam digs his hands deeper into his pockets. ‘Cork. Aunt Bridget.’

Luke laughs. ‘Ironic. She reminds me of warmth.’

‘Well, yeah, she was a warm hug, obviously. But church there – I can’t ever remember being as cold as when she made us go. I’m sure it can’t actually have been that cold, in reality. I just remember shivering in the pews every Sunday. Balmy July outside and inside was still a fridge.’

‘It was those fucking flagstones; you might as well not have been wearing shoes.’ Luke narrows his eyes. ‘I’d forgotten that. I’d completely forgotten. Mass. Every Sunday of the holidays. How did I forget that?’

They walk on, listening to the gulls shrieking and whooping.

Luke thinks aloud. ‘You’re right, that church was awful. Maybe I still have my missal somewhere?’

Adam shakes his head. ‘We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.’

‘We look forward to the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.’

‘Amen.’

There is a sharp pain in Adam’s chest. He sees Aunt Bridget’s face when he told her he’d got a woman pregnant out of wedlock. And for a second, the warmth of all their lives had been flagstone-cold. Even Luke, he has never told of this one solitary rejection.

The brothers come to a stop under the cliffs. The tide is in. They cannot reach the beach of the next cove without wading through the sea. They turn back.

‘I’m glad you came.’

‘Yeah.’

Adam tilts his face at the sky. ‘Snow at the beach. That’s a new one, even for me.’

‘Taylor Swift song, isn’t it?’

‘Shut up.’

‘He’s either the most conniving son of the Devil, or I’m kicking a puppy,’ Kent observes, straightening the crinkles in his paper suit. ‘And both are unappealing options.’

‘Now there’s a pair of lungs,’ Culvers notes appreciatively. Kent looks up out of instinct, then quickly looks away. He sucks hard on the Trebor mint to keep out the smell. ‘Well, other than Adam Conlan doing an insurance job, what are your options?’ Culvers continues. ‘You’ve got this Ophelia Richards, who keeps appearing at Conlan’s.’

‘Mmm, they’re like those little haematite magnets you get at the crystal shop. Keep clacking back together. Goodness knows why.’

‘I always knew this moment would come. Well, Boss, when a man and a woman…’

‘Thank you, Culvers.’ Thank god she is here. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the pathologist lifting some other dripping organ onto a scale.

‘There’s some grit in Richards, mind. I took her statement after she fetched this chap out of the sea. There’s capacity there, for good or ill.’

‘Well, swimming into icy waters to drag a body back is either remarkable mettle, or the most audacious double bluff,’ Kent observes. ‘Then we have the questionable clues of the missing gold bear, and this mysterious face at the window – events that we only have Adam Conlan’s word actually took place. The one solid precursor to the robbery is the heart in the post.’

‘Might be a red herring, might be a warning.’

‘Then there’s Lanyard Man,’ Kent continues. ‘He’s emble-matic of our third option – not Conlan or Ms Richards, but the professional third party. Someone who has either scouted out the location, or received inside information, so that they can avoid the alarmed shop door, and know that the residential door will open on to a corridor with a connecting door into the studio.’

‘Could be the mother of his child tipping someone off? Or her new partner?’ Culvers mulls. ‘Regardless, if it’s a third party, you have to accept that on a Monday morning, Adam Conlan was meant to be found at work, and the perpetrators either didn’t care or were looking to harm him.’

‘Thank goodness for children’s capacity for passing germs around.’ Kent peeks up at the man laid out on the steel table. The pathologist and her assistant are still removing organs, so Kent looks back at his toes. He hates autopsies, but feels a sort of duty to bear witness to a life cut short. Had it been this man’s intention to leave Adam Conlan on a slab? This is the universe’s cruel sense of humour, perhaps; soon the pathologist will incise along his jaw and roll back the skin of his face, searching for truth.

Culvers hums to herself, and Kent takes a deep eucalyptus-breath through the vapour rub smeared under his nose.

‘There are a few known operators in this neck of the woods. So far we have three names: Aledd Hussain, Nicholas Edwards, Andrew Niven. All three are known to coordinate high-value jobs, and have links to organised-crime groups. I’ve left Sergeant Eames running them down to see if we can find any connection to this job.’

Then the pathologist indicates it is time to start on the skull, where the MRI had shown substantial damage beneath the bloated, fish-nibbled flesh, and they shuffle closer. From time to time, Culvers surreptitiously gives him a pat on the arm.

Eventually, the pathologist is done. She deposits the plastic bag of organs back in the abdomen and sews it back up. Kent can never decide if this is efficient, or some sort of well-accepted travesty. She strips off her gloves and turns to them.

‘Nothing wildly exciting, I’m afraid. Cause of death was trauma to the frontal and parietal bones and subsequent haemorrhaging. Instantaneous. Before entry to the water. Victim was thirty-five to fifty-five, Caucasian, British dental work. He had been in the water for a number of days, but certainly no longer than a week.’

‘Consistent with being dumped in the sea on Monday after the robbery?’

She nods. ‘Consistent with submersion anytime between Sunday and Tuesday. We’ll send samples off but I’ll get an initial written report to you by…’ She pulls her phone from her back pocket and checks the time. ‘Probably about six this evening.’ Kent notices two children on her phone wallpaper. How does she go home to them, he wonders, and stroke their cherubic heads, knowing every fragile bone and vessel that worms beneath.

‘But your mum is so cool. What’s your problem?’

‘Sabs is right,’ Ellie shrugs, ‘she caught me smoking weed on the balcony when we came round at Easter. She just laughed and said she wished she was young again.’

‘I honestly don’t think you could rebel against Marina,’ agrees Sabrina, flicking back glossy hair. ‘Like, she’s an artist. And she posed for some really famous artists. Naked, sometimes, you know. There’s an absolutely gorgeous black and white photo of her on a rocking horse. What’s she going to tell you off for?’

‘It’s not like that in real life.’ Ophelia grinds out her cigarette. ‘It’s an act. She’s bitter because having me robbed her of that.’

The two other girls raise their eyebrows at her.

‘Seriously? Just count your blessings. Most of us have to live with much, much less liberal matriarchs,’ coos Ellie, flicking her stub away. ‘Your parents are cool with paying for you to read English Lit for three years. I had to beg my parents to let me send an application for Law instead of Medicine.’

Sabrina softens a little, expensive perfume evaporating off her school blazer as she takes Ophelia’s hand. ‘Everyone has a god-given right to hate their parents. You’re just exercising yours, I get it. That said, I would trade you any day.’

‘Ugh. Why don’t you marry Marina, if she’s so cool?’ Ophelia pulls her hand away.

Sabrina pulls a pouty face and blows a kiss as she goes back to the common room.

Ophelia had slipped out through the school gate and not gone home that night.

Ophelia opens the front door.

‘Hello again,’ PC Culvers’ shining blonde hair is wet with snow, ‘bit of a regular occurrence this now, isn’t it?’

The writer admits them to the flat and gestures Culvers and her boss towards the sofa. Culvers sits, shifts uncomfortably, and elects to stand. William Kent perches delicately on the edge, avoiding the worst of the lumps. Ophelia seems confused to see him there.

‘How are you doing now, my love?’ Culvers asks Ophelia.

‘Not too bad, you know.’ She shifts from foot to foot, arms cradling each other.

‘Did it help seeing your friend yesterday?’

‘Hm?’ Ophelia looks puzzled.

‘The one who lives at the end of the beach.’

‘Oh – yes. Thank you.’

‘Bound to shake you up, finding something like that. Good to have company, I think,’ Culvers rattles on, ‘only human. Think you can stand a bit more chat about it?’

Ophelia hesitates, then nods. This, Kent thinks, is why he chooses Culvers every time. This is her robust, cheerful, and singular power.

‘Good, very good, my love. Well, we’ve found one of your pieces of gold – that gorgeous opal ring. So there’s a bit of luck.’

The younger woman’s eyes open wide in surprise.

‘You’ll be able to have that back once the investigation is complete – for now it’ll have to stay in evidence, I’m afraid, but we’ll take good care of it.’

‘Where did you find it?’

‘Well, that’s the bit of news that might come as a shock. Take a seat now, we don’t want any sudden wobbles.’ Culvers shepherds Ophelia to the sofa and she is pliant as a child.

Next to her, Kent can feel the nervous energy that is wired through Ophelia today. Something has been disorganised.

Maybe it is finding the body. It would be quite understandable.

Culvers speaks briskly but kindly, ‘That poor bloke you pulled from the sea, obviously he was dead. But he hadn’t fallen in and drowned, and it wasn’t a suicide. He had been murdered – in all likelihood, during the robbery of Adam Conlan’s workshop.’

Ophelia’s knee stops bouncing. Her face, already sallow, begins to look panicked and faint. Culvers cocks her head and watches as Ophelia’s eyes become unfocused.

‘When did you last eat, love?’

‘Uh… breakfast. Maybe eight, nine… I don’t—’

The PC checks her Fitbit. ‘It’s four o’clock now.’ She strides over to Ophelia’s kitchen cupboards and finds well-ordered rows of olive oil, pasta, tinned tomatoes, chickpeas, oats. She shuffles her hand round and finds a bar of 85% dark chocolate. ‘This’ll do.’ She breaks off two big squares and hands them to Ophelia. ‘Eat up.’

Mechanically, Ophelia begins to consume them.

The police officers wait. Kent subtly looks around at the flat. It is shabby but spotless. The few possessions have been organised to make the most of the cramped space, but here and there, Kent can see today’s tasks that have been picked up and put down again, unfinished. An open notepad. A jumper that has been folded and placed in the laundry basket, but next to it, the drying horse still bearing the rest of its load. A book has been left splayed on the countertop. Somewhere, a fine balance has been tipped.

‘That’ll do you good.’ Culvers nods as Ophelia finishes eating. ‘Now, DI Kent has some questions, think you can manage them?’

‘Yes.’

Kent smiles placidly. ‘It’s been an eventful week. I’m very sorry about that… Adam Conlan is a gentle soul, isn’t he?’

Ophelia’s head whips up. ‘I suppose.’

Kent holds her gaze very steadily. ‘Be careful if you go to see him again.’

‘How did you—’

‘Your friend at the end of the beach. When I saw him earlier, he knew you’d found the body in the sea. He could have heard about the body elsewhere, but how did he know it was you who found it?’ Kent raises his eyebrows. ‘Just, take care.’

‘He wouldn’t—’

‘Probably not.’ Kent shrugs.

‘Never any telling, my love.’ Culvers levels that soft and steely gaze.

‘Do you know anything about the mother of his child – Julia Becker?’ Kent continues.

‘Uh – almost nothing, except that they share Felix. Why?’

‘We’re exploring all the terrain. Does she know you two are involved?’

Ophelia is dazed. ‘We aren’t. It’s not—’ She inhales. ‘That happened after the robbery, not before.’

Kent smiles. ‘It’s all right, no one is making any judgements. She has a new partner too, you know. She was away with him last weekend, just before the robbery. It must be intense sharing a child, especially never having actually been a couple. It would be natural if there were a lot of feelings involved. If there was anger, or jealousy, or resentment.’

Ophelia is not dazed enough to miss the implication. ‘Why would she rob Adam? He’s her child’s father. It wouldn’t make sense.’

‘Oh, love,’ Culvers smiles, ‘relationships don’t tend to make sense.’

‘I don’t know anything about Julia,’ Ophelia persists. ‘But I know Adam has nothing to do with what’s going on… he loves his son too much to risk anything.’

Kent nods. ‘Those are good things to know. What about this man?’ He shows her the photos of Lanyard Man. She shakes her head. Only Moira King has seen him then.

‘Why did you go to sell to Adam Conlan in particular?’ Culvers asks. ‘I saw another jeweller two minutes down the high street – closer to you. Did he offer better money?’

Ophelia’s knee begins to bounce again. ‘Just coincidence. I’d seen his workshop from the beach that morning. I think it stuck in my head. I’d got the late train back from my parents’ and had been walking for a few hours.’

Culvers’ frown deepens. ‘In the middle of the night?’

‘It helps clear my head sometimes.’

Ah yes, that’s what it is. Kent nods. Yes, there is no finer balance than between parent and child.

The child quickly learned not to fear the strange man with the rich clothes and long teeth who had appeared at the cottage in the woods. At first, the goldsmith had tried to scare him away, wielding the hammer he had brought from his workshop. But the strange man had only stepped closer, seeming to beg with his eyes for the goldsmith to carry out his threat. Like all fathers, the child had realised, the goldsmith was really a coward, and when he failed to bring the hammer down, the new man had gone to the fireplace and laid down next to it with vacant eyes.

Each morning, the child found him there upon his side with all four limbs splayed in front of him, like a forlorn dog. Sometimes his eyes followed her and then closed in pain. She left him a bowl of porridge, and sometimes he ate it.

Under cover of darkness, her new father went back to retrieve tools and materials from his workshop in the town, and set up anew in the parlour. Each day, once the child had finished cleaning the cottage, gathering firewood, foraging for berries, and baking bread, she stood in the parlour and in her most silvered voice, said, ‘Father, today, will you teach me how to shape gold?’

Every day, the goldsmith shook his head, and every day, the child asked again. After three moons had come and gone, the goldsmith finally said, ‘Yes, today I will show you.’

Moira King returns from her father’s, where she has settled him for the evening with a whiskey and the history channel. He oughtn’t to drink with his medication, but why deny him this small pleasure? He is no longer the loving tyrant of her youth.

She goes into her own gleaming kitchen. She had thought about picking up sushi, but it would be the third time this week, and the restaurant staff will begin to pity her order for one. She puts the Le Creuset skillet on the hob and unwraps the steak she has bought. While she waits for the pan to heat up, she looks down at the one piece of Adam Conlan’s work which she personally owns – a ring with a seed pearl emerging from the open beak of a nightingale. It suits her very well.

She slips the steak into the pan and sears it for two minutes on each side, then it is ready to eat, bloody.

Culvers drops Kent back at his house. From the kerbside, she peers at where it sits in the middle of the pretty, well-kept row of Victorian cottages.

‘Did you do the porch tiling yourself, Boss?’

‘God no, not me. It’s a period property; like that when we bought it. I need to bring those planters in for the winter, if the snow hasn’t already killed everything.’

‘Mm, you should come and do my garden while you’re at it. Right, see you Monday, Boss.’

‘Unless I need you over the weekend.’

‘Yes, yes. Unless you need me over the weekend.’

Kent takes it carefully on the front path until he reaches the monochrome tiled porch that Culvers had admired. It has stopped snowing now at least, so he reaches for the broom that leans next to the boot rack and sweeps a clear path to the gate. The hall light glows warm behind the stained-glass panels of the front door and the policeman breathes a sigh of relief as he gets inside.

Long since banned from cooking, he carries out his weekly duties by ordering a Chinese takeaway, and sits at the kitchen table with a glass of Picpoul de Pinet, which he has recently discovered he likes. He has a while before Simon gets home. He lays a pen and notepad in front of his laptop. Sometimes one needs paper.

On a clean page, he writes Adam Conlan in one corner, and Ophelia Richards in another. He draws a line between them, and with childish pleasure, adds a small heart.

He leans back and takes a sip of wine, then he returns to Adam’s corner and writes insurance money. They only have his word for it that the robbery occurred while he was collecting his son from school. His word, though appealing, is no more than air.

Why not before then, when his cameras weren’t on? A robbery staged after he dropped his son off at breakfast club, an accomplice killed and dumped. It could be done in an hour. Then school calls, his son is sick – it is inconvenient, a shock no doubt – perhaps he had to wipe the blood off shaking hands before he could answer his phone. But it does not disrupt his plan materially. If it had not happened, he would have gone for a walk, ensured he was caught somewhere on CCTV. The sick child has the virtue of being true. Even better, he can let Ophelia Richards discover the robbery instead of witnessing its aftermath as he had planned.

Adam Conlan is the most natural suspect.

A sigh escapes Kent’s chest. He catches it and chastises himself. You see, he says, you hope it isn’t him. You don’t want it to be. You want it to be true that there are gentle souls left in the world.

Ophelia Richards then, not gentle, but fragile. A shard of glass. She had visited the workshop beforehand, been at the scene of the crime, been the one to find the body. But why risk drowning to recover a body that you have disposed of in the first place? Let it wash out to sea, for god’s sake.

Kent sighs and takes his suit jacket off. No, even better, pyjamas. He nips upstairs and changes, pulling a fleece on top, then settles back at the kitchen table.

Motive. That is Kent’s sticking point. Which is ridiculous. He has seen a man killed over a packet of cigarettes. Around £60,000 of gold was taken – for whom would this not be a motive?

And yet, for whom was it motive enough? Adam Conlan is a man who appears to adore his child – who left London to be near him. Why take such a risk, now, when his business is thriving and he has already inherited money from his father?

Ophelia’s parents are rich, he can see from his files. A posh Georgian flat, a successful art gallery, a few rental properties and investments. She is a woman who could be financially secure the moment she chose – the moment she did what he has the faint idea she will never do, and let her parents provide for her.

So, Kent adds another name, connected by a line to Adam Conlan. Julia Becker, the mother of his child. By all accounts, Ms Becker bears Adam no ill will, but Kent has seen it before. A new relationship and suddenly the sky above is different; the constellations changed, and £60,000 is the money for a wedding, a new home, a new start in this life of hers and her son’s. Revenge served eight-years-cold. She knows Adam’s studio and flat well enough to tell someone how to get in without setting off the alarm, after all. Kent will have Eames run a background check on her new partner.

He puts down his pen and picks up his phone.

When are you back? Street v slippy – think the snow is freezing. Next series of Bridgerton?

Right. Lanyard Man. He adds this name at the bottom of the page. Customer or salesman? Or professional checking entry points to the premises? Moira King thinks she saw previously in London; interested in Conlan’s work.

At the bottom of the page, he adds the names of the three men known to be high-level professionals, active on the south-west coast. Hussain, Edwards, and Niven.

Kent leans back and surveys his half-dozen suspects, as they stand. He has met every type of person in his career as a policeman, but he reminds himself how easy it is to mistake them – a villain for a prince, desperation for love. More than that, and he knows it of himself, people remain surprising. They can escape the lives that society dictates to them, sometimes without appearing to at all. There are the locked rooms inside them, the puzzle boxes of their trauma, the distortions that run through their bodies like fascia on muscle. The types are universal, the lives specific.

Below them all, Kent adds Sea Victim. The dead man. Forensics have already confirmed his blood type matches the stain outside the studio. The real utility will be if his DNA is in the Police National Database and they can give him back his name.

But is the dead man the man who took and paid for the gold bear? Or is the man who took the bear the man who killed him? Which of them has been looking through Adam Conlan’s windows, sending him a rabbit heart?

Kent wiggles his chilled toes inside his socks. Step back, Mr Philosopher, he tells himself. You have forgotten – there is another path to Adam Conlan’s misfortune, one that does not begin in Morrow. He takes another sip of wine, and lets the thought begin to form.

What if Moira King is the way in? Moira, whom he can-not imagine unwinding with a takeaway and Bridgerton. This society dealer is far too tactful, too selectively honourable to ask her customers where their money comes from, he thinks.

He steps back into her Mayfair premises and looks around. What if he is a polished individual, one of these professionals whose wealth will never be glimpsed by HMRC? He might buy one of Adam’s pieces. Legitimately, all above board. But now he has seen what is on offer. Now he senses a nearly untraceable opportunity. An isolated goldsmith, sitting in a little town on the coast, a treasure chest to plunder.

