They came to the flat on the Sunday, two days after she came up, in the evening, and they came without being asked.
Ruth Vane, who was ninety-one and who had stood in the wreck of that sitting room in a raincoat over a nightdress on the Tuesday night. Peter Thorne's daughter Kate, who was forty-four and had asked the only question anybody asked that night that mattered. A woman who ran the newsagent, a churchwarden at St Mary-at-the-Weir, a retired district nurse, a farmer from up past the top field.