The next morning, two policemen arrived to pick her up, one young, one older. Jenny sat in the back seat and they gave her their helmets to hold in her lap. Inside she noticed that each had a little ring of foam inside them to cushion their heads, and in one of the helmets there was a biro drawing of a smiley face and ‘KIERON!!’ in shaky capitals.

‘Who’s Kieron?’ she asked.

The older officer looked at her in the rear-view mirror and said: ‘My grandson. Did that last week. Little bugger.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Five. Five going on seventeen. I tell you.’

She let a pause go by. ‘Do you see a lot of him then?’

‘Weekends. We have him at the weekends. His mum’s young still; she likes to go out. You know how it is with kids. You never get a minute to yourself. Got any kids yourself?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I love kids though.’

He crinkled his eyes at her in the mirror again. ‘More trouble than they’re worth.’

He was a nice man, she could tell. They both were. Nice, normal, ordinary people who just wanted a ‘chat’, and her fear lessened a little.

Unfortunately, they said goodbye to her at the desk and handed her over to another officer – an older Dawn French-type woman with very small eyes, like blue marbles sunk in dough. Her smile was brisk, perfunctory, and when she showed Jenny into the interview room, she told her that the ‘chat’ was going to be taped.

Jenny sat down. ‘I feel a bit nervous,’ she admitted.

‘Nothing to be nervous about.’ The woman smiled, and it almost reached her eyes. She wasn’t like the man talking about KIERON!! He’d been natural, while this woman sounded like she was reading from a script titled: ‘Put Accused At Ease With Niceties’. The weather. The job market, how hard it must be to come back home after all these years, and this last observation clunked like a hasty gear change, and Jenny knew that the preamble was over.

‘You came back to look after your mother... six months ago. Why was that?’

‘She had a stroke.’

‘She was very young to have a stroke? Forty-two was she?’

‘Forty-three.’

‘It’s difficult looking after a parent.’

Jenny nodded.

‘It’s what you have to do though, isn’t it?’

Jenny nodded again.

‘You mentioned to PCs Burns and Newell that your mother had been drinking the night she died?’

‘Who?’

‘The officers who took you to the hospital?’

‘Oh, yes. Sorry. I’m a bit… it’s all merged into one. Sorry.’

‘It’s a distressing time.’ She nodded. Her smile winked on. ‘But just take your time. Your mother was drinking the night she died?’ The smile winked off.

Jenny began to shake then and the shakes crawled up her body and settled in her chest and in her shoulders. She felt like she did when she was small and had to read in front of the class. ‘I’m sorry,’ she managed to shake out. ‘This is hard.’

‘Take your time.’

‘It feels disloyal that’s all. I talked to my friends about it but—’

‘Was your mother a problem drinker, would you say?’

Jenny closed her eyes. ‘Yes. She hid it pretty well, but when she came out of the hospital and couldn’t work, it kind of took her over again.’

‘And she was also taking medication?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many pills did you give her?’ she asked softly.

‘I didn’t give her any. She said she’d already taken her beta blockers. I wasn’t sure that was true, but I didn’t want to give her any more in case it made her sick. She… she was pretty tipsy.’ Jenny swallowed this last word, and looked at her hands.

The woman coughed and shuffled some papers.

‘Her blood alcohol was .32.’

Jenny looked up. ‘Is that a lot?’

The woman raised one eyebrow. ‘Yes.’

Jenny let out all her breath, nodded to herself, and then sat up straighter. ‘I think she was stockpiling alcohol and hiding it. I just… I didn’t confront her. I should’ve, but I didn’t.’

The woman’s blue pebbly eyes rested on Jenny’s. ‘You were in the house all day you said?’

‘Yes, but I did some shopping at six. Or six thirty. But it could have been seven. I just don’t know for sure, I’m sorry.’

‘And was she already drunk?’

‘Not too bad. But when I came back from the shops she was. I tried to get her to eat something – I opened a tin of soup, but she wouldn’t eat it. I tried to get her to bed then; I want to say it was around nine?’

‘Do you know how the picture on the stairs got damaged?’

Jenny squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Oh I don’t want to say.’

‘Can you tell me?’

She opened her eyes again. They were dull with pain. ‘She didn’t want to go to bed. She… look, she didn’t know what she was doing, all right?’

‘Can you tell me what happened?’

‘She… pushed me. Not on purpose, just sort of pushed past me, but hard. And I fell, hit my head against the frame. It was an accident.’

‘And the bruise here? On your chin?’

‘Oh this? That was my own stupid fault. I slipped on the ice on the way back from the shop, that’s all.’

A silence grew into each corner of the room.

‘And after the picture broke?’

‘Well, it seemed to sober her up a bit, to tell the truth. She said she was sorry, and we had a hug, and that was it.’

‘And the frame and the broken glass stayed where it was?’

‘I wanted to clean it up, and I started to. Cut myself too, look.’ She showed the officer her thumb. ‘And got blood on the carpet. Mum said she’d clean it all up. She said it was her job; she’d broken it, so she’d fix it. She was cleaning it up when I left.’ Jenny shook her head. ‘That was stupid of me. I should’ve stayed.’

‘You told the officer at the scene that you didn’t know how the blood got there, or how the picture was damaged.’

‘I… I know I did,’ Jenny admitted. She looked at her hands, twisting together in her lap ‘I wasn’t thinking, or rather I was thinking, but not properly. Shock I just… it felt awful to tell the truth about it. Like I said, it felt… disloyal somehow. She wasn’t herself. She was drunk.’

‘And what time did you leave?’

‘I don’t know. Something was on the TV – Teens Who Kill, I think it was called, but I don’t know what time that’s on, or even the channel. I remember before I left I turned the TV down. Her neighbour – Mrs Mondesir – she complains about the noise sometimes. Mum tends to leave the TV on all night. Tended to.’

‘And did anyone see you leave?’

‘No? No, I don’t think so. Why?’

‘Was it snowing when you left?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘We’re trying to work out exactly how long she was outside before she fell. We’re appealing for witnesses.’

There was a silence. ‘You mean people that might have seen her? But surely if anyone had seen her, they would have helped her—’ Jenny began.

‘We’d like to talk to anyone who saw your mother, yes, but also anyone who saw you walking to the Lees-Hills’ house, and at what time,’ the officer said evenly.

Jenny stared at her. ‘What does that mean though? Do you mean I need an alibi?’ She tried to laugh, but it sputtered into hitching, fearful breath.

‘This is all routine, and I don’t want you to worry about this, or concern yourself or—’

‘But how can I not though?’ Jenny’s voice was high as a little girl’s. ‘Am I suspected of anything?’

The woman’s face was empty of all expression. ‘It’s just timings we need to be certain about. When your mother left the house, how long she was out there, things like that.’

‘God, I’ve been thinking that too. Over and over.’ Jenny seemed to be speaking to herself. ‘I think about her in the snow.’ She looked up. ‘It’s so horrible, thinking of her like that, alone. And maybe shouting for help and no one hearing…’ And then Jenny began to cry the big hitching sobs that she hadn’t allowed herself before. She cried until her eyes shrank into little red pinwheels.

The woman stopped the tape, and she handed her a tissue. After a while, Jen quietened.

‘It’s just that she’s all alone, still,’ she managed eventually. ‘All alone in the snow and now all alone in the hospital, and I can’t help her, you know? I can’t end this for her, give her a decent funeral. I know you’ve got to do your job, though, and I understand, but it’s just… hard, you know? I just want everything to be over, not for me, but for her. I want to do right by her.’