Blee-bloop. Kent hates the sound his emails make but cannot work out how to change it. It is from one of his sergeants.

Been looking at Adam Conlan’s financials. As declared, he came into inheritance of c£100k on father’s death from stroke last year. However, the amount he is earning from his business, tho healthy, looks lower than it should be based on sales info and end-of-year a/cs. I want to send file up to the Met’s forensic accounting team to find out where disparity arising – can you sign off?

Kent replies giving his permission. He scans the page he has scribbled in his notepad and requests a series of follow-up actions. Background check on Becker’s new partner. Also, run background on all Conlan’s buyers for last three years. Send results ASAP. Thx.

He finishes his glass of wine. Why is Adam Conlan making less money than he should, then?

Kent hears a key turn in the front door lock and his heart swells. Gentle souls.

Once upon a time, his arms are there to cradle her. She can reach up from between them and stroke the lower lip with its slightly broken skin. She is warm here. The sea smells good.

But she has done something wrong, like she always does. She digs her fingers into skin because she cannot help herself. She makes him scream.

There is a ring on her forefinger. Nothing is an anchor when her mother has unmoored her, as only mothers can.

The arms trail away and she reaches out for them, but the hands are blue and the tide is strong. However much she struggles, she cannot reach them. His face is bloated and green. Around his neck is a gold chain and it is drowning him.

Someone is wading towards her. There are flowers running nearly down to his wrists, like he is carrying life. There is safety there, and she swims for them, but her feathers make her heavy.

‘Adam, you look godawful.’ Julia has never minced her words.

Luke and Felix are playing rough and tumble on the couch. Football club has been cancelled because the hall’s heating is broken, and Julia had volunteered to drop Felix off, because, Adam knows, she wants to check on him.

‘I don’t feel great,’ he admits.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to have Felix this weekend? It’s really fine.’

‘No. No, thank you. I need to spend time with him.’ It is true that Adam really, deeply, needs to be with his son.

Julia’s mouth pulls into a grim line as she appraises his drawn face and the dark patches under his eyes. She sighs. ‘Well, I’m glad Luke is here. Keep you from sinking in it too much.’

‘Well, Felix won’t let me sit down for too long either, so that’ll curb the pity party.’

She nods. A gold robbery and a body in the sea. These things are even further from her primary-school world and her neat little house than they are from Adam’s life. He looks again, and sees that the lines below Julia’s eyes are a little deeper than usual. She has been worried too.

She frowns. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘What?’

‘Worry about me. I’m just fine. Now, the police car is going to be outside all weekend – you’re sure?’ She glances at Felix, his green school jumper tangled around Luke’s huge arm in an elaborate wrestling lock.

Adam nods. ‘It’s just a precaution. The deed’s been done now. Anyway, I think they’re largely there in case I head out with suspicious bin bags.’ He hesitates. ‘Thank you.’

She nods and pats him on the shoulder. ‘Keep your head straight. This’ll all be done with soon enough.’

Ophelia is next to her painting, framed and mounted by the jolly woman in the school’s art department. She stands straight in her Clarks shoes and the spotless pinafore her mother lays out every morning, her hair in two long braids of shining red-gold, in a body she has already learned to hate. The Head opens the double doors and the parents are admitted to the year nine art show. Ophelia’s eyes do not need to pick out her mother. As soon as Marina enters, the teachers flock to her like hungry pigeons.

‘Mrs Richards, such a pleasure to have you here. It’s not often the girls get a chance to exhibit to an acclaimed artist.’

‘You’re too kind. I live for this sort of thing – all this new talent I can see brewing – oh, look at this. Alice, isn’t it? Your brush work here is wonderful.’

Alice blushes cloud-pink, overawed by this artist in her black dress, knee-high boots, radiant beauty. ‘Thank you, Mrs Richards,’ she mumbles.

‘Ophy.’ Marina smiles and crosses to her daughter, sweeps her up in rosewater arms.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Ophelia worked very hard on this,’ Miss Stevens says, smiling and trailing after. ‘Another artist in the family. She’ll be hanging work in your husband’s gallery before long.’

Marina gives her musical laugh. ‘None of us have any doubts. We’re very proud of her.’ She looks at her daughter, eyes shining. ‘Very proud.’

‘Well,’ Miss Stevens touches Marina’s elbow, ‘enjoy the exhibition. We’ll see you next week at the summer fayre committee.’

Marina nods graciously, and Miss Stevens moves off. Marina leans towards the painting again, hasty splodges of colour titled Rothko Revisited.

‘What are you doing?’ she murmurs. ‘This is nonsense. I’ve seen you draw exquisite little flowers and fairies. You produced better work than this at preschool.’

Ophelia meets her mother’s eye, and feels tears beading in her own. ‘I’m making you look.’

Ophelia strides through the snow. Her hood is up, and she has a thick scarf on top of her coat and jumpers. She can hear the huff and puff of her breath. She is still cold. She follows the hill path. Crunch lift, crunch lift. The steady tread of her boots on snow. Up and up.

I made you look. You made me. I made you. And I’ve seen you. I’ve seen myself before. I will not do this again. Not for you. Not this time. Not this time. It will be different. This time.

Ophelia stops at the top of the hill, panting. Below her, Morrow is stretched out in lilac and grey, in the uneasy brightness of a night reflected by the stark white of the snow. Even the gulls are still out, confused by this perpetual twilight, making raucous calls and swoops over the orange streetlamps. Behind Ophelia are the woods, and she tries to unpick the top of the tower from the blackened treeline.

Then she turns and takes the left-hand path down to the sands, and all that Ophelia can think is that no one has ever needed her before. Her mother is wrong. This time it will be different.

Each afternoon, after the child had completed her housework, she joined the goldsmith at his workbench, and there he gave her small jobs preparing the materials and tools, clearing away, and sweeping up the gold shavings to melt down and use again. She was allowed to watch him work, and began to learn many things. When he went each week to the kingdom on the other side of the forest to sell what he had made, she was permitted to practise with the crucible and tongs.

After four months in the cottage, the man who lay next to the fire began to get up sometimes. With his long teeth and rangy gait, he went out into the woods and brought back roots and berries and all manner of useful things. And so in this way, life took its new shape.

‘Hi.’ The giant man looks puzzled.

‘Hi.’ Ophelia is taken aback too. ‘I’m looking for Adam.’

‘He went out to pick up dinner,’ the man explains, ‘uh… come in.’ He ushers Ophelia into the hallway and she walks awkwardly ahead of him up the stairs.

‘Dad!’ a voice yells and a child comes hurtling towards the door of the flat, then pulls up short as he realises his mistake.

‘Hi,’ he says.

‘Hi.’

For a moment, the three stand in a tableau. Then the blond man offers a hand that engulfs the writer’s. ‘You must be Ophelia, I’m Luke, Adam’s brother.’ Of course, Ophelia can see that now. He looks nothing like Adam, and yet everything in his voice and expression, in the forbearing and unthreatening way he inhabits himself – they are alike. This must be what happens when siblings cleave to each other through troubled childhoods, she thinks.

Ophelia looks at the little boy in his school shirt and grey trousers. He is staring up at her with wide eyes. ‘You must be Felix. Did you just have football?’

He shakes his head and adds shyly, ‘Sports hall boiler broke.’

She crouches down, and Felix looks surprised when she holds her hand out so he can shake it like a grown-up. Like his uncle, he has blond hair and pale skin, features round where his father’s are long and angular. His fingers are soft and warm.

‘Did you know, a long time ago, very long ago – some English boys were stolen and taken to Italy, where an important man called the Pope saw them. Back then, English people were called Anglo-Saxons, and these boys were very beautiful, with hair just like yours. So the Pope gasped and said, These children are not Angles, they are angels.’ Felix listens, transfixed. ‘Are you an angel?’ she asks, and Felix blushes with delight. She squeezes his hand, then stands up.

Luke is watching with a smile on his face. ‘Go watch telly, bud, okay? I’m going to make Dad’s friend a drink. He’ll be back any minute now.’

Reluctantly Felix tears himself away from Ophelia then dives onto the sofa, bundling himself up in the blanket. He picks up the remote but every so often his eyes flick back to his uncle and this strange new lady.

Luke chuckles and puts the kettle on.

‘It’s okay, I’ll go – I didn’t know he had family round,’ Ophelia says, but Luke waves a hand.

‘From what I understand, we owe you a lot. You’ve been keeping an eye out for Adam during all this.’

‘He’s said the same about you.’ Ophelia cautiously peels her scarf off.

‘That’s what brothers are for – don’t tell him I said so though.’ He passes across a mug of tea and notices Ophelia looking at Felix, finally engrossed in a cartoon. ‘You haven’t met Fee before?’

‘No.’

‘He’s everything to Adam.’

Ophelia nods. ‘I can see that.’

‘And Adam’s half of everything to him, and Julia, his mum, is the other half.’ Luke smiles fondly. ‘To be adored like that boy is…’

‘Wouldn’t we all like to be loved like that?’ Ophelia agrees. ‘And you’re the uncle who spoils him?’

‘Well, I couldn’t possibly comment.’ Luke wrinkles his nose playfully.

They lean against the kitchen counter and listen to the frenetic music of the cartoon. The light from the television screen runs across Felix’s rapt face.

‘Life’s funny,’ Luke reflects. ‘Ten years ago, I’d never have expected Adam to be a devoted father, living out in the sticks, but here he is.’

‘Mm. I understand he was a little wilder?’

Luke chuckles again, a generous, expansive sound. ‘That’s one way of putting it. I could tell you some tales, and I think I was only along for the tamer nights. No, there was sex, and drinking, and I suspect other substances sometimes. I don’t think he ever meant any harm though. He never had any,’ he looks for the words, ‘ill intent.’

‘Just that recklessness that some people have when they’re young,’ Ophelia observes, ‘but which you didn’t possess?’

Luke creases his brows. ‘Yes. Yes, you’re right. I suppose you come out of a childhood like ours in one of two ways. Recklessness, or stolid stability. But you know, then this happened with Julia, and there was never any question he’d be there for Felix, for them both. But that’s Adam. A lot of space for love in him.’

Ophelia can hear the pain and the warmth in Luke’s voice.

‘Has he been okay?’ she asks.

Luke’s eyes are grey-green and lined round with unease. ‘Not really. He’ll hold shit together for Felix. But you’ve got to admit, it’s been a hell of a week. I’m glad you’ve been around.’

Ophelia smiles sadly. ‘Mm.’

‘All right, I’m back. It’s still hot.’ Adam’s voice rings up the stairs and he comes into the flat holding a bag full of paper-wrapped fish and chips.

‘Dad, your friend is here!’ Felix leaps up and points at Ophelia like a treasured prize.

‘Hi.’ Adam looks exhausted, but under this sudden con-stellation of Felix, Ophelia and Luke something lightens.

‘Is she staying for tea?’ Felix asks, eyes shining.

‘No, I was just popping by—’

‘No, stay,’ Adam says, ‘we’d like you to. There’s more than enough.’

Ophelia can tell Luke watches the way Adam responds to her, and can see the small smile in her periphery.

‘All right then, you, pyjamas on, hands washed,’ Adam turns to his son and plants a kiss on his head before tossing him, giggling, towards the second bedroom with his spare arm, ‘we’ll lay the table.’

But Felix scampers back and pulls on his dad’s wrist. Adam kneels down so his ear is next to his son’s mouth. Ophelia feels a sudden tug in her chest.

‘She looks like the lady in the book you read me,’ she hears Felix’s clumsy child-whisper and looks down at her cup so that Adam does not know she has seen him redden.

Felix is asleep in bed, and Luke keeps easy watch from the living room, scrolling through reports on his laptop. In the unheated workshop below, Adam and Ophelia wear their coats.

‘Look at what I did to Julia’s life. Look at what I’m doing to yours – I lost your gold, I’ve mixed you up in whatever the fuck is happening here – it’s murder now. I can’t drag you down with me.’

Ophelia approaches him. He lets her slip her hand between his coat and jumper. She can feel his collarbone and knows that below her fingers is a sparrow. His hand goes up to rest on hers, warm, dry, about to inflict grief on himself.

‘There’s no way you won’t get hurt by this.’

‘What would you be without guilt?’ she asks.

His chest moves under her hand, an expulsion of something like a laugh. ‘I will hurt you.’

‘This morning, I would have said the same to you.’

He frowns. ‘What changed in such a short time?’

‘This morning, you didn’t need me.’

Adam leans back to examine her face. ‘I’m not sure that’s true.’ He can tell she is surprised. Everything aches to keep her.

‘What if I need you to need me?’

‘I can’t. I couldn’t live with that.’

Ophelia feels for the threads she knows she could pull if she chose. In her mind, she plays with them for a moment, with the vision of what she could have. She drops them and pulls her hand away. She backs away, the floorboards a sea between them again. She will not have Adam. He was only hers for the day she pulled another man from the sea.

‘Okay. Then noli me tangere. I won’t ask for that. But Luke is going tomorrow. And I will be here. I will stay. A friend, and a friend only. I will stay until you don’t need me anymore.’

‘Mum is away with Patrick again this weekend,’ Felix tells him as he flies backwards towards Adam.

His father gives the swing a push and waits for it to return before replying. ‘Yeah, she said.’

Felix swings back again, long legs tucked up, gloved hands jangling the chains. ‘Patrick is nice.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. He said I don’t have to call him Mr Achebe when I’m not at school.’

‘That must be funny.’

Felix considers. ‘It’s nice-funny.’

They carry on in companionable silence. The swing squeaks to and fro. The crows make a noisy tussle over something in the park bin.

‘I like your friend, Dad. She smells nice.’

‘Yeah. Ophelia is very nice.’

‘No, but she smells nice too, doesn’t she?’

‘Uh, yeah.’ Adam stops pushing the swing. ‘Right, I can feel my toes falling off. Let’s go home.’

‘Okay!’

Felix arches his body to fly off the swing at the arc’s zenith then makes a graceful landing. Adam flinches. ‘Don’t do that, Fee.’

‘Can we make hot chocolate at home? With marshmallows?’

‘We had chips for tea last night. I need you to eat some sensible food when you’re with me.’

They leave the deserted play area and set off down the path. ‘Okay, what about we have pasta and hot chocolate?’ Felix offers.

‘He’ll be a lawyer when he’s bigger,’ laughs an older woman, the only other occupant of the park, who has been wheeling her swaddled grandchild up and down, up and down, trying to get her to nap. ‘What a good daddy, you have.’ She smiles at the bobble-hatted Felix and he nods enthusiastically.

‘Thanks.’ Adam’s heart contracts with shame. No one tells Julia she is a good mother when she takes their son out alone.

Holding hands, they make their way up the cleared path. Every so often Felix darts out to a pile of snow that has escaped Morrow’s other children, pats it into a snowball and hurls it at his dad, who ducks. The snow is thawing already, getting slushy and brown at its edges, but Felix feels duty-bound to make the most of it, and hurtles through it gleefully, arriving home wet and frozen.

Adam fills a hot water bottle for him and turns the thermostat up. The cosy flat and the bright grey daylight forge the appearance of a normal Saturday lunchtime.

Last night, Luke had chivalrously taken the sofa, eyebrow raised at his brother. Adam had crawled next to Felix in his own bed, and Ophelia had melted away to Felix’s bedroom. This morning, he had woken to a message from Ophelia saying she had gone to the library to work, she will come back after Felix is asleep; she doesn’t want to confuse him with her presence. Luke had left for Oxford soon after breakfast, and Adam and Felix had wrapped up and headed to the park; a simulacrum, a homunculus dressed like an ordinary day. Somewhere, right now, the police are trying to establish if he is a murderer.

Adam goes to put a pan on the hob to cook lunch, and now he notices that Ophelia must have cleaned before she left. There is the faint scent of citrus spray, and the surfaces shine better than usual, like the flat had received a visitation while he slept. He smiles; he should be terrified about what will happen to him. He is. But in this warm, clean flat, with Felix, knowing that tonight, when his son has gone to bed, Ophelia will reappear, and that if he picks up the phone, his brother will come too – Adam thinks he can keep the panic outside for a little longer.

Once upon a time, there was a library in a seaside town. It was kept too warm. The head librarian knew that most of the service users had an unheated flat waiting for them; or that they had something in their lungs rendering them vulnerable to the cold, some price already exacted for being poor. Bad ventilation, mould, barely maintained flats and hostels. The coughs spattered and hacked as midday fireworks against the sound of slowly tapped keyboards and the untraceable hum of the council building.

The librarian would have preferred they not use this last public space to spend their purgatorial hours, but she does not remove them while they do not breach the rules, and she would not have them cold in her domain. She enjoyed the warmth herself, cardigan over turtleneck. What is the point in being cold?

A gentleman with a fraying sports holdall shuffled to the desk and asked if he could use the library computers to get online; he needed to fill in his Universal Credit application. With the patience and dignity of a queen bestowing alms, she took his details and showed him the log-in process illustrated on a laminated sheet of paper. With a slight palsy in his hand, he took the instructions and retreated.

The queen’s face set harder when two West African women passed through the automatic doors, recent immigrants working in the care or hospitality sectors. When she wheeled her Returns trolley past them, she checked they were not eating in the library or watching videos with the sound too loud on their phones. Instead, she was gratified to see them using GCSE revision guides, and she left them to their studies. There was a place for that in her court.

Ophelia lifts her head away from the laptop. When she stops, she can feel it simmering, which in itself is strange, new. Usually the pot boils over so quickly. It had threatened to, yesterday afternoon, after the phone call with Marina. But she has somehow held on to herself. She is simmering but she is steady; this time she will outlast the wave of self-destructiveness that has always swept through her, again and again during her life. She is writing, writing the world as she understands it. Recording and imagining Morrow, recording and imagining herself.

This time, the difference is Adam. Adam and Felix and Luke in that flat above the beach. A family who needs her, and the broken things she can give.

Julia Becker surprises DI Kent with the strength of her handshake. She is a petite woman, attractive but understated. He is sure her drawers are full of M&S cardigans. They sit on the window stools of a busy cafe in a town an hour away from Morrow-on-Sea.

‘Thanks for seeing me on a Saturday, Ms Becker.’

‘Thanks for driving out to meet me. I’m not sure it would do wonders for me to ditch my first weekend with Patrick’s parents to talk to the police. They’re still slightly wary of me having a child.’

Kent drinks his green tea. ‘My pleasure. I appreciate you’ve already talked to some of my officers, but that was before a body washed up. It’s important we keep up momentum with the case. I didn’t want to wait until Monday.’

‘Well yes, it is a murder,’ Julia observes archly. ‘What is it I can help you with? It wasn’t Adam, by the way.’ She takes a sip of her cappuccino.

‘So everyone keeps telling me.’ Kent opens his notepad. ‘We’re just trying to get a good picture of his business so we can understand who had the access and motive to do this.’

‘Right.’

‘First off, have you had any ideas about it?’

‘No.’

‘All right.’

‘He works with gold, just about anyone would profit from robbing him.’

‘Quite. Who might have known about Mr Conlan’s security arrangements – camera, alarm, the side entrance to the flat, and so on?’

‘Well, anyone with eyeballs and a pair of legs. You can see a camera above the front step. There’s an alarm company sticker on the front windows, which are barred. But if you walk around the side, you can see a residential door without any wiring. Enough to baffle drug users and ASBOs, perhaps.’

