She said: “Don’t let anybody in that room until I get there.”

My mother had known Kevin’s mother for eleven years.

Part Thirty-Nine: Hair Half Pinned

She was there in twenty minutes, with her hair done on one side only.

She had barely got her mouth to the girls’ heads before the door went again.

Twenty minutes is not possible from her house.

It is a twenty-eight minute drive and she does not break the speed limit.

What she had done, I discovered afterwards, was leave her own car on the road outside her house and get into a neighbour’s, because the neighbour was standing in her front garden and had asked if everything was all right.