Chapter Thirty

That morning, when Cassie had been woken by the chirruping of the moorhens, her first conscious thought had been of Ethan. Venturing into the main cabin in her dressing gown she'd discovered that he'd already left. Of course he had . No note. No text.

Bronte's face swum in to her mind. She was shaking her head. I wouldn't if I were you .

She was on late shift so on impulse she headed over to her grandmother's – feeling guilty about how long it had been since her last visit. She'd been putting it off, not looking forward to telling her about the split from Archie, who Babcia adored.

She used her key to let herself in, before halting at the sound of voices in the front room.

‘Cassandra! What a lovely surprise,' her gran said, before gesturing towards her younger guest who sat in the upright armchair. ‘I think you have already met Chrysanthi Angelopoulos' – looking a little embarrassed at this conjunction of visitors. ‘And you know my granddaughter, of course.' Her careful tone recognising Chrysanthi's loss and the fact she would never now have grandchildren of her own.

‘Of course. She's been very kind,' said Chrysanthi, managing a smile. ‘It has meant a lot to me knowing my child is being looked after by someone who cares.'

After a bit of awkward small talk she got to her feet. ‘I must be going. Thank you for the tea.'

When Babcia returned she was shaking her head. ‘That poor woman. She says her life is over. And she's only in her mid-forties.'

Cassie did the maths: if Chrysanthi was say, forty-five, she could only have been eighteen when she'd had Bronte.

Cassie was concerned to see how the visit seemed to have extinguished her grandmother's usual spark. The way she lowered herself down carefully into the armchair, her inward look – it took Cassie back to her months of convalescence after she'd had a mini-stroke. But she was nearly eighty after all.

‘I'm making you a strong coffee, with cream,' she said.

She returned with a tray carrying the coffee and two slices of poppyseed cake. Babcia hadn't moved or spoken. ‘I found some makowiec . It looks delicious.' Knowing that if she ate some her grandmother would have to join in. ‘So have you been seeing much of Chrysanthi?'

She nodded, absent-mindedly breaking off a morsel of cake. ‘We have had coffee a few times. At the church and here. She is much younger than me, of course, but we understand each other.' She took a sip of coffee. ‘We both lost our only daughter. But of course it is so much more raw for her.'

They both looked at the age-bleached photo of Cassie's mother – Kath – Babcia's beloved only child, aged about sixteen, which had always occupied pride of place on the mantelpiece. Like an icon . Cassie had been inoculated by two decades of exposure to her mother's hopeful, innocent look in the photo; and irritated too, during her teens, by the way her gran had held her daughter up as some kind of a saint. It was only recently that Cassie had discovered Kath's wild streak, her troubles at school and, after she'd become a mother, the bouts of depression which she had treated with alcohol.

‘I remember being just where Chrysanthi is now,' said Babcia. ‘The fury is all that sustains you. And hers is all directed against Sophia's father, for no good reason that I can see.'

‘What does she say about him?'

‘That he is "mired in sin".' They exchanged a raised eyebrow. ‘When I ask why, she will only say that he's a pig, who has spent his life rutting with anything that moves.'

Cassie grimaced. ‘But she doesn't suggest that he had ever hurt Bronte .?.?. in any way?' That ‘any way' code for sexual abuse.

‘I asked her about that. Do you know what she said?' Babcia arranged her face into a mask of vengeful fury and pointed to the sky – ‘"I swear by the Almighty Father, if he had ever laid one finger on my child, I would have killed him. Mortal sin or not." And I believe her.'

Blimey .

‘What about the ex-boyfriend, this guy Ethan Fox?' Cassie asked.

‘Oh she hates him, even more, if that's possible. She's convinced he was involved in the death of her child.'

Pushing her makowiec around the plate, Cassie recalled Ethan losing his rag at the bargirl in the 'Spoons at the lock. But having a quick temper didn't make you a murderer.

‘And of course the poor thing has no family to turn to,' Babcia went on. ‘Her mother died right after having her, and she never even knew her father.'

‘Does her faith give her any solace?' asked Cassie. Believers often seem to cope best with bereavement: the conviction that everything was part of God's plan, and the belief in an afterlife, bringing comfort.

‘She worships her priest, Father Michaelides, but he is a very stern man.' Babcia gave a little shiver. ‘Not a lot of love and forgiveness in that church. Still, she has asked me to go there to pray with her and I said yes.'

Yikes. Cassie felt torn between two competing emotions: desperately sorry for Chrysanthi, but also worried about the effect exposure to all that grief and fury might have on her grandmother.

‘Will you tell me when you're going? I'd like to come along. I could take you both for coffee afterwards.' That way she could keep an eye on things.

She pulled on her jacket and bent to give her grandmother a kiss. ‘Does Chrysanthi ever go back to Cyprus?' she asked.

That brought a grim chuckle. ‘Cyprus? No. She calls it Satan's island.'

Half an hour later, she was climbing back on the boat, where she found a plastic bag standing beside the cabin door. It held a bottle of Wyborowa – her vodka of choice – and a scrawled Post-it note stuck to the label that made her smile despite herself. It read, ‘Thanks for looking after me last night, Nurse Raven. E x.'

Macavity wound himself round her ankles as she prepped his food, encouraging her with a deep purr. But when she set it down he sniffed at it once and threw her a look that said, What is this shit?!

‘It's Sheba for Christ's sake,' she told him. ‘You used to love it.' Looking at the food again, his back twitched once in disgust, and he left the cabin, scooting through the cat flap with unnecessary force.

Should she hold her ground over Macavity's latest food fad? Or just roll over and bulk-buy tinned fish?

Her phone rang, making her heart do a little backflip. Ethan? But the sight of Flyte's name on the screen triggered equally complicated emotions.

As ever, Flyte wasted no breath on social niceties. ‘A neighbour heard the sound of someone struggling for breath from Bronte's place the night she died. Could somebody have choked or suffocated her without it leaving any physical evidence?'

Cassie pictured Bronte's face, pale apart from the lividity on one side. ‘Her face wasn't congested, although it's not always a feature in asphyxiation. There was no sign of petechiae but that's not—' She stopped abruptly.

‘Cassie?'

Cassie had been bending down to pick up the cat's saucer of uneaten food. As she straightened to set it on the worktop, she heard a single, discordant guitar chord which stopped her breath in her throat.

It seemed to come from right behind her but also, somehow, from a yawning distance. She tried to breathe but her throat stayed closed. She tried to speak but only a choking sound came out.

‘Cassie, what's wrong?!'

Starting to feel dizzy from lack of oxygen, Cassie made herself turn slowly, inch by inch, convinced that she'd find Bronte sat behind her, guitar on her lap.

The cabin was empty. She drew a gasping breath.

The fading jangle of that chord seemed to hang in the air still. Cassie's brain was whirring like a fruit machine.

‘Sorry,' she told Flyte. ‘Something just occurred to me. Meet me at the mortuary in half an hour.'

And ignoring Flyte's questions she cut the call.