Julia stirs her coffee in a manner which is somehow deprecating, and Kent feels a degree of pity for any rowdy nine-year-old who disrupts her class. She certainly knows Adam’s flat and security well, but her suggestion is not incorrect. The information is not opaque, if one is really looking for it.

‘What is your relationship like with Mr Conlan?’ he asks. Julia’s dark brows contract, and she looks suddenly weary. Kent finds himself apologising. ‘I’m not judging. I’m really not.’

‘No, I understand. I do. I expect you’re well accustomed to judgement.’

‘Yes, well,’ Kent says sympathetically.

Julia understands. She had judged women before that night with Adam. Then too much prosecco at Hannah’s before the club, a pair of nice arms, a recent break-up – Adam’s desire had made her feel good for the first time in a while, and she had surprised herself by going home with him. She judges very few people these days, knowing now that when people believe themselves to be accurate, they are usually wrong.

‘My relationship with Adam is good. He’s a wonderful father. He’s respectful of my decisions about Felix. He never misses a weekend. So, in answer to what you are really asking, I don’t have a grudge against him – I chose to have sex with him,’ she blushes slightly but carries on, ‘and he might not be my partner, but I’ve known him eight years now and he certainly didn’t pull an insurance job and then crack someone on the head.’

Kent has to respect this. ‘Okay. Any financial difficulties?’

‘Him or me?’

‘Either.’

‘None. Adam does well. Teachers don’t make a fortune but it’s enough for me and Fee, in Morrow. Adam pays half of everything to do with Felix. He wanted to pay more but I declined. I’m quite capable of managing.’

‘No doubt.’ Kent finishes his tea. ‘You know we’ll check?’

‘Of course you will.’

Kent cocks his head. ‘You were never tempted to keep Adam? A good man is hard to find, and all that?’

‘Felix kept a father. Adam’s not my type, really. Not sober anyway.’ She grins, a sudden mischievous streak surfacing. ‘You must get to be nosey in your job, that must be fun.’

‘Yes,’ Kent agrees, ‘it is one of the perks. Last question, then I’ll let you get back to Patrick and the charm offensive on the in-laws.’

‘All right, I’m ready.’

‘A man came to Mr Conlan’s workshop twice in the preceding week, around twelve thirty each time. Mr Conlan wasn’t in. This chap buzzes, waits around and then leaves. Do you recognise him at all?’

Kent passes over his phone and Julia looks at the twin CCTV photographs of the lanyard-wearing heavy-set Black man in his forties as he waits on Adam’s step. Julia begins to shake.

Like an enchantment, Ophelia is there when Adam returns from putting Felix to bed. A pot is boiling on the stove and she moves quietly and deftly around his kitchen, a vision of an alternate life.

How had he agreed to this? How had he been so fortunate that she had decided this and stifled his protests? He wants to put his arms around her, his mouth to her neck, her stomach, between her thighs. He coughs and she turns.

‘It’s risotto, is that okay?’

‘Smells great.’

‘Mushroom and thyme.’

‘I tried to make risotto once but all the rice got stuck to the bottom of the pan and burned, then Felix refused to eat it.’

She laughs. ‘He’s a sweet boy. He’s lucky to have you. And Luke.’

‘That’s family.’ Adam smiles.

‘Is it?’ Ophelia asks, half joking, and ladles more stock into the pot. Adam leans on the counter and watches as she stirs and stirs, and the rice turns glossy and plump. He wonders more than ever about her life, wandering and lonely.

‘Kent showed me a picture of the man you brought out of the sea. I don’t understand how you did it. He looked… awful.’

‘Not human anymore. Maybe that’s why it was possible.’ Ophelia keeps stirring. ‘I think maybe though, really… it was purpose. I think purpose is useful. There was a chance he would be lost at sea if I didn’t bring him back. So I did.’ She crouches down and lets Leonard lick a spot of butter off her fingers, and he winds himself around and around her narrow ankles.

Adam considers this. ‘It’s funny; when Julia called me and told me she was pregnant, it was a shock. A huge shock. But after that, I knew what I needed to do. There was a clarity I’d never had before. Responsibility for someone else, a purpose. Don’t get me wrong, it was hard, really fucking hard, but it made me happy. I hope it’s made Felix happy too.’

Ophelia spoons risotto into two bowls and steam curls and licks the air. ‘Duty, maybe it’s something we all need. Maybe we miss gods and monarchs.’ With practised hands, she drizzles the rice with olive oil and flecks of fresh thyme.

‘Another trick from Italy?’

She twists the pepper mill. ‘E pepe.’

Her phone rings and Ophelia’s face loses all playfulness. Adam glances down: Mum and a picture of a breathtaking silver-haired woman appear on the screen. Ophelia declines the call.

Silently, they move to the table and start eating. For a while they listen to the wash of the sea and the hum of the radiator.

Ophelia sits with her legs tucked up on the chair, never fully relaxed. And Felix was right, Adam notices for the first time, she does look like the woman in his book of fairy tales, cursed to spend a hundred years as the wind and the rain and the stars above the valley. More pinched than the watercolour illustration, hair twisted into a plait that falls down the back of her cable-knit jumper, but the same look of hauntedness, of suffering. Funny that Felix should have recognised what he hadn’t.

She notices him looking and turns the gaze back on him. ‘What was it like growing up without a mother?’

‘What big small-talk you have, Grandma.’

She grins that rare grin. ‘All the better to see you with.’

He smiles and considers the question. ‘I guess you only know the life you have as a child. Looking back, I think it was like growing up without a map maybe, without knowing everybody else had one and you didn’t.’

‘Being lost without realising?’

‘Yeah. Yes. I think that’s a good way to put it.’

‘Is that why you and Luke are so close?’

‘Probably. We might not have been if Dad had been more… I don’t know, warm… loving. He was an architect, worked a lot with concrete – I think that about explains him. That and a mid-century Catholic boarding school.’ Then Adam smiles. ‘We had a wicked aunt back in Ireland though. Aunt Bridget. We visited every holiday, and that was when the sun shone for us.’

Ophelia enjoys watching the happiness that moves across his face as he talks about his aunt and her antics and her kindnesses. She looks down at her bowl. When did she last cook for two?

‘Have you ever been to the tower in Morrow Wood?’ she asks abruptly.

‘A few times. There’s a clearing around it. Sometimes in the summer we take a picnic up there.’

‘I don’t understand what it is, but I need to be there sometimes. Almost like a compulsion. I felt it when I was a child too. Something about it was magical, or romantic, or, I don’t know. Other.’

Adam’s dark eyes examine her. ‘Perhaps it meant escape.’

Ophelia rests her chin on her knee and thinks about this. ‘Perhaps it did.’ At last she says, ‘I had a boyfriend in Italy. He said he liked watching me write because he could see what I was asking myself.’

‘What was that?’

‘Am I less lost today than I was yesterday?’

The waves roar onto the shingle of the beach. They roll, then they break, then they claw, and the pebbles and silt and sediment go with them.

Ophelia examines the lines and valleys of Adam’s face, his throat. She will stay as long as Adam needs her, then she will go. She will let him live his new life, whatever shape it takes. She will not cling like a parasite or a changeling. But after that, she promises herself, she will cease to be tidewrack. She will find somewhere and stay there; she will have a home – a home she has searched for since she was 13 and witnessed blue-stained hands, here in Morrow.

‘Who is he?’ Kent asks Julia. She looks at the picture of Lanyard Man and back up at Kent, hollow-eyed. The noise of the cafe retreats. ‘Who is he?’

Shakily, Julia reaches into her bag, then withdraws her hand, holding the same bottle-green lanyard the man wears. A pass dangles from it.

Julia Becker, STAFF, St Mary’s Primary Academy Morrow

‘It’s Patrick,’ she says.

Once upon a time the sparrow-princess suffered so much, and grieved so deeply, it felt like her heart must break. She would take no food and bathed only in icy water. She grew thinner and weaker, and shut herself away in the tower. One day, after a long time, she awoke to find a cat at the end of her bed. She did not know how it had got there, since the tower was too tall to climb, and her door was always locked.

But the cat licked its paw and told the princess she must rise now, and thank the brave captain who had slain her wretched husband, the murderer of her child, and the princess did as she was bade.

The captain, surprised to see the princess after so many months, bowed her shining head, and promised always to be of service to her. The princess suddenly thought how fine she looked, and did not know that the captain was thinking the same of her.

Together, they walked to the beach that ran alongside the far edge of the kingdom and listened to the gulls as they soared and chorused. Before long, the two were married. They each wore one of the three gold rings that the sparrow-princess had been given by her stepmother, and buried the third in the empty grave of the child.

Together, they and the cat lived happily ever after.

Patrick Achebe joins them at the cafe, quiet now after the rush of lunchtime. A big man, aware of his own size, he moves carefully past the tables and bends to kiss Julia on the cheek.

‘What’s going on, Jules – are you okay?’ Julia is still white and shaking and she does not look him in the face.

Patrick turns to Kent. ‘What’s going on?’

Kent is about to introduce himself when Julia’s head flicks up. ‘This is the policeman I told you about, Patrick. He wants to know why you went to Adam’s studio without telling me, twice, just before Adam was robbed.’

Patrick’s hand flies to his mouth. ‘Oh my god.’

Kent watches the two of them, and the wordless coursing of everything that passes from one lover to the other. Neither is aware that he has messaged for an unmarked car to sit outside the cafe in case it is necessary.

‘Jules, no.’ Patrick completes the unspoken sentence. He shakes his head and reaches a hand towards her before hesitating and pulling it back.

‘I know. Then why? What earthly reason?’

Still shell-shocked, Patrick struggles to shape what he needs to say. Julia rests a hand on his sleeve with firm tenderness. ‘Why? The police need to know. I need to know.’

Patrick sighs and sits awkwardly on one of the too-small stools. ‘In retrospect, it was a really stupid thing to do… I wanted to talk to Adam.’

‘What?’

Patrick looks sheepish. ‘I felt bad we were going away together before he even knew about us.’

‘I told you I was going to tell him about us.’ Julia is sharp.

‘I know.’

‘Jesus Christ, it’s the twenty-first century. It’s none of Adam’s business who I go away with. When to tell him was my decision to take, not yours.’

‘I know. I know that. I’m sorry. It was misplaced chauv-inism.’

Kent can sense Julia’s anger.

‘Patrick, we are adults. And I’ve never asked Adam permission for anything, and I never expect him to ask me either, not unless it’s about Felix. Our lives and our relationship have never been like that – and you should respect that, and me.’

Kent would quite like to disappear and be anywhere other than seated between the two teachers.

‘I’m sorry, Jules. He’s just been such a big part of your life, and Felix’s. I wanted to meet him, see what he was like.’

‘So you should have asked me to get him over for lunch. Were you… intimidated by him? Like some sort of first wife?’

Patrick shifts his broad shoulders uneasily, like Julia has hit the nail on the head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t say… It wasn’t exactly thought out. It was more of an impulsive thing. I was going past one lunch hour and just buzzed. I wasn’t sure if I was going to tell him who I was. I was just going to stop in like a customer and sort of… see how it went.’

Julia’s eyebrows are rising higher and higher.

‘He wasn’t in on the Tuesday but I could see some work in the cabinets inside. It was really nice. So, yeah, I went back on the Thursday to see if he was around. I still hadn’t quite, you know, decided what I was going to say. But I thought if I did tell him, I could ask him to make something. For your birthday, I mean. I just – obviously I didn’t know he was going to be robbed on Monday. Never crossed my mind the police would want to know why I had been there.’ He glances at Kent.

‘The pair of you gave me the fright of my life.’ Julia looks accusingly between them. She makes a piercing exhalation, cleansing anger from her system, replacing it with something calmer, and meets Patrick’s eyes. ‘Good luck affording anything Adam makes on St Mary’s pay.’

‘I’m sorry, Jules.’ Patrick takes her hand and squeezes it. Kent sees her squeeze back.

The policeman makes an apologetic cough and speaks for the first time. ‘So you have nothing to say about the robbery?’

‘Nothing at all, mate.’ They avoid each other’s eyes out of unspoken masculine decency.

‘Right.’ Kent sighs and scratches his neat beard. Achebe’s record shows him to be exactly the harmless, law-abiding citizen as sits in front of Kent now. Besides which, to case a joint while wearing a genuine ID would be a spectacularly stupid thing to do.

Kent looks at his notebook and scratches out Lanyard Man.

‘Sorry your weekend has been wasted on a wild goose chase,’ Julia says.

Kent pinches his nose. ‘Well, that’s police work. Not one of the perks.’ He raises an eyebrow at Julia who laughs. He looks back at his notebook and frowns. ‘A final question before I go. Mr Achebe, do you recognise this woman?’ He shows Patrick a website on his phone. Patrick takes a pair of reading glasses out of his jacket pocket and looks closely.

‘No, I don’t think so. Can’t say she rings a bell.’

‘You’ve never been to a jewellery conference in London?’

Patrick laughs, giddy with his new relief, and removes his glasses. ‘No. Not really my scene.’

‘Right,’ says Kent, ‘right.’

The policeman leaves the cafe and, glancing back through the window, sees Patrick and Julia with their heads together, arms laced, laughing at the peculiarity of life. Of their life.

Kent opens his notebook and draws a ring back around the crossed-out Lanyard Man. Moira King identified a man she had never met.

Ophelia is gone again when Adam rises and leaves a sleep-ing Felix to stretch out over the double bed. A pot of coffee is warm and waiting on the hob.

Before he can lift a cup to his lips, he feels anxiety rippling again. Like lapping waves, he cannot hold back the thought of being taken from Felix; the fear that his son will be left bereft and confused. This, he sees, is why neither Julia nor Ophelia had wanted him to be alone.

Adam breathes deeply. He has a while before Felix will wake. He should do some work, ground himself in its safety. From downstairs, he fetches a box containing the links of a necklace, a hundred of them, each one of which he needs to articulate by hand. Thorns that will pierce no flesh, petals of a dog rose that do not wilt but will grow warm against the skin.

Glancing every now and then at the design propped against the windowpane, he brushes his fingertips through the box to find the pieces he wants. When he finds them, he slips the open mouth of the first thin ring through the halo of the next. A sudden burning flares in his shoulder, deep in the muscle, near the bone. He puts the pieces down and breathes, waiting for it to pass.

The pain reminds him he had dreamed of Ophelia once more. He had kissed her, her hair falling about her like water through his hands. The red mark on her stomach took on the shape of a wolf, a bloom, a church, a gaping mouth. Then she had fallen away, carried by the wind, she was the wind itself, and he had been left alone on a mountainside.

Adam takes a sip of the rich, bitter coffee, and picks up the gold pieces to try again. His hands are precise, controlled.

Felix is in the next room, and downstairs a man was murdered. He has lost his gold, he has lost Ophelia’s. How long until the police clear him? Is that what they will do? He threads one link, then another.

Why is he the apple that fell so far from the tree of his father and brother, so steady, so stable? He has rolled far off and bruised, and now his rot infects the people he loves, threatens the security of their lives. He had wanted to be a better father to Felix than his own was to him, and now he has fucked it up so badly.

In his hand are a petal and a loop. He lifts his arm to hurl them away. He puts them down on the desk. What can he do to protect them now? All he knows is that he must protect them.

‘Detective Kent, I didn’t realise you needed to see me. Do come in, the weather is appalling.’ Moira King steps back from the front door of her Belgravia mews house.

Kent and Culvers enter, dripping slightly. ‘Thank you. Sorry to surprise you on a Sunday like this. I hope we aren’t interrupting anything?’

‘Not at all.’ Moira closes the door on the squall outside, and they follow her through the hallway into a white-painted living room, studded with the textures of glass and velvet, gilt and mahogany. It smells of cedarwood. Kent’s records show that Moira lives alone, and indeed, he can hear no one else.

The dealer still wears a faint expression of surprise to see them, but she is impeccably bred and offers them a drink. ‘Tea, coffee?’

‘No, thank you,’ Kent declines.

‘And you are?’ Moira enquires politely.

‘PC Culvers, ma’am.’

Moira reaches out to shake Culvers’ hand, and Culvers takes it and gives a brisk nod.

The dealer’s dove-grey loungewear is scarcely less elegant than the suit she had been wearing when Kent first met her. Her hair is twisted back and secured with a clip, and she wears the same pearl studs in her ears.

‘What is it I can help with?’

Kent offers her a piece of paper. ‘We had Adam Conlan’s business and personal finances examined by specialists and they’ve sent a report. They found serious irregularities.’

Moira’s eyes scan down the sheet and she takes a sharp breath. ‘There are some substantial sums missing.’ Then quietly, ‘What has Adam been doing?’

‘It’s been going on a long time. Just small amounts, here and there, small enough not to arouse suspicion. But in total, he’s missing nearly fifty thousand from his books over the last ten years,’ Kent explains.

‘In this business, not a huge amount, but to an individual… with a child…’ Moira grimaces with concern. ‘Oh, Adam. Where is it going?’

Kent nods grimly. ‘Do you share an accountant, perhaps?’

‘Uh, yes, I believe we do. I recommended Lampard & King’s accountant to him when I signed Adam up. He was new to the industry, didn’t know much about the finance side. I often recommend our firm to artists, but of course it isn’t compulsory. Some people like to do their own accounts, use their own people.’

‘Yes, I understand that,’ Kent agrees. ‘I don’t understand why you’ve been stealing from Adam for the last ten years.’

Moira’s eyes widen. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I don’t understand why someone as – forgive me – as wealthy as you would bother stealing around £5000 a year from a single client. You aren’t taking from any others, as far as the Met can work out.’

Moira’s face is a frozen lake. Kent watches it. She is wait-ing to see what will come next. He continues. ‘Every time you sold some of his work, you manipulated the disparity between pricing and your commission, supplied different numbers to Adam via the accountant so that he never knew he wasn’t receiving the full amount for his work. You defrauded him.’

‘There’s a mistake, I never stole from him,’ Moira speaks mechanically.

‘The Met looked at your accounts too. There is no mistake,’ Kent tells her. ‘What I’m asking you is why? To you, this is small change.’

Still, Moira does not say anything, does not move her face, her body, her hands.

Culvers gives a cough, and Kent sees she wants to speak. He nods.

‘Do you love Adam Conlan?’ Culvers asks Moira.

The dealer stares at this sturdy and anonymous policewoman who would look just as at home working a checkout at Tesco. For a minute, Kent thinks Moira is going to burst out laughing at the suggestion. But she doesn’t, and Kent realises it is because it is true. Moira King is in love with Adam Conlan.

‘For how long?’ asks Kent, reeling.

Moira has gone white. She shakes her head and keeps shaking it.

‘Why are you stealing from him if you’re in love with him?’

‘Because,’ Culvers ventures, watching Moira for her reaction, ‘he’s never noticed.’

Kent watches too. That is it. That is why. Later, in bed, with his grey head on the pillow next to Simon’s sandy one, he will remember Moira King’s face in that instant. Such clear skin, pale green eyes, immaculate hair. A handsome face, stricken, disintegrating.

She does not speak.

‘Is it true?’ he asks.

Moira speaks jerkily, swallowing back tears. ‘I’ve seen him every week for fifteen years… He slept with half of Shoreditch, and he doesn’t even kiss my cheek. He doesn’t look at me like that. I helped him. I helped make him, and he doesn’t kiss my cheek. He can’t see me.’

