Prologue

Sometimes a heartbeat is all the time it takes to reach a decision.

It may not even feel like a considered choice. Just the veering away from the prospect of more misery – a final spur to movement. The room remains unmoved. A silent witness. But loyal in its way to the woman who has just left it. The chair pushed out from the table tells no tales. The plate of half-eaten roll and cheddar (extra mature) with leftover Christmas pickle (eight months old, but still going strong) lies in mute defiance.

The man calls her name, and without pausing to be invited in, pushes open the door that leads from the hall into the kitchen. And why would he pause? He has already let himself in the front door without asking.

He huffs and puffs his way around the kitchen, opening the fridge, flicking through the diary left open on the table.

The diary doesn't give her away either. Its record of parish meetings, choir practice and a planned visit to a local garden with her curate; a testament to a seemingly blameless life. Maybe there is something in the handwriting? A neatly formed hand, precise and clear, apart from a kink in the ‘S's that look as if they would like to escape from the regularity of the line.

Opposite him, the back door to the garden (which always requires a doorstop) for once stands half open, half closed. Stilled, as if in anticipation, like the rest of the room.

Then, very slowly, it swings on its hinges and quietly clicks shut.

Ninety miles away, off an alleyway in North London, another door is pushed open. The mail piled up in the entrance slithers aside and the broken bell clinks its tinny welcome. First across the threshold is a solitary leaf. A twist of orange, sent spiralling by a late August wind that holds within its warmth the piquant tang of autumn. A woman watches the leaf's spinning progress into the quiet darkness of the shop within. For her, autumn has always been a season of beginnings; punctuated, in her childhood, by the anticipatory thrill of new shoes, crayons and pencil cases.

Now she only thinks of endings.