Chapter Sixteen

When Cassie pitched up at the mortuary entrance the next morning her heart sank to see who was at the door.

But Bronte's father George Angelopoulos greeted her amicably enough. She took him into the family room and made him a cup of tea. Then, taking a seat opposite him she met his gaze. ‘Mr Angelopoulos, I can't tell you how sorry I am – we all are – about the image in the press. We have no idea how it was obtained but the police are investigating, as you know.'

Her NHS Trust employers would go apeshit if they could hear her: their mantra was ‘never apologise or admit liability in any way'. Well, screw that. To her, the policy wasn't just inhumane, it was stupidly short-sighted: for most people it was enough to hear the word ‘sorry', and parroting an infuriating corporate response only made a lawsuit more likely.

‘Thank you,' he said in a quiet voice. ‘And please, call me George.'

After a pause, she asked, ‘Have you come to see Sophia?'

He shook his head. ‘I can't,' he said simply. ‘But you were so kind to us last week, I wondered if you could talk me through the process. Sophia's mother is driving me crazy about things she sees on social media, things they say were missed by the police.' His accent was a pick and mix: mostly London but with long, transatlantic-sounding vowels – and unlike his wife, scarcely a trace of Greek lilt. ‘She says that final text Sophia sent "didn't sound like her" and I .?.?. I don't know what to think.' He pulled a heartfelt shrug.

He was as well dressed as ever but she noticed with a pang of sympathy that he'd buttoned his shirt up wrong, so that one side sat higher than the other. Neither he nor Chrysanthi would be functioning at anything like a normal level for some time. The funeral would be the first staging post on their lifelong journey of grief towards – hopefully – some kind of acceptance.

‘You are talking to one another then?' she asked gently, scanning his face.

‘If you can call it talking.' He made a regretful face. ‘She only phones me to scream and shout about the police being idiots. Why aren't I doing something about it? Why aren't they questioning Ethan?' He made a resigned gesture.

‘Yes, I gathered she really doesn't like him,' said Cassie. ‘But then if it was him who got Sophia into drugs .?.?.'

‘In my experience, nobody "gets" anybody into drugs other than the person taking them,' he said, shaking his head. ‘No, I'm afraid Sophia's mother took against him from the moment she found out he was Jewish.'

‘Oh .?.?.'

‘Yes, I'm sorry to say that her religious belief isn't exactly the charitable kind. The Orthodox Church has been slow to enter the modern world, but it's also down to the priest at her church. He's in his eighties and very conservative, very anti-women, which is why I tried to keep Sophia away from the place – and from him – as much as possible.'

Struck by how worldly, how liberal, George seemed compared to his ex-wife, Cassie had been reading up on his career. After they arrived in Camden in the early nineties, George had used his cruise ship experience – and savings – to go into the high-end restaurant business. His first solo venture, a resto set in a converted church in chichi Fitzrovia, won a Michelin star for its ‘high concept' version of Mediterranean cuisine. Within a few years it had become a magnet for music biz types, and there were dozens of images online of George carousing with music stars, agents and producers – making contacts that probably helped his daughter's career. The flagship spawned a small West End chain, which he'd sold a couple of years earlier for nearly five million.

Chrysanthi was absent from the images of George's public life, and despite being a lot younger than him, it was her whose attitudes seemed to spring from a previous era. Was it the age gap that had finished them? Or the culture gap between churchy Chrysanthi, only in her forties but already embracing middle age, and this modern-minded man who hung out with cosmopolitan types? – and had multiple affairs with them, if what Chrysanthi had told Babcia was true.

‘What would you like to know?' she asked him.

‘How long do we have to wait before we know if Sophia took something that made her suicidal? Strange to say, but I think it would actually help if she had.'

Cassie nodded. ‘That's an understandable feeling.'

‘The police said they found drugs at her place – could she have had a bad reaction?'

‘Some drugs can trigger a psychotic episode that might have made her act irrationally. The coroner will release Sophia's body to you shortly so you can have the funeral, but the inquest will have to await the toxicology results – and I'm afraid they can take a while, sometimes weeks.' Not liking to say ‘months', which was more the norm on a routine PM these days.

‘Weeks?!' He looked shocked. ‘To think she would take herself away from us – deliberately. That is the hardest thing to bear.' He lifted red-rimmed eyes to Cassie. ‘I know it's a terrible thing to say, but I think that's why Chrysanthi would actually prefer it to be murder.'

Cassie recalled Babcia saying that mother and daughter had had a difficult relationship. ‘Were she and Sophia close?'

He tipped his head, a rueful look on his face. ‘Sophia loved her mother, of course she did, but she's always been closer to me, ever since she was a little girl. And then I became her manager so we spent even more time together. Her mother smothered her, tried to control her, never really stopped treating her like a child.'

Cassie tried to picture how her relationship with her own mother might have developed had Kath lived to raise her, especially when she'd left home at seventeen for the vagabond allure of a Camden squat. Her grandmother had been wise enough to leave her be, to let her get it out of her system – something a mother might have found much tougher to do.

After George had left she felt the need to phone her own father, Callum. After twenty-plus years believing he was dead she still found it hard to think of him the way she knew other people viewed their parents – as a constant presence in her universe.

‘Hey, Dad.' It still felt odd calling him that. ‘How's Belfast?'

‘Oh, it's grand – I'm seeing all the old crew, some of them I knew from when I was a wain. They take the piss out of my "London" accent of course, and keep dragging me down the pub even though they know I'm teetotal these days. There's only so much lime and soda a man can drink.'

A sudden flare of anxiety. ‘But are you resisting temptation?'

‘Yes, Catkin, I am.' His tone as cheerful as ever but edged with a hint of warning. When he'd turned up last year, the prodigal father, Cassie had embarked on a clumsy campaign to mitigate the damage that seventeen years inside and a dependence on illicitly distilled alcohol and roll-ups had done to his body. He had been overprotective of her in turn, forever banging on about the dangers of living on the canal. But gradually they had reached an understanding: he didn't try to come the patriarch routine with her and she'd agreed to trust him to take care of himself.

‘Siobhan has said that wee Orla can come over with me and stay at Weronika's for a few days when I come back. She's dying to see you.'

Cassie smiled. Meeting her five-year-old cousin Orla had been one of the unexpected bonuses of being reunited with her dad.

‘How is the little monster? Still bossing all the grown-ups?'

‘Ah she's a proper little firecracker,' chuckled Callum. ‘She's been chewing my ear off ever since I got here, demanding a sleepover on "Cousin Cassie's" boat. I said you might let her visit but she has to sleep at Babcia's.'

Whether it was being raised as an orphan, or something in her genetic make-up, Cassie had always been a bit of a loner, so the bombshell discovery of an extended family had been exhilarating – and scary. Little Orla was one thing – but so far she'd ducked meeting the rest of Callum's sprawling Northern Ireland clan.

‘Anyway,' he went on, ‘I dare say that boyfriend of yours would be none too happy having an extra guest on board who wakes everyone up at dawn.' He paused. ‘Everything good with him?'

‘Yeah fine,' she lied, realising with a guilty jolt that the only contact she'd had with Archie since he'd gone to Gloucester was a few WhatsApp messages. Maybe they were both treating it as a trial separation.