Kent looks again and sees Moira anew; a woman who does not understand what she exudes. Someone it would be unthinkable to reach for, who is desperate to be touched. The marble bloodlessness that has left her alone, and underneath this high veneer is everything red she hungers for, and Adam never saw it, only Culvers.

‘You take from him because it hurts,’ Culvers says.

‘But love is something you give,’ Kent tells Moira softly.

And Moira lunges at him and he can feel her nails on his face, sharp and gouging. She is on him, hands on his neck. He is trapped against a wall and raises his arms, grabs her wrists ready to push her away, but with a swift crack, Culvers has seized Moira’s head and knocked it once against the bookshelf.

Moira drops Kent immediately and her hands fly up to the blood already streaming from her brow bone, her mouth a sudden O of pain. Culvers takes Moira’s shoulders, turns her against the wall and handcuffs her. Before Kent has pulled himself fully upright, she has recited Moira’s rights.

Face still in pain, Kent automatically slides his hand into his coat for his phone and calls the local unit waiting a few streets over.

By then Culvers has manoeuvred the spent Moira onto her cream sofa and stands over her like a guard. Seeing that the dealer is now quiescent, Kent excuses himself to fetch some paper towels from the chrome and granite kitchen he can see through an open doorway. He presses them to his cheek and they come away crimson.

The policeman passes a handful to Culvers, who holds them neatly against the wound she has made in Moira’s forehead, then he drops heavily into an armchair.

‘When I visited you before, you said you had met the man in the CCTV photographs I showed you – the one with the lanyard. You never had, had you? You just wanted to draw attention away from yourself.’

Moira shakes her head. ‘I never wanted to hurt Adam.’

Kent is steely. ‘Yes, you did.’

‘I love him,’ she says quietly, a tearful, remorseful child.

‘Did you organise the robbery of Adam Conlan’s studio on the twenty-fifth of November? Did you mean for them to find him there?’

Moira clamps her mouth shut. A dried red riverbed meanders from her eyebrow to the corner of her mouth.

‘There’s a jewellery quarter in Birmingham, isn’t there?’ Culvers says. ‘Did you visit for work? A good place to post something from, if you want a postmark a long way from home.’

‘The heart,’ Kent realises. ‘Why the escalation now, Moira, when you’ve been stealing all these years? Why send Adam a heart now?’ he asks tenderly. ‘What happened?’

And as though he has been listening, Moira’s phone vibrates on the coffee table, and Kent can see the message from her ailing father appear on the screen. I can’t find the history channel. Are you coming later? I can’t find tablets. Did you move them again? Moira’s eyes close in agony.

‘Who’s the man we pulled out of the sea, Moira?’ Kent asks, quietly beseeching. ‘Please, his family need to know.’

But she is gone now, past the place where they will have answers from her, and deep within herself. They wait in silence for the patrol car, and she begins to cry noiselessly, and Culvers wraps a comforting arm around her shoulder. When the car arrives, they let the local constables take charge. The dealer asks if she can message someone to go and visit her father.

Before Moira is guided from her home, she turns to Kent, voice soft and fractured. ‘Did your husband like his tie pin?’

‘Very much.’

She nods. ‘I’m so glad to hear that.’

In the cottage in the woods, the goldsmith, the wolf-prince and the child lived in harmony for many months. All the while, the child was learning her new craft, studying what her father did day and night, and practising herself at every opportunity. She found the silver tongue heavy now, but her heart was light. It could feel everything a human being might well feel in its life. Gladness at dawn’s first golden rays through the trees, fatigue when she had worked all day, pleasure when she tasted food, and deep, deep sorrow at the death of her mother.

The child noticed, too, that the goldsmith, a man who had been so proud and ruthless, was beginning to seem less proud, less ruthless, more uncertain, more penitent. Sometimes, at dusk, he would cease his work to look out of the windows and into the woods, then turn and make a comment – perhaps to the child, perhaps to no one at all: ‘I was wrong.’

Slowly, the goldsmith began to show the affection of a father towards the child. Praising her work when it was fine, offering encouragement when she struggled. Even the wolfish man who had lain by the hearth all those months began to speak, and with kindness. Then one day, this man too said, ‘I was wrong.’

Or are the wolf-prince and the goldsmith the same man? Second and third fathers? Or were they none at all?

The woods gave out onto the shoreline that cradled the two neighbouring kingdoms, and the child walked out there each day when she could do no more, and she played in the rock pools and the tide and the tide wrack.

Sometimes the goldsmith came.

No, the old man with the black plastic bags. He picked along the shoreline with her, and they cleaned the sand of litter, grain by grain before tucking it away and moving on. Together they talked of this and that. Of what is right and what is wrong, and how the sea does not care, but we must look after it anyway. She likes his lined face, and the slow way he moves.

And their hands were blue.

Blue.

The child loved to be by the beach with her mother, so stunning. They went there each year for their holidays. The sun shone, though she was always cold, and the water was full blue. Grey. The girl was pretty and talkative, but she had fallen far from the tree of her mother’s beauty, which was unmatched.

How the queen longed to be admired again. How she longed to be the artist and muse she had been so short a time before. And yet, she was always to have this child at her side. This child whom she had intended to be her magnum opus, but who disappointed and irritated her. But the years passed, as they must, and it was not long until the child reached her thirteenth birthday and was old enough to spend time on her own, following her own fancies.

How fortunate, then, that at that time, another artist chanced to be in Morrow, and spotting the degraded talent and undimmed bloom of the mother, invited her to sit for him. Many a happy hour was passed in the holiday cottage, as the mother sat and the artist sketched, then painted. Then kissed, then fucked.

It so happened that, when the portrait was nearly done, the artist announced that he must leave the seaside and travel back to town. Both the artist and the mother possessed high tempers, and it was not the first time they had fought that summer, however, it was certainly the worst time.

The child was just returning from the beach, where she had been reading and collecting fine specimens of sea glass, when she heard the noise that the two were making and ran up the steps to the cottage, ready to defend her mother from whatever intruder had set upon her and the man who was so keen to paint her. Upon reaching the doorway, she saw that it was those very two who were making the noise, and became frozen in pubescent fear and ignorance. The artist had blue upon his palms from the jar of hydrangeas he had painted into the portrait’s background. His arms jerked and gesticulated. Her mother raised her arms in return, and for a moment looked as though she would strike him. Then she stepped forward and pulled him into her. He cupped her face and ate her mouth, until with a spasm he pulled himself away and shook his head. He told Ophelia’s mother that she was talentless, good only for fucking, that she was lucky he had raised a brush for her. Her mother screamed back, her crimson lips so beautiful, defiant. The man called her a cunt and spat in her mother’s exquisite face. Turning, he jumps at the sight of the child at the threshold, he shakes his head and surges past, taking the steps in a stride, down the beach and gone. Ophelia rushes to Marina and puts her arms around her, wipes the spit away with her sleeve and finds it mixed with her mother’s tears and mascara.

‘Mum, what happened – are you okay? Are you hurt?’

Marina pulls away from her daughter’s embrace. She turns so that Ophelia cannot see her face, only the quaking of her shoulders under the lace dress. Finally, without turning, she says in a strange voice, ‘Don’t tell your father.’

And Ophelia, 13, knows that she stands on the other side of a chasm, orphaned, homeless. She knows she will never have a mother or a father again. She knows she is alone.

To Morrow-on-Sea, to Morrow-on-Sea, to the gulls with their cries, and the wind whistling free.

She and Marina never speak of what happened. She never tells her father, who continues to worship her mother, and keep his eyes tightly closed to the suffering of his daughter. She is a new island now, within sight of the shore, but with no means of ever reaching it.

Ophelia leans back from what she has written, her hands shaking like the blood will leave through her fingertips.

Adam needs to go home. The call from Luke comes at 4 o’clock, and he wants to set off right away, but he can’t leave Felix . Julia had said she would not be back from her trip with Patrick until evening. He sends her a message but cannot wait for her. His friends all live in London. There is only Ophelia in Morrow.

As a teenager, Ophelia told Marina she would never have children. Over and over again, until in her twenties her periods disappeared and it didn’t matter anymore. She still went through the indignity of having a coil fitted, just to make sure. She knows she will never be capable of having a child. She cannot give them what all children need and deserve, and she could not bear to give them less.

Ophelia looks down at the golden head that has trustingly, unhesitatingly nestled into her side while she reads to him. He is so soft that she is startled to feel her eyes welling up. At her feet, Leonard purrs contentedly.

‘Do you have any more of these?’ she asks as she closes the third instalment of the tales of a ninja hedgehog.

Felix shakes his head. ‘Mum says they’ll probably release a new one soon, in time for Christmas.’

‘Maybe it’ll appear under the tree for you?’

‘That would be so good!’

The day outside has died and they are lit by lamps, cosy in their illuminated pool on the sofa.

‘Dad said Uncle Luke needed some help.’ Felix tilts his head up to look at his impossibly enchanting and otherworldly babysitter.

‘That’s right.’

‘With what?’

‘Fee, be good. Don’t jump round on the sofa, okay, you’ll get hurt. I love you,’ Adam had called back as he was leaving. The look of gratitude he had given Ophelia had been profound.

Ophelia considers how to answer. ‘Dad will explain more when he’s back. I think Uncle Luke and Auntie Becca have disagreed about something, and Daddy is making sure Uncle Luke feels okay about it.’

She hopes this is the right thing to say. Felix seems to accept it anyway.

‘Are you hungry?’ She moves the subject on.

He wrinkles his brow, alarmingly like Adam, or perhaps Luke, for a moment. ‘Yeah.’

Ophelia straightens up and puts the books neatly to one side. ‘Okay, what do children like to eat? Shall I give you some of Leonard’s kibble?’

Felix looks mortified before he realises he is being wound up and bursts into giggles.

‘What about pasta? Do you like pasta?’

Through his laughter, he nods. ‘Sometimes. I can’t eat cheese though.’

‘What about pasta pomodoro then?’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s like tomato pasta.’

Felix hesitates. ‘I think I like that.’

‘You’ll like it.’

The drive from Morrow to Oxford is agonising. Every light that can be red is red. Every spot there might be traffic is choked. Adam drums his fingers on the steering wheel.

‘Becca’s left. She’s gone.’

It had been all he needed to hear down the phone, before he had been planning the journey. Thank god Ophelia had been nearby. Julia will be back in an hour or two, but the drive to Oxford is long and Luke will already be alone in the house for hours before Adam can make it.

The goldsmith can’t have music on in the car anymore. He used to be able to work, drive, read, have sex, sleep with music blaring, but now he finds it saturates his brain, distracts and confuses him. His shoulder aches and he shifts his position at the wheel again. In the silence and the passing headlights, he tries to untangle the mess of his thoughts.

Soon Adam will be with Luke. What then? Luke should come back with him, he can’t stay alone in the home he shared with Becca. And in Morrow, there is Ophelia, like the lady in the book, like the lady’s own knight who stays steadfast for a hundred years. What now? How long does this all last? This crystalline, unstable family he has unwittingly bonded to him, impossibly precious. Does it disappear when William Kent arrests him? Will he bring them down with him?

Adam shakes his head. This is not useful. He must help Luke. He can be there for his brother now; it is the only thing he can do, the only thing in his control right now.

Slowly, finally, he is driving down Iffley Road. He takes a side turn into the residential streets just before the dreaming spires begin. He feels a sigh building in his chest, the sigh of childhood and home that can only come when these have passed out of reach. He parks somewhat illegally and grabs the bag he had thrown together, before climbing out in front of the bay-windowed Victorian townhouse on the corner. As Adam ascends the steps to the door, he almost expects his father to open it and ask where he has been. But his father is dead, and Luke and Becca moved here last year from their nearby flat, because it was somewhere they could start a family.

Luke, or something like his brother, opens the front door. Adam drops his bag in the hall and puts his arm around him. There is a slackness in Luke’s body that Adam has never felt before, like the solid man he knows is not beneath the clothes anymore. Luke places a distant and listless hand on his brother’s back, then they shuffle through to the living room.

The light is not on. Luke has been sitting in the dark. When Adam flicks the switch, the built-in bookshelves stretch themselves out to dominate the room the way they had when he was growing up, and some of their father’s heavy architectural tomes still bow the wood. But Adam knows these things like his bones and his visiting eye is drawn instead to the new items. The coffee table between the old armchairs, the reed diffuser that gives the room its sickly floral scent, and the photograph of Luke and Becca’s wedding day at the centre of the mantelpiece.

His brother sinks into the right-hand chair that still holds his impression from the last few hours.

It is really over this time, Adam is sure. Luke has always been the one exiled from home then called back with forgiveness and tears. But finally, this time, it is Becca who has left, taking her warmth and her life with her, and leaving his brother to sit in this charnel house of four decades of youth and adulthood.

‘Talk to me.’ Adam sits to the left. The armchairs are turned slightly towards each other so that the occupants might spend an easy evening in conversation, but each brother keeps his gaze forward, sightlines crossing in the mid distance. Adam can feel the emptiness in the air.

‘She said she’s known for a while. She wanted to wait for me to be done with polymer testing. Like that mattered.’

Like that, Becca had felled a giant.

‘Push down hard, like that.’

Felix presses down on the cloves of garlic trapped between two chopping boards. Ophelia lends her strength and with a sudden burst of aroma, the garlic is crushed. She lifts the top board to show Felix the smithereens.

‘Eww,’ he says delightedly, and she gives him the wooden spoon to scrape them into the pan with a plop.

‘Okay, pour the oil in, like that. Aaaand, I’ll do the hot bit at the stove. I think I’d be in trouble with Dad if I let you do that.’

Ophelia sets the garlic frying and Felix helps her with the tin opener for the can of tomatoes, little hands on hers, which are only marginally bigger but so much stronger.

‘Will Mum be here soon?’

‘I expect so.’

Felix looks a little disappointed but is too tactful to say anything.

‘Mum and Dad only love each other as friends, you know,’ he says in an explanatory sort of tone.

‘Yes. Is that all right with you?’ Ophelia asks, shifting through Adam’s cupboards in search of dried herbs. Felix catches sight of some crisps.

‘Can I have crisps?’

Ophelia glances at the pasta that will be ready soon. She is not his parent. ‘Sure, why not.’ She passes him a packet and he digs in.

‘Yeah, it’s all right,’ he returns to the subject, ‘they’d drive each other mad if they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Mum loves Patrick anyway. He’s her boyfriend.’ Felix looks shyly at the crisp packet. ‘Do you have a boyfriend… or a girlfriend?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Ophelia looks rather sombre and the boy worries he has asked something he shouldn’t. ‘Sometimes,’ Ophelia hesitates, ‘sometimes boyfriends smell.’

Adam returns from the recently renovated kitchen with a plate of beans on toast and two mugs of strong tea.

Something like recognition passes across Luke’s face and Adam grasps at it, at the expression of something in the emptiness. ‘Like Dad used to make when we were ill,’ he explains, and passes the tray to Luke.

Adam sinks back into his chair and drinks his tea. It had been the only sort of comfort his father had been capable of, but his sons had clung to it. Young and already aware of their father’s emotional limitations.

Mechanically, Luke tries to cut a mouthful of the soggy toast and the tray tips on his knees, and the plate slides onto the carpet with a clatter.

Adam freezes. Luke stares at it for a moment, then his shoulders begin to shake with laughter.

‘What a fucking mess.’ He covers his face with his hands. He laughs, laughs and Adam laughs with him, laughs and out of the laughter comes sobs, heaving, and Adam keeps on being there. When Luke finally stops, Adam cleans up the mess with kitchen roll.

He is bent over, scrubbing the last of the sauce with some stain remover he had found under the kitchen sink, when Luke speaks to the back of his head.

‘I always thought I could keep her. I could live with her moments of indecision. I thought in the end, she’d always decide on me. But she didn’t.’

Adam keeps cleaning. ‘You deserved better. You deserve someone who loves you without condition.’

‘I know. But when you love someone like I love her it doesn’t matter. You’re happy to be treated like a dog, so long as you’re her dog.’

Adam bundles everything into a carrier bag. ‘Sounds shit.’

‘Maybe. Maybe we should have tried for kids earlier. Might have made Becca happy.’

The goldsmith stays knelt on the floor. Luke’s brittle, beautiful wife, thriving on his worship and obedience. The silence stretches out.

‘Or maybe not. Maybe nothing would.’ Luke rises from his chair and takes the bag from his brother, heading to take it out to the bins. He pauses at the living room door. ‘I’ve never been like you, Adam. I’ve always needed Becca.’

Kent has left Simon and his sister Sally and her nice loser of a boyfriend eating at the one nice pub in town, which is a shame because now he will have to fend for himself, and that means a sandwich.

By the time he had returned from London and the processing of Moira King’s arrest and charges, the rescheduled hike had had to be rescheduled again.

Simon had texted while Kent was being driven back to Morrow by Culvers. Trying to organise something with you is like waiting for Godot x

‘Do you know who Godot is, Culvers?’

‘Not a clue, Boss.’

Some of us didn’t go to private school, but I sense I’m being mocked x

But at the pub, Simon had kissed him and told him it didn’t matter because he doesn’t like Beckett anyway, and Kent had called him a smug bastard, and they had sat down for a drink. Before the food had arrived, Kent had received the email and departed again.

He sits at his kitchen table looking through the attachments.

Andrew Niven, 47, luxury goods importer. No convictions. Suspected links to criminal gangs throughout south/south-west of England.

A photograph of a well-groomed, short-haired man. A business headshot, from the looks of it.

And then, what Kent has been waiting for. A copy of a sales receipt from King & Lampard, signed by Moira King and Andrew Niven, for one of Adam Conlan’s rings.

‘Sorry I’m late. We got caught up in traffic.’ Julia stands at the door of Adam’s flat in a sensible parka. ‘You must be Ophelia.’

‘That’s right.’ Ophelia shakes the hand Julia offers. ‘Felix fell asleep on the sofa, I hope that’s all right. I wasn’t sure what his bedtime is.’

‘Of course. Thank you so much for looking after him,’ Julia says earnestly, and for a minute, the two petite women remain awkwardly in the doorway, then Julia crosses the familiar expanse to the sofa and peeks down at her sleeping son. ‘Was he all right?’

‘Good as gold.’

Love suffuses Julia’s face. ‘Did he get sweets out of you?’

Ophelia blushes. ‘A few.’

His mother smiles. ‘Well, it’s a compliment. He’d only try it on with someone he trusts.’

‘That’s… nice.’

Julia straightens up. ‘Adam tells me you were the first here after the robbery?’

‘The first to the shop,’ Ophelia says quickly. ‘I was selling him some gold.’

‘Quite the discovery,’ Julia says grimly and gathers up Felix’s belongings, slinging his child-sized rucksack onto her back. Ophelia can see she knows every inch of the flat.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ophelia manages, ‘it must be very worrying for you, knowing Adam was robbed.’

Julia smiles wearily. ‘I think it’s always been at the back of my mind. An occupational hazard for a goldsmith, I suppose.’ Then the teacher examines Ophelia more closely. ‘You and Adam make a good fit.’

Ophelia glances around the flat, arms cradling herself. ‘Oh. It’s not really that, really.’

Julia looks surprised. ‘Really? Well, think about it. You have my blessing, if you want it. No crazed ex in your way.’

‘Oh.’

‘I love Adam, but not like that.’

‘No?’ Ophelia ventures.

‘No. And he needs a partner. He’s been alone too long now.’ She sits next to her son and strokes his golden hair, and he murmurs in his sleep. ‘Someone hardy, I think.’ Her eyes flick up to Ophelia again.

‘Mm.’

Does she fit that description, Ophelia wonders. She looks down at her body, wrapped in layer after layer and still cold.

‘Tell me, does he still feel guilty?’ Julia asks suddenly.

The writer has never before encountered the honesty, the open acknowledgment of life, that she has met with these last ten days. She is still learning what it means to feel in the open. She stumbles for it.

‘Yes, intensely.’

Julia’s eyes run over her son and back to the other woman. ‘You know what “Felix” means, don’t you?’

‘Happy, fortunate.’

‘I chose the name, and Adam should have understood by now. There’s nothing I would change.’

‘No.’

‘I’ve told him a number of times over the years. But… in my experience, what children and young people are told about themselves sticks into adulthood. They become those fundamental truths we hold about ourselves. And I suspect Adam was told he was selfish; someone who hurt people.’

With unexpected strength, Julia stands and picks up the sleeping Felix, well over half her size, and he drowsily opens his eyes then snuggles into her shoulder, the safest place in the universe. ‘Think about it,’ she says to Ophelia as she navigates the stairs. ‘You might find you need someone like Adam.’

And she goes out to Patrick waiting by the car. The big man waves at Ophelia, then opens the back door and helps Julia manoeuvre a floppy Felix into his car seat. There is tenderness in his face and hands, and after he closes the door on the still-sleeping child, he briefly squeezes Julia’s shoulder, and she pats his arm, fingers lingering on his jacket sleeve, before they climb into their own seats.

Ophelia is filled with bystanding warmth, lit in the glow of new worlds. Their car winds away, and she stands in the empty door.

‘Is this important? Strictly’s about to start.’

‘Sorry, sorry. Can you get it on catch-up?’

Kent hears a resigned murmur and a kerfuffle, then Culvers is back on the line. ‘What is it, then?’

‘Andrew Niven bought one of Adam Conlan’s rings through Moira King.’ He can’t suppress the excitement in his voice.

‘Oooh.’ It is mirrored in Culvers’. He has never seen her house, but he can imagine her in her dressing gown, packet of Hobnobs to hand. ‘It’s the link you were looking for.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Well, King is in custody. What do we know about where Andrew Niven is?’

‘I’m going to get Eames to run his whereabouts down. See if we can’t get enough together for a search warrant.’

‘Okay, but don’t message Eames now, Boss. A judge isn’t going to look at a warrant tonight.’

Kent rolls his eyes. ‘I’ll leave it for the morning. I’m not a monster.’

‘Hmm. I’m missing Claudia though, aren’t I?’

Kent smiles to himself. ‘Sorry, sorry, I’ll let you go.’

‘Good one though, Boss.’ He hears Culvers pause on the other end. ‘What does Niven look like? White, medium build, short hair?’

‘Yes. Why? Oh…’

On either side of Morrow, threaded together by the slushy streets of brown melting snow and the early Christmas lights trimming the windows of the eager, they both think of the body lying in its drawer in the morgue.

‘It would be nice if there was a time one of us wasn’t in crisis,’ Luke observes.

‘At least we’re taking it in turns.’ Adam shrugs and puts down the ace of clubs. They have moved to the dining room so they can use the table. ‘I can feel Dad shaking his head at us though.’

‘Yes, well, maybe it’s easier if you only ever have one slightly grave mood.’ Luke takes the ace, then shakes himself. ‘That’s not fair, he lost a wife. What’s higher in brag, flush or straight?’

‘Straight.’

‘I’m sure it’s a flush.’

‘It’s a straight. Flush is higher in poker.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘It’s how I play with Felix.’

Luke puts down the three of hearts. ‘Then you’ve taught him wrong. Knock.’

‘Bollocks.’ Adam changes his last card and puts down a pair of jacks.

‘Well, you lose either way.’ Luke shows a flush.

‘Fine.’ Adam puts his glasses on top of his head and rubs at his eyes.

Luke looks at him. ‘Go to bed. I’ll be okay.’

‘Okay.’ Adam slips the cards back into the box. ‘But email work and tell them you’re taking the week off on personal. Testing is done, and you can’t work right now. You’ll be no use at the lab. Tomorrow, you’re coming back to Morrow with me.’

Luke looks at him with those grey-green eyes, the energy for a fight long gone. ‘Okay. Yeah.’

Adam climbs the stairs and on the first landing, he catches a second’s whiff of shoe polish and aftershave – his father. He stops and tries to catch it again.

Neither he nor Luke had cried at the funeral. Though Luke had been closer to their father, physically at least, living in Oxford, he had seen the beginnings of dementia. The confusion and the ill temper. The stroke, while a shock, was something Luke had told his brother he considered merciful. Adam had agreed. He had not said what he knew they both felt; that grieving for their father would feel like grieving for a stranger.

They had both wept silently at Aunt Bridget’s funeral, in that cold Cork church. And while the priest droned on in his gilt vestments, Adam had thought of what they owed the woman who had tried her best to make up for the misery of their childhood, and not been able to forget the brief second he had seen Aunt Bridget’s disappointment only a few months earlier, when she learned that Adam’s recklessness meant a woman now carried his child.

The scent is gone. Adam turns to his childhood bedroom, now a guest room freshened up with Orla Kiely sheets and curtains. Back to Morrow tomorrow he always jokes with Felix when they have gone anywhere overnight. He drops his clothes on the floor and climbs into bed. Back to Morrow tomorrow.

Adam has said he won’t be back tonight. Ophelia toys with the idea of returning to her own flat, but it is peaceful here. She wants to linger while she can, before the reprieve from her own life ends. The evenings spent in this flat are a euphoric suspension of time.

She makes all as it should be, neat and tidy, and puts a load of washing on – her own, and Adam’s, and Felix’s, in a strange marriage of dirt. She checks the silt trap and finds sand speckled with gold dust.

It is still not 9 o’clock and if she goes to bed now, she will only lie awake in the dark, so she drifts around the tasteful, minimalist room, imagines Adam’s life there, pulls the curtain back and opens the sash window to listen to the sea and feel the cold that rushes in to greet her.

To Morrow-on-Sea, to Morrow-on-Sea, to the gulls with their cries, and the wind whistling free.

The refrain has been Ophelia’s since childhood. Or perhaps since her childhood ended. It had come to her on the seafront not far from here. Trailing after Marina, even then taking comfort and comprehension in the act of writing, trying to get warm. She had bumped into him as she recorded these words.

‘I’ve told you so many times – you must stop writing while you walk. I’m so sorry. Ophelia, will you please apologise?’

‘That’s quite all right,’ says the artist, ‘never apologise for creating.’ Marina locks eyes with him and bites her lip.

Twenty bitter, restless years and she rests the notepad on the window ledge, touching the bitter cold, and writes with calm urgency until she cannot feel her fingers, and her nose has turned red. Finally, she closes the window and looks round for Leonard. Adam had not said whether he should be brought in before bed, but the last two nights she has woken to find the cat sleeping at her toes. She finds his box of kibble and shakes it. Nothing stirs. She tries again, but no, he is definitely not in the flat.

Unsure, Ophelia turns about. What about the workshop? She has seen him lurking beneath the workbench, asleep on top of the kiln. She picks up her coat and the keys and carries the box of kibble down the stairs. In the hallway, she turns to the internal door, replaced now after the break-in, and unlocks it.

‘Leonard? Leonard?’

The boards creak under her socks, and the air in the studio is quiet in spite of the wind outside, sealed off in its own stillness. In the dark, the room has the aspect of a desolate, haunted place; one that cannot be disturbed by normal life, but only by things that are bigger, subtler. Ophelia realises the workshop reminds her of the tower in the woods, and she wonders why.

She shakes the box of kibble again. ‘Leonard? Gatta?’

She waits to be frightened by a sudden wakening, claws scattering on wood and an urgent meowing for food. There is nothing.

Ophelia puts the box down and stands behind the workbench in Adam’s place, reaches out for the handles of tools hanging beside her, feels the warmth of the wood, running skin over the rasp of files. She pulls out the drawer where her gold was kept and examines the cardboard boxes filled with solder and blocks of green wax. It smells like metal, like blood from a split lip. When he works, he must feel like a god.

The floor is cold through the soles of her socks as she crosses to the new glass cabinets. Adam has filled them with what had been in the safe. The spotlights are off and the objects glint dully, but in the dark their power is no less. They are defiant, and seethe with their own aliveness. Ophelia can see loping shapes, brambles or wolves. The mellow petals of buttercups grasping night air.

Ophelia turns and in the barred windows, there is a face looking back.

She gasps.

It is her. She can see her open mouth and her own eyes reflected in what little light hits the glass. She crosses and gazes out over the promenade and the sea wall and to the water. On the night horizon there is movement, the undulation of the waves, never stilled.

She can see herself from the outside, from the street. A pale face at the window.

Last week’s snow is gone; now there is the deeper cold only found at the coast, where the damp nips like imps at fingertips and exposed skin. God, Adam has missed it during the only night he has been away. He draws as much as he can into his lungs. It is lunchtime and the beach is empty. Luke had declined to walk with him, and gone straight to bed as soon as they reached the flat. Tomorrow Adam will insist, but for now he has the luxury of walking by himself, listening to the flux of the waves, the gulls, the distant sight of a freighter far out in the grey.

It is the first day of December. A rush of Christmas orders is already filling his inbox – wealthy men with no idea how long it takes to make their wives’ and mistresses’ gifts. He will need to work all the hours he can to get them done, but it will be his holy trinity – work, walking, family. He tips his head back and breathes it in. If only he can keep hold of these articles of his faith.

In the distance is an ink blot, a solitary spur rising from the sand. Adam smiles. And the unsanctified?

Neither hastens their pace, but watch each other emerge into view. Some of Ophelia’s hair has broken free from under her hat and whips like silk ribbons in the wind.

‘Did you know I’d be here?’

Ophelia shrugs. ‘I guessed. How is he?’

‘Terrible.’ Adam sighs. He has to erect the barrier in himself, between his heart and his brother’s, numbing the pain in his so that he can nurse it in Luke’s. ‘He will be for a while.’

She nods. Adam can see a patch of dry skin on her cheek, flaking slightly. She is beautiful. True God from true God.

‘Do you want me out of the flat?’ she asks.

‘Do you want to go?’

‘No.’

‘Then stay. Please.’

Between them, the sand is washed even by the retreating tide. Adam feels the barrier of his heart tested.

‘Are you okay? Was Felix?’

‘Fine. We had fun, I think.’

‘Thank you. I owe you…’ Adam exhales, exhausted. ‘I hope you know what I owe you.’

William Kent and PC Culvers climb out of the car when they see Adam Conlan approaching. Kent’s shoulders tense when he sees that Ophelia Richards is with him. Then they relax again. It is different now.

‘Morning, Mr Conlan, Ms Richards. Could we go inside? It’s beyond freezing out here.’

Adam turns off the alarm and they all shuffle into the workshop, where the goldsmith switches on a couple of fan heaters and Kent finally feels warm enough to remove his scarf and gloves.

Adam apologises. ‘The flat is warmer, but my brother… he’s had a rough week. Wife left. I don’t want to disturb him.’

‘How awful. I hope he’s all right.’

There is some awkward coughing and gathering around the workbench. Adam Conlan is looking at the policeman to see what axe will fall next.

‘It’s a funny sort of good news.’ Kent puts him out of his misery.

‘Okay?’

‘You were robbed twice, really. Or many times.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Moira King, your dealer, she’s been skimming off your profits for the last decade.’

‘Moira?’

Conlan would be less stunned to find pigs flying, the police-man thinks. What had the dealer said to him in her Mayfair shop? Adam tends to ascribe people good intentions, which they may not possess.

It takes a while for Kent and Culvers to explain. Adam keeps shaking his head as they show him the receipts and records. He remembers each and every piece he made. Each and every piece a betrayal. Ophelia watches silently.

Adam begins to pace. ‘But why? She made my career. If she wanted more money, she only had to ask. I’d have given it to her.’

Kent and Culvers exchange a look.

‘It wasn’t really money she wanted, we think. She was after your… affections,’ Kent explains chastely.

‘Affec– Moira?’ Adam stops. ‘But… It was business. She was a mentor. She never gave any sign of…’

‘No, I suspect she didn’t.’ Kent can see her face still, splintering. ‘She’s been charged now. So, you know, hopefully insurance will pay out for the sixty thousand, but potentially also the further fifty thousand that she embezzled from you over the last decade. A nice sort of Christmas present after a slightly miserable two years.’

‘You think Moira was responsible for the break-in as well?’

Culvers produces a picture and shows it to Adam. ‘Do you recognise this ring?’

Adam only has to glance at it. ‘Waves and Gulls, I made three. All sold through Moira last year.’

Culvers places a second piece of paper on top, the receipt. ‘One of the rings was purchased by a man named Andrew Niven. Based in London, he works in luxury goods, but not only are we fairly certain he’s doing things he shouldn’t in his own business, he’s also linked to organised criminal elements in Somerset, his home turf. Might be a coincidence, or Ms King might have put two and two together and spotted an opportunity.’

Kent puts it as simply as he can: ‘If Moira wanted greater revenge, or… satisfaction, say, then when Andrew Niven buys this ring, legitimately – we think he gave it to a girlfriend – a conversation might take place. Moira has an inkling what he does, who he’s involved with. Niven profits, you get hurt.’

‘But she wouldn’t.’ Adam shakes his head again.

Kent smiles pityingly. ‘But she already did, for over a decade. You had a child, moved away from London. You never noticed her – sexually, romantically – and you never would. Her father is declining, and it seems to have triggered a sense of crisis. She sent the rabbit heart. We think she coordinated with Niven. And… she didn’t know your son would catch a stomach bug. I think you were meant to be here. I think you were meant to be hurt more than financially.’

Adam is drained, silent.

‘We’re looking into Niven’s movements and phone records. Do you recognise him or any of his known associates?’

Culvers spreads out a series of photographs. One or two of the men have pale, staring faces. Adam’s eyes flick up to the window.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Two years?’ Ophelia breaks the silence she has been holding. ‘You said Adam has had a miserable two years.’

Kent switches his attention. She is calmer today; that desperate energy he had seen has settled. He notices how close she stands to Adam, shielding him, almost. ‘Yes. The robbery, and losing both parents. I expect your brother’s relationship problems haven’t been easy either, I’m sorry to hear about that.’

Adam wakes himself from his haze of surprise. ‘Thanks. We lost Dad last year. It was a bit shit, but,’ – he shrugs – ‘Mum actually died when we were kids.’

Kent frowns. Then he feels the slow dragging in his gut.

‘What?’ the goldsmith asks.

Adam, Ophelia and Culvers watch as Kent opens up his phone and finds Adam’s background check. ‘Your mother was Nina Conlan, née Clore?’

‘That’s right…’

‘How did she die?’

Adam grips the edge of the workbench. ‘Pneumonia. She’d always been frail apparently, poor health. One winter when we were tiny, it finished her off.’

‘Your father was left to look after you and your brother?’ Kent asks, voice tight. Adam nods. ‘Shit.’

‘What?’

Kent turns the phone around so that Adam can see the death certificate. ‘Nina Conlan died two years ago in Leeds. She divorced your father when you were two.’

There is a silence so profound that Kent can hear ringing.

‘I’m so, so sorry. I thought you knew.’

Culvers remains tactfully silent as she drives them back to the station. Kent puts his head in his hands. This morning he had been lighter, buoyed by the idea that Adam Conlan is closer to being cleared, that gentle souls might still prevail. Now the relief has been met by a rush in the opposite direction. Guilt. He has dug through the mire of Adam’s life, and in closing over one wound, has opened a dozen others. He has been so clumsy.

He gets out his phone. God, I’ve fucked something up.

The reply is near instant. Did you shoot someone? X

Kent snorts. Don’t be a dick.

His phone pings again. Then it’s nothing that can’t be atoned for. Meeting now. Talk later? Lasagne for tea x

‘She left.’ It is too big a piece of news. Adam does not know what to do with it. His hands straighten and rearrange everything on the workbench. Ophelia watches. ‘She left us.’

There is nowhere in his mental world for this upturning, no way to make it fit into anything he knows or can understand. All he feels is agitation, restlessness.

‘Fuck. What am I going to tell Luke? After Becca, god.’

He rakes his hand through his hair, rubs his eyes and forehead. Cold fingers close over his.

Ophelia brings his hand away from his face and with a sure movement, pulls him down into a hug. Her arms are wiry and he has to hunch over, but it is the most comforting thing Adam has ever felt. His head is in the crook of her shoulder and her hair tickles his face with salt air.

‘It will be okay,’ she tells him.

His eyes prickle. If he starts crying now, he will never stop. He pulls himself away. ‘Thank you.’

Ophelia looks at him with the furious empathy that runs through her whole being. In his mind’s eye, he sees Aunt Bridget. Then he remembers the pan-flash disappointment that had crossed his aunt’s face, and he cannot ever imagine it on Ophelia’s.

‘I won’t tell Luke yet.’ He thinks out loud. ‘I’ll give him a while to recover from Becca first. Hopefully by then, things will be sorted with this Niven as well.’

‘Keep your doors locked even when you’re in. Call us if anything doesn’t feel right. Anything.’ Kent had issued a warning on his way out. ‘If Niven’s people feel exposed, there’s a chance they’ll try to intimidate you. I still have a car parked on the other end of the promenade. You’ll be okay.’

Adam will tell Julia to keep Felix with her this weekend.

‘You’re a good brother,’ Ophelia says. She hesitates. ‘Some-times you need the missing pieces, even if you didn’t know they were missing. You need them to understand.’

‘Your life?’

‘Everything, really.’

‘Is that what you’re doing when you write?’

Ophelia nods. Willingly, she prises open the windows that have long been rusted shut and lets him see inside. ‘I came back to Morrow because when I was thirteen, my mother had an affair here, with an artist. I saw her get hurt and she never forgave me for seeing. She never forgave me for anything.’ She takes a breath and Adam can see that this offering hurts her. ‘I saw him again in London this spring – the artist. Just walked past him in the street. He didn’t notice me. But it was him. And so I came back to Morrow, to write it, and myself. There’s only so long you can do what you’ve always done.’

He will do anything to protect them from all the pain he has caused. His choices; the things he did and did not do. The things he did and did not know. He loves them. Felix needs to be kept safe, provided for. And how can he spare Luke from knowing he has been abandoned, forsaken, not once but twice now? Before bed, Adam had looked in at his brother, asleep in Felix’s bed, a giant covered by a child’s single duvet.

And Ophelia. She is in his bed now, Leonard probably worshipping at her feet. He has the right idea. Adam turns over on the sofa and looks at the closed door to his room. She had volunteered to take the sofa, but Adam had known he would not be able to sleep. She should be comfortable.

He stands and goes to the window. It is pitch-black outside. The sliver of moon that is left to the month has been crowded out by clouds. Tomorrow is due to be stormy.

So, Mum had left. Had it been on a night like this? Had she looked in on Luke, on Adam, on their father and then taken her bags and walked away? Had she told Dad why; had she hesitated; had she kissed them before she left? He imagines trying to leave Felix and it hurts so much he has to stop. He could understand her dying.

Adam has to give his father some credit for the lie. There is more kindness in it than he would have expected from Diarmiad Conlan; a greater accommodation of his sons’ feelings, of their youth and their humanity, than he had demonstrated for the rest of his life. It was the sort of softness he showed baby Felix the handful of times he met him.

Maybe this is what he shares with his father, in the end. He will do anything to spare his family further pain.

After the prince had slain his own baby on the night of her Christening feast, he fled into the dawn, peeling off his wolf-pelt coat, howling with such sorrow that it chilled the very bones of all who heard him.

After some time, the wolf-pelt raised itself from the forest floor and shook itself out. Under the full moon, it regrew its flesh and bones. It began to stalk the woods once more, as befits a wolf.

Tuesday morning comes wearily. It struggles to raise its light, and the wind is high.

Adam wakes from his fitful night on the sofa to hear Ophelia’s feet padding quietly around the kitchen. He lies there to listen to her move and watch the sclerotic dawn through the window. Then he lifts himself up to look at her. She is making coffee and a big pan of porridge, swaddled in her jumper and thick socks, hair twisted back in some Gordian knot. Her long pale lashes slope downwards in perpetual mourning. She should be made of stained glass.

‘What can I do?’ he asks blearily, rising from the sofa.

‘Set the table?’

‘Are you trying to keep me away from the coffee?’

‘I thought it would be nice for Luke if it didn’t taste bad.’

He smiles. ‘All right.’

He lays the table for three and knocks on the door of Felix’s bedroom. ‘Breakfast!’

Luke will have to get up because Ophelia is there. If it had only been Adam, then he knows Luke would stay in bed. But his brother is too polite, too gentlemanly to not get up at all when Adam has another guest, and that guest has made breakfast. It is another reason to be thankful for Ophelia’s presence.

Luke looks like shit as he emerges from Felix’s bedroom. Hollow-eyed, hair somehow grey instead of its usual blond. Adam and Ophelia pretend not to notice.

‘No bacon?’ Luke jokes weakly.

Ophelia gives him a stern look. ‘Sorry, did you want cancer?’

He tries to laugh. ‘Porridge is great, thank you. I’m glad you didn’t let Adam cook.’

‘Where did this idea I can’t cook come from?’ Adam chides.

The three sit round the dining table with its branching grain, and Ophelia ladles warm snowy porridge from the pot.

‘I think no one minded until Ophelia came and did it properly, like a fairy godmother. You’re suffering from com-parison,’ Luke says.

‘All right, you can do lunch in that case.’

Ophelia watches both out of the corners of her eyes, and wonders whose brave face is for whom at this breakfast table of adults without parents, without partners; this coastal leper colony.

‘So what are you going to do if this Niven bloke tries any Guy Ritchie shit?’ Luke asks.

Adam keeps eating. ‘You’re big. I’ll stand behind you.’

‘Seriously though?’

‘I don’t know. God knows. Kent has left some blokes in an unmarked car further down. I’m sure they’ll step in if anything happens.’

After breakfast, Luke sits on the sofa, staring into space, the fig leaf of a book in his hand. Adam starts working at his desk by the window, unwilling to leave his brother to work downstairs. Ophelia perches at the cleared dining table, laptop open in front of her.

She has almost finished the manuscript now. There will be endless editing and polishing, but in its body, in its substance, it is nearly whole. She tries not to think ahead to when Andrew Niven is apprehended, when she will have to leave. When the book will no longer take up her days and salve her mind. When she will need to find her own life, her own home.

Ophelia finds her mind drifting over Nina Conlan, Andrew Niven, Moira King. All of their actions and absences. She ought to despise Moira, she supposes. She has had to drag the art dealer’s consequences out of the sea; she will never be able to rid herself of this experience, will always have touched someone who is dead, who is rotting. But Ophelia understands desperation. What would she have done for Marina to see her? What is a person, unseen by love?

The rain crackles against the window, Adam’s pencil scratches paper, Ophelia taps at her keyboard; a soundscape to their uneasy peaceful morning.

Just before noon, William Kent arrives with PC Culvers.

There are no more gentle souls. Like the morning before a funeral, Kent has felt the heavy slowness resting on his shoulders since he found out. Even Culvers’ usual cheeriness is diminished.

They trudge up the promenade to the workshop and peer in through the window to find it empty. The lights are on in the flat above, and they walk around the side. Culvers presses the buzzer and they stand waiting by the bleach-washed wall. The steady blinking of the light on Culvers’ body-worn camera makes Kent nauseous.

Adam ushers them up. In the flat, Ophelia rises to meet them, and Kent sees the heartbroken brother for the first time. What a week.

‘Any update on Niven? Is Moira okay, has she been bailed?’ Adam asks.

‘I’m afraid not – she’s well connected, and wealthy. Too much of a flight risk while an investigation is ongoing.’ Kent hesitates. ‘She has a good lawyer though, if that puts your mind at ease.’

The goldsmith looks guilty and embarrassed. ‘Right. I’ll put the kettle on.’

Kent waits until he has set it to boil, then turns to Ophelia and Luke. ‘I’m afraid I need to speak with Mr Conlan alone. Some sensitive topics. He’ll be able to choose what he shares with you later.’

They look surprised, alarmed. ‘Surely–’ Luke starts.

‘I’m sorry, I really have to insist,’ Kent says gravely, donning the authority that he so rarely calls from its repose.

Both of them look at Adam who also wears a look of deep consternation. ‘Uh, sure. If that’s what has to happen.’ He looks at Ophelia and Luke. ‘I’ll be okay. Promise. Just, go for a walk or something.’

Slowly, reluctantly, they put on their coats and boots, glancing all the while at Adam and the policemen. When they are ready, they head for the door.

Luke frowns. ‘Text if you need anything, okay?’

Ophelia says nothing, only meets the goldsmith’s eye before she leaves.

Adam pulls out three mugs, gathering himself or stalling, Kent cannot tell. The kettle crackles, boils, gives the air the smell of scalding purity.

‘What do you need to ask me?’ Adam asks once he has steeped the teabags in the mugs.

Kent scratches his brow. It is best to begin and then not to stop. He takes a breath. ‘Has anyone from your mother’s side of the family ever tried to get in touch?’

Adam’s brow furrows. ‘No. Never. To be honest, we didn’t think there was anyone to get in touch. Her parents were dead, she was an only child. We thought she was dead.’

Kent nods. ‘I see.’

Adam appears to be trying to remember what goes next. He crosses to the fridge. ‘Uh, I’ve got normal milk or oat milk?’

Kent hears Culvers’ intake of breath. It takes a moment for him to realise why. Then his mind follows hers, and it stings.

‘That’s how you did it, isn’t it?’

Adam’s handsome face lines. ‘Did what?’

‘Your alibi. Collecting your sick son from school.’

‘Sorry? I don’t understand.’

‘Your son’s dairy allergy. His mother mentioned it – she said that when he was sick on the Monday of the robbery, it looked like when he has a reaction to dairy, but he hadn’t had any. Everyone thought it was a bug. Something that couldn’t possibly have been predicted – a hiccup in somebody’s plan.’

‘He hadn’t had dairy. I don’t—’

‘That was the intention – you would be away from the workshop on the most unforeseeable, loving grounds. A beautiful alibi. What did you do – mix the dairy in with his oat milk when you gave him cereal, so he wouldn’t taste it, wouldn’t say something? Was it something like that?’

Adam shuts the fridge firmly. ‘I would never give Felix milk. It makes him sick, it makes him vomit.’

‘Around two hours after it’s ingested, I’m guessing?’

Adam looks angry for the first time since Kent has met him. ‘I would never hurt Felix.’

Kent feels the anger and the desperation flooding his own veins. ‘But you did. Because it gave you a two-hour window to drop him off, stage the robbery with your accomplice, then get a call from school to pick him up. A caring father. A victim.’ His voice roughens. ‘How could you? And then Ms Richards, she turns up and discovers the robbery for you. Was she in on it? Or was she useful, attractive collateral? I almost hope it was the former, for her sake.’

Adam steps towards Kent. A tall man, lean, angry. Culvers squares herself, ready. ‘How the fuck could I poison my own son? Rob myself? Kill a man and leave Ophelia to find it all?’

Kent does not back down, he is too angry, too disappointed in reality. ‘I know why. You knew your son would come to no real harm – a few hours’ vomiting, that’s all. Much better to protect him from the bigger mess.’

‘What bigger mess?’

Culvers speaks, calm, emollient as she lights the blaze. ‘The man in the sea, my love. Because DNA results came back this morning. He isn’t in the police database. But given his age, and the percentage of DNA he shares with you, we would guess he’s maybe a first cousin – but much more likely, he’s your half-brother.’

Adam’s expression falls away.

Kent’s eyes switch between the goldsmith and Culvers at work.

‘Did he show up asking for money?’ she asks.

Adam says nothing.

‘You were trying to protect your family, weren’t you, my love? The one you’ve been so desperate to shield.’

The goldsmith’s face contorts, ripples, looks nothing like itself.

Kent takes up the noose. ‘We’ll trace the precise details in the next few days. But, I would imagine he found you sometime after your mother’s death two years ago – perhaps going through papers, finding out she had a previous family, plenty of possibilities there. Like I said, we’ll establish the exact chain of events very shortly. But, however it happens, he finds out his half-brother is a goldsmith, doing well for himself. And he turns up to ask for money. I imagine, after the initial shock, you refused.’

‘Is that how it was, my love? Tell us if the details – the personalities – were different. He was persistent though, I imagine. Most people are when there’s thousands involved.’ Culvers squints. ‘He threatened to go to other family members. Tell them the truth about your mother, a whole other family no one knew existed. Were you afraid he would unbalance the life you had built for your little boy? Or were you worried about the effect on your brother? You lost your father last year, and you saw this divorce business coming a mile off. He looks devastated, poor chap. You did it to protect them.’

Kent pulls the paper from his pocket, passes it hand to hand. ‘In the end, you agree to stage the robbery together – he walks away with sixty thousand in gold and a solemn oath never to come near you or your family again, and you make the loss back through insurance.’ He searches Adam’s face. ‘But something goes wrong. Does he start asking for more? Do you suddenly realise he’s going to keep coming back? Or were you just really fucking angry?’ He wants to know, Kent cannot stand not to know. ‘That’s when you kill him. Head against the bricks. Sudden, ferocious.’ He holds the paper out to the goldsmith. ‘We have a warrant for your arrest.’

The clouds outside thicken, and the light from the window fades. Adam’s face becomes dark, and Kent can see the gleam of his teeth.

Luke and Ophelia take the steep path towards the woods. They walk quickly, silent, trying to erase their anxiety. Their boots thud and crunch, Luke’s long heavy strides and Ophelia’s quick light ones, syncopated, searching.

The rain lightens and intensifies, lightens and intensifies, and the wind scours the cliff path until they reach the cover of the trees and its sovereignty cedes to the damp forest.

‘What do you think they want?’ Ophelia asks.

Luke shakes his head. ‘I just… I don’t know. What can there possibly be?’

Ophelia bites her lip. Their mother’s secret is not hers to tell. ‘They looked so sombre.’

‘God, Adam.’ Luke shakes his lion’s head.

Ophelia’s feet have unconsciously been leading them towards the tower, and with their agitated pace, they break into the clearing before she realises where they are going. Luke stops and stares up at it.

‘Strange place, isn’t it?’

The glass in the arrow-slit windows is opaque today, its jet surface reflecting the two figures back to themselves.

‘Unearthly,’ Ophelia agrees.

‘Mm, unearthly,’ Luke muses. ‘I’m worried… I’ve always worried that’s what Adam is. He’s… he’s that dangerous cocktail. So full of love, but wild, not working on the same plane we are.’ He exhales a deep breath, close to tears, Ophelia thinks. ‘I’ve spent the last eight years trying to convince myself he’s changed. That that germ of… recklessness, perilous dreaming… whatever it is – that it was gone. That he’d settled down, the drama was done with.’

‘It has gone. I haven’t seen it. He’s a good man.’ Ophelia feels close to tears herself. ‘He’s… gentle. This is a mistake. Whatever is happening is Moira and Niven.’

Luke bites his lip. ‘What do you think the police are asking him? Why couldn’t we be there too?’

‘I don’t know.’

They walk around the base of the tower. Around and around.

Luke’s face crumples. ‘I’ve been distracted – Dad’s dementia, the stroke. My own shit with Becca. I should have been a better brother. I stabilise him – always have. He needed me these last few years, and I didn’t see it.’

She shakes her head. ‘It’s not like that.’

Luke gives her an anguished smile. ‘You’ve been good to him.’ He gives her an awkward side-by-side clasp of the shoulder. ‘We’ll be there for him, whatever happens.’

She wipes her eyes fiercely.

‘This wood is a bit oppressive, isn’t it? How do we get out in the open?’ Luke changes topic.

‘This way. We can come back along the cliff path and then down to the beach.’

They walk on over the undergrowth. What has not rotted is rimed with frost and threatens to send them flying, and the frozen-fingered trees reach out to catch them.

‘It is Niven, isn’t it? And Moira King?’ Luke asks. ‘I only met her once or twice, but I can’t say I liked her.’ It isn’t rhetorical, he really needs to know; he needs Ophelia to tell him that Adam has nothing to do with it. She feels the grief of the man next to her, as he tries to hold together his splintering life. She tries to brace the pieces.

‘Yes. Whatever the police need to tell him or to ask him, it’s because of what Moira and Niven have done.’

Luke nods gratefully. ‘With the greatest respect – I don’t know what’s going on with you two, that’s your business – but I expect there was some other indiscretion from Adam’s youth. Something they didn’t want us to have to hear. Another family secret to keep buried.’

They come out into the open and the great, grey sky stretches vastly across the field of their vision, and below the waves lap blackly.

Adam Conlan is as still as marble, a silhouette against the light as Kent approaches, warrant in hand. The brother and the girlfriend are gone. Culvers is close behind her boss, and the van is waiting in the street below. This is how it will be.

Kent’s heart is lead-heavy but it beats quickly. As he gets closer, he can see that the hair at Conlan’s wrists is raised like hackles.

‘Adam Conlan, I am arresting you for the murder of a person yet to be identified, and attempted fraud. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Please turn around so that my colleague can cuff you.’

‘No.’ His voice is low.

‘Don’t resist arrest, Adam,’ Kent warns him, ‘don’t. It’s not worth it. It won’t change things.’

Let this be the shred of gentleness he has left.

Culvers has her cuffs out. She covers the angle that Conlan might take so that he is backed against his desk.

‘No,’ he shakes his head, ‘no.’

‘Another family secret?’ Ophelia asks suddenly.

‘Mm?’ The chemist takes his eyes off the view. ‘Another child, maybe,’ he suggests.

Ophelia shakes her head. ‘No. He never denied Felix. Never hid him. He did the opposite.’

‘Oh,’ says Luke shiftily, ‘yes, you’re right. Something else then.’ He walks closer to the cliff edge and peers curiously at the beach below, then returns to the path where Ophelia is standing. He shakes the cold from himself. She can see the gooseflesh running its finger along his strong jaw.

‘Your mother,’ Ophelia says, staring straight at Luke’s face. A flash of comprehension crosses it.

‘What about our mother?’ He looks away.

‘Were you outside the door yesterday? Did you hear Kent?’

‘Hear Kent say what?’ he says, but his voice is strained.

Ophelia’s stomach feels hot. ‘You know. You know that we know.’

Luke meets her eyes and his shoulders sag. ‘I’ve known for a while. I didn’t tell Adam. I thought I might never have to. It hurts – it really hurts to find out you’ve been abandoned.’

‘No, wait. Please.’ Adam’s whole body is shaking. The truth is awful, dense. It drops whole and heavy and with such certainty that the world is made anew in its sordid, gothic image. ‘Please, wait.’

Something makes Kent hesitate. ‘What is it?’

‘Oh my god. He’s with Ophelia. I told them to go for a walk – fuck. I told them to go together.’

‘I’m sorry, Ophelia.’

‘It’s not for me to forgive. You meant well. Adam didn’t know how to tell you either. But you’re right, we’ll be there for him whatever happens.’

Luke clears his throat with an awkward cough, suddenly choking back tears. ‘You don’t understand. I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. Now it needs to look like you were involved. This needs to look like remorse.’

‘What?’ Ophelia studies him, and he moves and the sweetness is a trick of the light on the musculature, and it isn’t there at all; he is a wolf in pain.

‘It’ll be quick. I’ll look after Felix. I’ll visit Adam if he goes to prison.’

Ophelia does not reply. She backs away. The wind blows her hair across her face and Luke leans towards her. ‘Tuck your hair back, I don’t want to pull it. Please. I’m so sorry, it was never meant to be like this.’

He is taking hold of her shoulders, softly brushing her hair away from her face with his giant hands, walking her back towards the edge of the cliff.

‘Culvers – van, back-up,’ Kent barks, but she is already on the stairs, radio in hand. ‘Conlan, with me – where will they go?’

‘Shit. A walk. Ophelia will have taken them onto the beach. Maybe the woods. Luke knows his way but not as well as she does. She’ll have led.’

They clatter down the stairs and out into the freezing air.

‘You’re sure it’s him?’ But Kent already knows it. What Adam has half told him fits, in letter and spirit. He will be with Adam, he can still arrest him if he has been deceived. But if Ophelia is with Luke and what he knows to be true is true, then she is not safe. Kent and Culvers had come so close to what happened but missed it so slightly and so dangerously. ‘Drive up to the woods. Ask the unmarked if they saw which way they went,’ he shouts into the chaos of sound that is issuing from his radio.

The goldsmith is on the beach looking one way then the other across the sand. The rain is picking up again and there is a haze that cuts off the distance from view. They have to make a choice.

‘Left first,’ Kent orders, and they run along the narrowing plane of sand and shingle.

No one will ever know. Marina will bury her troublesome daughter and cry for the mess she got herself into. She will sob on her husband’s shoulder and whisper that she always knew Ophelia’s life would end in tragedy. Adam – will Adam know? Will Adam doubt her? Will he bend to Leonard’s ear and tell him she betrayed them? She thinks this beneath the panic shutting down her nervous system.

Her body is pliant. Luke is backing her off the path now. The ground changes under her feet, tussocky and soft as they get closer to the edge of the cliff. It is not sheer, but they are high enough. She will die even if she misses the rocks and hits sand.

She will die and still no one will see her. Adam will – won’t he? Please – he has been her witness. Won’t he know?

Something burns. A life spent on her own, unseen, until the goldsmith.

A life on her own has taught Ophelia not to panic, not to feel in the moment but to save it for later. To preserve herself, she has learned to ignore pain when it is not useful.

Luke is tucking her hair back so tenderly, like she is his daughter. She turns her cheek and bites his hand, tears a chunk of flesh like a hungry dog. He screams and snatches his hand away, and she shoots under his arm towards the opening in the scrub, towards the steep cliff path that will take her to the beach.

The sand is too forgiving. Unlike the hard wintery ground above, it welcomes their strides, cushions them, soaks their footsteps up and slows them down. It is a nightmare in which Adam cannot run fast enough; can never reach where he needs to go.

Next to him, Kent struggles for breath but does not slow.

Reaching cliffs shortly – confirm, any sighting on beach? He can hear Culvers crackling through on Kent’s radio and wills her to say she sees them.

The details, the sequences cascade into Adam’s head but he shakes them away. It does not matter. All that matters is that Luke did this, and Ophelia is with him. There is an abyss he must look into, but it cannot be now.

The cliff steps into town take indistinct shape through the rain. He had seen her there that night on the beach. Please let her be there now, let her be safe.

The steps resolve themselves, garlanded with seaweed and grit. They are empty.

‘She’s not here,’ Adam shouts through the bitter liquid in his lungs. He turns and Kent follows him as they run back down the beach, lapsing now, swallowing their footprints with water, back towards Morrow Wood and the cliffs that hold up that piece of the sky.

The blood flows down her chin and blows across her cheeks as she skitters along the track. It is so steep she hurtles, wheeling, unable to slow herself even if she had wanted. Luke is behind her, picking up speed like a boulder. If this titan can touch her, he can kill her, will kill her, there is no other option for him now.

She leaps from an algae-rusted crag and slips, hands cracking against wet sandstone. Ophelia pulls herself up and can hear the rapid thudding of Luke’s approach. She runs again, in as straight a line as she can through the shingle and scrub that plummet downwards, until the sand is nearly within reach. She makes a final leap and lands with a soft, wet ploft.

She keeps running in a straight line. She will never make it back to Adam’s – on the flat sand, she is fast, light, but Luke will still outrun her and bring her down. She heads for the water. Only in the water will they be levelled, will the sea level them.

Ophelia sprints straight for the approaching waves, hair streaming in her wake.

Moira, an unwilling maiden, and Niven a coincidence, an unrelated shitbag. And all along, this man, Conlan’s brother. Brothers. The man in the sea.

‘Can you see them?’ Kent pants into his radio.

Nothing yet. Station sending more units. Still looking, Culvers hacks back.

Adam is ahead of him but the men spot the blur in the rain at the same time. Below Morrow Wood, below the cliffs, a fast-moving wisp and another, bigger, close behind it.

‘There!’ he shouts, and they close the painful distance in time to see Ophelia throw her coat behind her and hurtle into the water.

One day, when the silver-tongued child was done with her work at the cottage in the woods, she left the goldsmith and the strange man to walk down to the beach, as was often her habit. On the beach, she met a wolf. She bade the creature a courteous good morning, but a wolf will always be a wolf, and therefore he did as his nature dictated and set upon the girl.

Thinking quickly, the child said, ‘If you spare me, I will fetch you a bigger dinner.’

And the greedy wolf paused a moment to consider.

Well, the silver-tongued child had known what pain was for a long time now, and she knew she could tolerate more of it than the wolf could. So she seized this opportunity and dived into the cold sea. The wolf followed and no matter how hard he paddled, he could not catch the girl. Slowly but surely, his limbs failed.

And so it was that the wolf drowned and died a second time, and when he was washed ashore, the old man with the bin bags gathered his bones and took him away. And the girl got out of the sea, chilled to the marrow, but alive.

Luke grabs her neck. He turns her so his grip is on her throat and he can see her, then he holds her still for a moment, panting and shivering, up to his waist in the water. She can see the temperature beginning to register over the adrenal-ine, catching up with his consciousness. Her own body is quaking.

She did not make it. Her feet scud, shoe tips grazing the sand under her, unable to plant themselves.

Another few steps and she would have begun to swim. She would have been able to outswim him with ease, in this weather, in this cold, with the tide coming in. She has experience. She might have drowned but not before he did.

She is so afraid. Her nails find the wound in Luke’s hand and she digs in as hard as she can, but it is not enough to make him let go now.

‘Let it happen… just, let it happen now. Please. Stop this,’ he pants.

‘No.’ She digs in again and he winces. She tries to kick her legs but they are too heavy in the water. He plunges her head under.

Ophelia’s eyes burn with the salt, her skin with the cold, her lungs with the sudden cessation of air. She is burning underwater. She thrashes and cannot reach any part of him, any purchase. It is burning; she is drowning.

Then there is air. Her head is above the surface again and she gasps and blinks. Is he sparing her? Is he Adam’s brother after all – is there gentleness in him?

‘Luke, stop!’

No, it is Adam. Adam on the shore with the policeman.

‘Luke, please, bring her out of the water.’ His face is stricken, he is staring at her. She looks back.

Luke sways slightly as the waves push against him. Adam can see them lapping and pulling at his abdomen. Ophelia is in his outstretched arm, her head only just above the water. Both are already blue with cold. Adam steps towards them, ready to enter the water.

‘Stop,’ says Luke warningly. Adam’s feet are washed by the surf and he gasps at the cold. He moves forward and Luke drives Ophelia’s head below the waves.

The goldsmith stumbles back. Luke lifts her out, her hair and nose streaming. Behind him Kent is speaking rapidly into his radio.

‘What happened, Luke? What did—’

Luke had always been the first to share his sweets, to look after his brother when he fell in the park, to answer Adam’s calls in a crisis, to remember all his nephew’s birthdays. Who is this man in front of Adam that he calls his brother?

‘I didn’t plan this,’ Luke shouts above the roar of the waves. He is frowning, wearing that expression they share when they are thinking. ‘I don’t want you to think badly of me.’

‘Bring her back to shore. Come here – Luke – come here and tell me why.’ Adam can see Ophelia struggling. The waves are getting higher now and every third crest splashes her face. Her hair fans and waves like kelp below the surface. ‘I don’t care – I don’t care that you did something bad, I know there was a reason. I know that man was our half-brother, our mother’s son.’

Luke is shaking his great blond head.

‘Please, please, Ophelia is drowning.’

‘It was Dad,’ Luke shouts back.

The waves make a hushing sound, turning and raking the seabed, felling each other, tumbling towards the land and never bringing them closer.

‘Please – Ophelia.’ Adam is pleading. He can see the fear in her face.

‘Mr Conlan – Luke – whatever happened, we can sort it out. What’s important now is that you both get out of the water safely. We will get you medical attention, we will get you a lawyer. We can resolve this. The best thing you can do is come back to land,’ Kent appeals from beside Adam. His hair, his suit are no longer neat. He is not a police officer but a man who does not want to see any more suffering.

Luke quakes with the cold. His clothes are soaked and his jumper clings to him. The arms that had lifted his nephew over his head are strong enough to crush Ophelia’s windpipe before they get near.

‘We thought Dad didn’t leave a will,’ the chemist shouts. ‘We agreed it was strange, didn’t we? For such a stickler of a man not to leave a will.’

Adam cannot comprehend what this means. ‘It didn’t matter – we shared everything like we’ve always shared.’

Luke shakes his head again and grips Ophelia tighter. Her hands cling to his. Adam can see blood on her chin, and her lips are white. ‘But he had left a will. I found it after me and Becca moved into his house, tucked at the back of a wardrobe.’

‘What does it matter?’ Adam shouts. ‘Come back.’

Luke’s eyes look off to the woods on the clifftop as he remembers the words. ‘I told you your mother had died, but that was a lie. She left. I thought it would be kinder when you were small, not to believe you had been abandoned, and perhaps it was more convenient for me also. I had a child with another woman, and your mother discovered it. I’m not asking your forgiveness; it is too large a sin for that. But I hope I might have your understanding for my mistake – Adam, perhaps, will understand most of all.’

‘The dead man – he was Dad’s son, not Mum’s?’

Luke nods, mouth clamped shut to stop himself crying.

The wind howls off the water, and the only one of them to move is Ophelia, shifting, struggling.

‘Dad didn’t split the money evenly between us, Adam. He didn’t. He split it between you, me, and Felix. And his illegitimate child. Joshua Carey.’

‘What does it matter anymore? If you wanted money, I’d have given it to you, you know that. You didn’t have to steal from me. Please – Ophelia—’

‘It wasn’t money,’ Luke sobs. He cries like when they were children and he had lost a board game. ‘I don’t care about the money. Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? Neither of you – not even Dad, a man with no wit, no charm, no warmth – played fair. Both of you fucked around and hurt others, and I have always been there. Loyal son, loving brother. I love you. You both fucked up, and he left the same money to his bastard and yours because there are no consequences. Look at your life – you have a son, and a home, and a woman who wants you. I did everything the right way—’

‘And Becca didn’t want you.’ Adam sees now.

‘She didn’t want me in the end. I knew she was going to leave. I love her and she didn’t want me anymore. You were just supposed to get robbed. Lose a bit of gold. It would hurt, it would sting for a while. Your pride, your charmed fucking life. No one would really get hurt – not Felix, really. A few hours’ being sick, poor guy. I love him.’

‘He’s a child, for god’s sake.’

‘I didn’t know Carey had been hanging around. I didn’t know he was going to turn up. I didn’t know who he was. None of it was meant to happen.’

Ophelia’s face is dipping below the rising tide. She is struggl-ing less. Luke no longer even looks at her.

‘Please – Ophelia is drowning. She’s going to die.’

Luke’s eyes snap towards her, then back to his brother. ‘Maybe that’s the price. Maybe this is the consequence.’

‘It can’t be.’ Adam lurches into the water. It surges up his shins, towards his hands, promising to drown them all in the cold.

‘Because you love her?’

‘Yes.’ Adam entreats him. ‘Please.’

‘Julia chose.’ Both men freeze as Ophelia spits her chattering words up at them. ‘Julia chose. I chose. Becca chose.’

Once upon a time, the fair prince visited his brother, the dark prince, who was a goldsmith by the sea. The brothers loved each other dearly, but little did the goldsmith know that his elder brother harboured a deep anger. On the Sunday of his supposed departure, Luke mixed semi-skimmed into the carton of oat milk, and instead of going home, drove to the next town to stay the night at an anonymous hotel. When the sun rose on Monday morning, the dark prince and his son breakfasted. Then when the goldsmith took the poisoned child to school, the elder brother waited in his car just down the street. As soon as the goldsmith was called away to his sick child, Luke went to the side entrance he knew well, and with a little effort broke through to the workshop without raising the alarm.

But the fates are wont to play tricks, even on the fairest of men. Just as the deed was being accomplished, another man came to the door, wanting to see the goldsmith. This man had been peering in at the window often this last week, seeking to spot Adam, and working up the courage to speak to him. Interrupted in his covert work, the fair prince was shocked, panicked, and with a single blow, dashed the man’s head against the wall.

Hurriedly, the fair prince planted a few items of the gold upon the man. In so doing, he discovered in the contents of the corpse’s pockets that he had slain his own half-brother, come to seek his long-lost family.

Later, the dark prince will understand all this. Now, all Adam can see is his brother drowning his lover.

‘I love you. Don’t do this.’

‘I love you too. It was only meant to hurt a little.’ Luke starts to cry again. ‘I miss Becca.’

In the dark, surging, incoming tide there are the drowned spirits of their loss. Mother, father, half-brother, wife, livelihood, brotherhood, innocence. Ophelia’s eyes are dimming, her lips are blue. She threatens to drift away to join them.

‘What life do I have now? Who do I have now?’ the fair brother asks.

‘Me, you’ll always have me.’ Adam reaches out for them both.

Luke shakes his head a last time. ‘No.’ His eyes slide down to meet Ophelia’s. ‘Look after him for me.’

He releases Ophelia, and as Adam plunges towards her, the fair prince turns and swims out into the open water.

There is no way to bury two brothers without something splintering, fracturing. There has to be something irreparable if the sufferer is really human. Something no solder or crucible can ever make quite as it was before. Ophelia can see this in Adam’s face at Luke’s funeral, the sort of wound only family can make.

The pews are all but empty, and there are no flowers. The arrangements have been discreet and minimal. At the front, alone, is Becca. Julia had offered to come but Adam had declined. The only other mourners are Culvers, Kent, and a sandy-haired man on whose shoulder Kent rests his head. Their fingers are twined together.

The priest starts to give a sermon about frailty and forgiveness. Ophelia’s eyes fix on the coffin. It stuns her that there is a man she knew in there. He was a giant who ought to have turned to stone where he was slain. Have become a monument, a myth. And the myth would be as much as anyone ever knew him. There is a man she knew in there, and a man not even his own brother knew.

Is this the gulf between them all? Had Ophelia dreamed she had been on an island, out of reach of her parents? Was it not simply the case that no one knows anyone, in their truest hearts?

She had wondered about that in hospital for the two nights she stayed. Her neck very bruised, red pinpoints in her eyes, but the doctors most concerned about the hypothermia. It might have carried her off, the nurse said meaningfully, if she had not been young and fit.

Adam had pulled her out of the water while his brother swam on and on until he had drowned himself. Not as far as she would have got.

What had been real and what had been delirium? The fear and the sirens, the pulsing in her head, in his chest. Was she cradled in his lap, in his arms? Someone’s coat about them. A thicket of brambles. It was round her neck. There are wolves, there are stars, there are waves. How easy, how peaceful it would have been to close her eyes and let whatever was coming, come. It might have been the home she had searched for. Her eyes had closed. Rocking, like a child, gentleness, someone who was there and there for her only. The door to the tower opened.

She had opened her eyes again, reborn.

Adam had been at her bedside when he could, when the police were not spiriting him away for this or that detail. He had slept there. They had said almost nothing. Her throat hurt when she tried, and his conscience hurt when he did. They had been silent. They had been there.

Culvers had been good company when Adam was called away. She had brought a deck of cards with her and taught Ophelia how to play cribbage, then beaten her again and again.

‘That’s all right, my love. We’ll play again when you haven’t had a near-death experience.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t cheat?’

‘I’m an honourable woman. The jacks had fallen into my lap by mistake, that’s all.’

‘We are none of us innocent. We are none of us whole or perfect, but only in Christ, only in something larger than ourselves, can we find a true home, the peace we seek after and so often miss.’ The priest concludes his sermon, and somewhere in the recesses of the church, the organist begins to play.

Ophelia slips her hand into Adam’s.

Becca’s heels click down the flagstones. Even under the ravages of grief and shock, Ophelia sees how beautiful she is, the glow of her white-gold hair.

Adam swallows and meets her eyes. ‘I was hard on you. I didn’t see it.’

Becca nods, her voice cool and husky. ‘Luke was always broken, since childhood, and it scared me. Much easier to leave sometimes than to acknowledge that I wasn’t strong enough to fix it.’

No, we cannot fix some things, Ophelia thinks. We cradle those fragments in our hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam tells Becca.

‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘You’re still family, Becca. You’re still welcome in our lives.’

She looks at the goldsmith, and for a moment Ophelia sees what Luke did. Becca shakes her head. ‘No. No, we don’t need each other.’

And Luke’s widow leaves the church without looking back.

Joshua Carey is not buried for a fortnight.

The police trace his immediate family, who are devastated, who have been waiting to hear from him since the day he went missing.

They come to collect his body and take it back to North-umbria. A woman, whom Adam supposes must be his sort of half-aunt, and her husband meet them at the funeral home.

‘You’re his half-brother, then?’ Andrea Rinks nods kindly. ‘I can see a sort of resemblance. He – god rest him – he had the same sort of features as you. But pale. Sort of like a photo in reverse, if you know what I mean.’ She cups Adam’s face with her warm hands. He holds them there. ‘He was desperate to find you, you know. Always on those genealogy sites, wondering who his dad was. Then the death certificate popped up on one of ’em a few months ago.’

‘He didn’t tell you where he was going?’ Adam asks.

Andrea shakes her head and takes her husband’s hand. ‘He was a cheeky chap, wasn’t he? Good at hiding the pain, you know. In that sad way. He said that he had a lead on a possible family member and he’d tell us if it came to anything. Booked a bit of time off work and off he went.’

Mr Rinks clears his throat. ‘We always thought it better to let sleeping dogs lie. His mum never wanted to talk about his father, and we suspected there was a good reason for that. But he liked playing detective and… well, we loved him, didn’t we? We all need to know where we come from.’

Adam looks towards the closed casket. ‘Would you tell me about him? What did he do? What was he like?’

Joshua Carey had just turned 40. Well liked, well loved, the man to whom you turned if you needed help. A difficult start to life, with a single mum, but the family pulled round her and Andrea helped raise Josh alongside her own son and daughter. ‘God, you wouldn’t believe the mischief the three of them could pull off if they tried.’ He did well enough at school. Fell in with the wrong crowd at college. ‘I think it’s a phase boys go through, isn’t it?’ Came out of it again and trained as a carpenter and joiner. ‘Funny that, isn’t it? That you were both skilled with your hands. He made the finest chairs for our kitchen one year, as a Christmas present. Put them round the table while we were all asleep and left a note saying Love, Father Christmas, the clever sod.’ He never had a problem getting a girlfriend, and once he was engaged but that faded off quickly. Mum died young, and that’s bound to leave more questions than answers. Joshua had started using genealogy websites to build a family tree, to piece together the fragments his mother had told him. He was good at it, but you always need a bit of luck, and it had been ten years until, suddenly, he had received an email alert for a search term he had set, and a link to his father’s death certificate. He had been disappointed – heartbroken, really – that he would never meet his father, but very quickly, he found that he had two half-brothers, both still in England. He would go to check them out. Gauge if his presence was welcome. He was giddy.

‘It’s very, very cruel that it ended like this, very cruel. Your worst nightmare come true. I can’t imagine how it must feel for you as well.’ Andrea Rinks wipes her eyes with a hankie and heaves an unsteady breath. ‘Right, well. Nothing to be done.’ Her husband pats her reassuringly on the shoulder.

‘Before we go, love, police found this at his Airbnb. The landlord kept it after he thought Josh had done a runner. It must be yours. Beautiful, it is.’

From her handbag, she retrieves a little gold bear, two inches high, standing on its hind legs. ‘I expect he admired it. I expect he wanted to feel closer to you, even if he hadn’t quite built up the nerve to say hello yet.’

Adam closes it back into her hand. ‘It’s his.’

Andrea wells up again. ‘I don’t suppose – maybe it’s all too sore – I don’t want to step on any toes. But… when some time has passed, you’d be welcome to come up and visit, you and your lady friend. We could show you where Josh lived. You could meet some of his – some of your family.’

Adam is choked. ‘I’d like that. I have a son. He’d like that.’

Adam cannot sleep, but drifts around the flat in the dark, restless, night after night, treading softly so he does not wake Ophelia in Felix’s room. The days are a treacle-ish haze. He has cancelled all his Christmas orders. Insurance have said they will pay out for the robbery and for Moira’s fraud – he does not need to work right now. He couldn’t anyway. He can’t, he has tried, and the gold sits stubborn and cold under his fingers, like a child warily regarding a stranger. Instead, he spends hours at the window, watching the water.

One day, Ophelia brings home a bunch of holly and sets it in a glass pitcher on the table. She is there, day after day, like the tides and the gulls outside the window. She does not ask him anything, does not tell him he should talk about his feelings. She makes food and puts it on the table. Feeds Leonard, whom she calls gatta. Then she works at the table, face full of concentration. He wishes he could tell her how grateful he is. That he has never needed anyone so much in his life.

She wears a high-necked jumper always, hair tucked in at the collar, until the bruises have faded almost to nothing. In his nighttime laps around the living room, sometimes he hears faint sounds from Felix’s bedroom, as though she is dreaming, crying out, and he waits outside the door until she stops. Every day, when he asks how she is, she nods and says she is managing. Every day, she goes out for a walk through town, retreats to Felix’s room to exercise, writes and writes for hours. Adam does not know what he can give her now, so he brings her hot water bottles and blankets because she always looks cold, even when the heating is on.

The week after Luke’s funeral, Julia visits. She is by herself; Felix is with Patrick. Adam has not seen his son since Luke died.

Ophelia is out and Julia looks around the flat with her brisk gaze. ‘You’ve got a good housekeeper.’

‘It’s not… She’s…’ Adam tries.

Julia leans in and gives him a firm hug. ‘You’ve been through hell. The guilt can wait a while now.’ She squeezes him tighter. ‘Felix keeps asking when Daddy will be better – has he still got the flu.’ She whispers, ‘We need you, when you’re ready.’

Adam nods. It is like a fog suddenly burned away by the sun. The pain will follow, but his family needs him. ‘I’ll be there. Shall I come for Christmas Day like usual?’

‘Grand.’ Julia pats his cheek. ‘And the day after. Patrick’s spending Christmas with his parents but he’s joining us on Boxing Day. You two will like each other.’

When she leaves, Adam goes back down to the workshop.

Julia’s visit has changed something. Adam talks more, meets Ophelia’s eye, smiles once or twice. He goes down to his studio to work for a few hours each day.

They are eating pasta quietly one night when he looks directly at her. ‘Tell me if you don’t want to talk about it. I’ll always ask you how you are, but what happened to you was… I don’t know how anyone deals with that trauma. And you get up every day and you keep working, you keep functioning, you keep me functioning, and I don’t know how. I hear you at night sometimes, dreaming, and I know what it is. I just – I don’t want you to keep on being okay for my sake. I don’t want you to keep on going until one day, the dam breaks and then you can’t ever be okay.’

Ophelia is looking back at him. She has put her fork down. The shaking is something she usually masks, or excuses herself when it starts, but now it is in her hands and won’t be stopped. Adam is looking at her with those dark, concerned eyes, and she knows he is seeing her, to her marrow.

She keeps her voice cold and narrow. ‘When I came here, I knew I’d go as soon as you didn’t need me anymore.’ She looks at the table. ‘You have a son. I don’t want to be a parasite. I have never been okay. I wasn’t before, and I never will be, and you don’t deserve that – now more than ever.’ She is peeling back the dark, sticky innards of herself. Adam can see all the blighted seeds. She loves Adam, and once she has given him what he needs, to love him is to sever her own rot.

Adam has pushed his chair back. He reaches for her hand and she lets him take it. ‘I will always fucking need you. I need a god.’ She feels Adam’s hot mouth on hers. ‘Please.’

Threaten to cook Christmas dinner one more time and we’re getting a divorce.

Then he receives another message in quick succession: Would you be a dear and get some more potatoes? King Edwards, but Maris Piper in a pinch X

Kent makes his way down the overcrowded high street. People go mad at Christmas, he thinks, as he is bumped and jostled by all the passers-by wielding their shopping bags, and tries not to bump them with his own in turn.

Kent is weighed down by various bottles. Baileys for Culvers, nice ales and craft beers for the rest of the team who have been working overtime trying to get the Conlan case papers together for the various official bodies who need their say. He sighs and heaves everything into his car boot in the town centre pay-and-display car park, then turns back the way he came to hunt for potatoes.

You’re sure there’s nothing else? I don’t want to die going back a third time for sprouts x

Kent braces himself and begins to navigate his way through the crowds back towards the supermarket. He stops as he reaches the town square. The coloured lights on the Christmas tree glow with such impossible warmth. He feels a child’s excitement, the sudden merriment and goodwill that are the welcome ghosts of Christmases past; memories of love, and family. He stands still and lets them fill him up. It is Mum and his sister Sally’s turn to come to them this year. They will almost certainly wear their novelty jumpers with jarring velvet trousers. He smiles broadly.

He looks at the tree pointing upwards and the star at the top.

Kent hopes… he hopes this is what humanity is. He went to one of those vaguely C of E primary schools on the outskirts of Morrow. He had always liked the Nativity story more than the Easter one. He is sure proper Christians would disagree, but he likes the one where the baby gets born and everyone is happy – not the one where a man is tortured, whatever the redemptive pay-off is.

Children run around the base of the tree in an over excited game of chase, then stop and point out the biggest baubles they can find. Some of the parents are cross, harried. But others are watching, smiling, remembering how excited they had been at this age. Someone bends down to give the local homeless man a turkey-sandwich meal deal and stops for a chat.

Kent thinks about Adam and Ophelia often. Not just at work, though of course there too. There had been so much pain inflicted, so much suffering. He has always struggled with it, as an officer, the pointlessness of the damage done to human lives. The priest at Luke Conlan’s funeral had of course been right, we are frail and we need forgiveness. But why shouldn’t everyone be gentle?

Simon has held him every time he has asked this.

Moira King’s lawyers have been in contact, asking for copies of more evidence, of the business accounts that had been angry love letters. She will be sitting in a shared room now, in all likelihood, in the women’s remand centre. There are backlogs. Her trial won’t be for a year or so. Kent wonders if they have a little Christmas tree somewhere in the dinner hall. He wonders how her frail father is. Niven, the innocent in all this, is apparently off somewhere in the Caribbean, ready to resume his various harms in the new year.

He has called in at Adam’s once or twice this week, to ask questions, to see how they are, to look into the eyes of the other humans who saw what he had seen, and have them look back.

Yesterday, they had seemed different. Their arms had brushed against each other as they stood side by side, and Adam no longer disguised the fact that he was looking at her, adoring her. What if there might be happiness there, beyond all the sorrow? Maybe, Kent wonders, the redemptive pay-off is valuable too.

His phone buzzes. Where are you? POTATOES!

He grins. Coming x

On the twenty-third of December, Ophelia calls her mother.

Marina answers with sparkly brightness, ‘Hello, darling. How are you?… It’s been a while.’

‘Hi, Mum. I’m good. Are you okay? How’s Dad?’

‘Oh, we’re very well. Feeling festive! I’ve got about eight side dishes to prepare, but never mind, I’ll get there in the end.’

‘I’m sending you something later, by email,’ Ophelia says.

‘Really?’ Marina is intrigued. There are the familiar Christ Church carols playing in the background from the sound bar in the kitchen.

‘I’m sending you something I wrote.’

‘Oh.’ Marina’s voice is suddenly flat, guarded.

‘It’s my book. I finished it. I was always writing it for you, actually. And for me. So I could stop looking back.’

‘Manderley…’ Her mother’s voice smiles. Ophelia smiles too.

‘I know it was hard, having a child. I know it changed things for you, made it difficult to pursue art. I know you were always hurting—’

‘Ophelia, let’s not—’

‘I know. You don’t want to talk about it. I’m not coming home for Christmas, by the way.’

‘What?’ Her mother sounds irritated again. ‘I’ve catered for you. I’ve factored you into all the hosting arrangements, the seating plan… Why can’t you come?’

‘Because I have a new home. Goodbye, Mum. I love you. I forgive you.’

Ophelia hangs up and switches the phone off. Later, she will trade it in at the dodgy tech shop on the high street and get something cheap, with a new SIM, a new number.

Adam leans over and kisses her forehead.

After many years, the silver-tongued child had become a very accomplished worker of gold, and had learned all there was to learn from the goldsmith. And the goldsmith and the wolf-prince had learned from the child.

One day, at dusk, they fell to speaking.

‘Long ago,’ said the wolf-prince, ‘I met my future wife in this cottage. She changed from a sparrow into a princess, and we married and had a daughter. But I was careless and proud. I fell prey to a curse of madness, and I devoured my own child.’

The goldsmith nodded his head. ‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘I too did great wrong. I made rings for a queen whom I knew to be dishonest and intended harm. I did not care who was hurt by my work – I thought all that mattered was my art. Then I made gold hearts for you and your mother, and silver tongues. The man I made them for was killed, and your mother, and the sculptor, and we were driven from the town.’

In so confessing their sins to the child, the goldsmith and the wolf-prince felt much lightened in their burdens. They promised that from that day forward, they would no longer be victim to pride and ruthlessness. They would show the child every kindness and mercy that they had failed to show others.

The child heard what they had to say, and looked from the goldsmith to the wolf-prince, and from the wolf-prince to the goldsmith.

‘I thank you for telling me these things, and for pledging your lives for the better,’ she said, for her tongue would always be silver. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I am no tool for your redemption.’

And with that, I turned into a sparrow, and with the three gold rings I had made in my father’s forge, flew away and left them behind me, and made my own way in the world.

‘Daaaaaad!’ Felix hurls himself into Adam’s stomach and Adam holds him there and wishes it could be forever. This is the longest he has ever been without seeing him.

‘Fee, you’ve grown! It’s only been a few weeks. What’s Mum been feeding you?’

Julia grins and her Christmas-tree earrings swing as she leans in and kisses Ophelia’s cheeks. ‘Well, someone’s been asking for pasta “pommydoro” a lot.’

‘Maybe we can cook it for Mum tomorrow? I bet she’s been doing a lot to get ready for Christmas?’ Ophelia says to Felix and he nods his head enthusiastically.

As they file down the hall and into the lounge, Felix pauses and looks back at his father’s face. He will remember this Christmas day when he is an adult. The first one with them alltogether. In his memory, it will be a day of joy. But under the marzipan and presents, Felix will remember his father’s face in the hallway. Something indefinable in it has changed, and at seven years old, he does not understand why something in it looks both very sad and very happy.

Adam has missed Felix badly. Every day, during their morning phone call, he had felt the almost unbearable urge to tell him that he would come round right then. To hold on, and watch out of the window, he is coming. But Julia and Ophelia had been right – it was important to be well enough first. He and Julia have agreed that Felix must be shielded from it for a long time. There has been a lie of kindness. Uncle Luke has gone abroad to work at another university. There will be a day, when he’s old enough, when they will tell him.

Felix sits wedged between Adam and Julia while Ophelia passes presents from under the tree. They both have their arms round him, and Adam is healing anew in the touch and the smell of his son. The bright little head lowers in amazement as he opens gifts with no understanding of monetary worth, as delighted by a bath bomb as by a big set of PlayMobil as by a book about a ninja hedgehog.

‘You haven’t opened one yet, Auntie Oph!’ Felix notices.

‘Here, this one’s for you,’ Julia says and points at one for Felix to pass to Ophelia.

Adam watches Ophelia’s face as she unwraps a thick jumper.

‘Should be the right size, but a bit of a guess what you’d like, I’m afraid. We’ll get there eventually though,’ Julia explains. ‘We bought some chocolate as well because everyone likes chocolate, don’t they?’

‘It’s perfect, thank you.’ Ophelia hugs Julia and Felix, and wears the jumper for the rest of the day. She was right, Adam thinks, these women have chosen. He is profoundly grateful.

At lunchtime, Felix insists they all wear the paper crowns from their crackers. Mid way through a roast potato, he turns to his father. ‘Will we see Uncle Luke soon? Can we go on a plane and visit him?’

‘Maybe one day,’ Adam says. He coughs. ‘I’ll just get some more gravy from the kitchen.’

He is gone a while, but when he comes back, Ophelia cuts them all slices of the gâteau she has brought and they read out the paper slips from their crackers, and Felix nearly cries laughing at a joke about a sprout and a kitten, and the adults are carried away by the same light-headedness.

Adam and Ophelia do the washing-up and drying in the early evening, while Julia settles an over excited and exhausted Felix to sleep. When she comes back down, they bid her goodbye and leave her to a glass of sherry and a stack of new books.

When they are back at the flat, they sit at the sash window and let the salt air and cold in. They stay there in silence for a long time, letting the dead out. Finally, they close it.

‘I made you something,’ Adam says, and he gives her a box.

Ophelia opens it. It is a tiny gold tower, exact in every detail, except that the door at its base is open, welcoming her home.

To Morrow-on-Sea, to Morrow-on-Sea,

To the gulls with their cries, and the wind whistling free.

In early January, in the cold and damp of Morrow-on-Sea, they form a heart on the double bed. The ceremony had been short and they had both worn jeans, the officiant politely baffled by the assembled party – only the couple and a child, and two teachers as witnesses. The three thin, beaten rings, rather than two – for the couple and the little boy. Adam’s body is crooked in its sleep to meet at head and toe with Ophelia’s opposite. Nestled between them, snoring lightly, the flaxen child and the ginger cat sleep too.

Outside, the gulls cry.

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks as always to my lovely agent, Jane Finigan. Likewise, many thanks to the team at Bedford Square Publishers. You are very patient and good at explaining how this all works to someone who is still learning.

Georgia Poplett, soul sister, I don’t know how I wrote before we met.

To Melissa Chapman, who never stops believing in me. To Jacob Lister, whose anecdotes are unparalleled, thank you for explaining autopsies.

To Evelyn Aylén Heis, beautiful bookseller and queen of cannibalism.

To my family, you’re all rabid nutters. I love you.

Boopy, gatta, I miss you. Marshmallow, thank you for nearly deleting this novel on more than one occasion. I know it’s because your cuddles are full of love and enthusiasm.

My beloved and long-suffering Kawan. My beloved and long-sparkling Som. Everything is for you.

Also by Bonnie Burke-Patel

I Died at Fallow Hall

About the Author

Born and raised in South Gloucestershire, Bonnie Burke-Patel studied History at Oxford. After working for half a decade in politics and policy, she changed careers and became a preschool teacher, before beginning to write full-time. She lives with her husband, son, and dog in south-east London.

BEDFORDSQUAREPUBLISHERS.CO.UK/BONNIE-BURKE-PATEL

@bonnieburkepatel

If you liked Dead As Gold… Why not try I Died at Fallow Hall…

‘Burke-Patel’s debut is both a traditional country-house mystery and an examination of loneliness, the difficulty of making connections with others, and how hard it can be to escape the roles imposed on us by family and society’ Guardian

‘Superbly and elegantly written… executed with skill, finesse and considerable compassion. A very impressive debut from a fully-formed writer’ Irish Independent

Anna Deerin moves to a remote Cotswold cottage to become a gardener, trying to strip away everything she’s spent all her life as a woman striving for, craving the anonymity and privacy her new off-grid life provides.

But when she clears the last vegetable bed and digs up not twigs but bones, the outside world is readmitted.

With it comes Detective Inspector Hitesh Mistry, who has his own reasons for a new start in the village of Upper Magna.

Drawn in spite of herself to this unknown woman from another time, Anna is determined to uncover her identity and gain recognition for her, if not justice.

As threats to Anna and her new life grow closer, she and DI Mistry will find that this murder is inextricably bound up with issues of gender, family, community, race and British identity itself – all as relevant in decades past as they are to Anna today.

£9.99 | 9781835010822

BEDFORDSQUAREPUBLISHERS.CO.UK/I-DIED-AT-FALLOW-HALL

Copyright

This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2025

By Bedford Square Publishers Ltd,

London, UK

bedfordsquarepublishers.co.uk

@bedsqpublishers

All rights reserved

© 2025 Bonnie Burke-Patel

The right of Bonnie Burke-Patel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN

978-1-83501-083-9 (Hardback)

978-1-83501-084-6 (Trade paperback)

978-1-83501-085-3 (eBook)

Ebook by Avocet Typeset, Bideford, Devon, EX39 2BP

I Died at Fallow Hall

Burke-Patel, Bonnie

9781835010815

256

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'Superbly and elegantly written... executed with skill, finesse and considerable compassion. A very impressive debut from a fully-formed writer' Irish Independent

Shortlisted for The Betty Trask, The Val McDermid Debut Award and The CWA Gold Dagger.

Anna Deerin moves to a remote Cotswold cottage to become a gardener, trying to strip away everything she's spent all her life as a woman striving for, craving the anonymity and privacy her new off-grid life provides.

But when she clears the last vegetable bed and digs up not twigs but bones, the outside world is readmitted.

With it comes Detective Inspector Hitesh Mistry, who has his own reasons for a new start in the village of Upper Magna.

Drawn in spite of herself to this unknown woman from another time, Anna is determined to uncover her identity and gain recognition for her, if not justice.

As threats to Anna and her new life grow closer, she and DI Mistry will find that this murder is inextricably bound up with issues of gender, family, community, race and British identity itself – all as relevant in decades past as they are to Anna today.

Buy now and read (Advertising)

Mrs Plansky Goes Rogue

Quinn, Spencer

9781835013076

320

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'I absolutely adored this book. Mrs. Plansky is a terrific character.' - Stephen King on Mrs Plansky's Revenge

The irresistible and unforgettable Mrs. Plansky goes rogue in this whirlwind adventure that will lead her up and down coastal Florida and beyond!

Mrs. Plansky is fresh off of winning a thrilling senior tennis championship with her doubles partner, Kev Dinardo, and is gearing up to celebrate with him on his yacht. That is, until the yacht is destroyed in a fire. Kev claims the fire was caused by a lightning strike, pure bad luck, but there's one small problem―Mrs. Plansky didn't see any lightning.

Already certain there's more going on than she's being told, Mrs. Plansky's curiosity turns to concern when Kev goes missing. Her suspicion gets the better of her and leads her to break into his house, only to find it ransacked.

But Kev isn't the only person Mrs. Plansky has to worry about. A conversation with her dad reveals that not long ago, he'd introduced Kev to Jack, Mrs. Plansky's wayward tennis pro son. And now, her dad―distracted by arrangements for his upcoming wedding―either can't remember or has no interest in divulging any details.

Worse? Now Jack has gone missing, too.

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People Watching

Bonam-Young, Hannah

9781835011485

368

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'I blew through this! Bonam-Young blends gritty reality, family, and passion to create a powerful story about acceptance and the power of opening up to love. I loved this'—Abby Jimenez, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Introducing Prue and Milo in the brand new heart-warming and spicy strangers-to-lovers romcom and the start of a new duet from bestselling TikTok author Hannah Bonam-Young!

Prudence Welch has always valued her introverted lifestyle in the small town of Baysville, Ontario. She is content with working at her father's gas station, writing her beloved poetry, and caring for her mother who has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimers. Despite her father's continuous remarks that she should venture out of the town to have a more fulfilling life, Prue just can't leave it behind.

Milo Kablukov is a free spirit, who has had his fair share of worldwide adventures and wild nights. But when he is called by his brother for an urgent family matter in Baysville, he finds that he just might have to stay put a while.

After an intriguing encounter with Prue, Milo sets his sights on getting to know her, but he finds that a friendship with Prue may be different to what he had been expecting...

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Out on a Limb

Bonam-Young, Hannah

9781835010983

368

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'Warm, sexy, and vulnerable... Hannah Bonam-Young needs to be on your romance radar' - Hannah Grace

'A beautiful love story, full of joy from beginning to end!' - Sarah Adams

Independent, confident, and not held back by her disability, Winnifred McNulty has been determined to prove to herself and others that she can do anything without needing anyone.

That all changes when Win meets Bo at a Halloween party, a charming boy in a pirate costume who has more in common with her than she realises. Bonding over the fact that they both have a visible disability, Win and Bo develop an electrifying connection with each other that they just can't ignore.

After a one-night stand leaves Win with the biggest decision of her life, Bo is more than happy to join her in sharing this new experience - on the condition that they remain strictly friends. Win and Bo embark on a journey together, discovering more about themselves than they thought they knew. But the chemistry between them is unavoidable, and the plan they put in place soon gets thrown into question as feelings begin to surface.

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MINDF*CK

Mids, Victor

9781835012772

304

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How can you stop your brain being manipulated, deceived, and led astray?

Read this brilliantly interactive book that explores the relationship between science and illusions!

You will learn:

How your brain works and how easily it is manipulated.

How attention works.

How illusionists influence their audience with words, body language and subliminal messages

Feats of apparent dexterity that even the clumsiest person can perform

How to be better at flirting… and get more swipes on dating apps

How to bend spoons like a psychic

...and create the illusion that you can read everybody's mind!

A highly illuminating combination of fun and education for the whole family.

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