Kay was almost finished. She was catching up on the twice-a-year jobs, the washing and buffing of glassware that was never used. To her almost certain knowledge Mrs. Thalaine hadn’t touched these wee red vases in three years. But she’d been given them by one of the kids, and she liked them. Kay pressed them down into the hot water and watched the grease lift and the sheen return to the glass. Her hands were pink to the wrists. She smiled at the steam settling on her face like artificial perspiration, cooling her down before her body had time to respond to the need.

The doorbell rang all the way across the house. Kay turned to see who it was. The kitchen window looked out onto the courtyard and the front door.

A man and a woman stood looking at the door. Both in suits, but not sorry the way salesmen were. They looked confident, weren’t swinging their briefcases nervously or letting off weak practice-smiles.

Mrs. Thalaine’s lady-trot clip-clop hurried to the hall followed by the sound of her unlocking and opening the door. Kay turned back to the sink and her washing, taking the vases out, putting them on the draining board, her meditation broken by curiosity. She craned to hear the muted conversation in the hall.

The man and woman introduced themselves. Kay couldn’t hear the details but Mrs. Thalaine mumbled some questions and then she heard footsteps coming this way. She resented it because she still had bits to do and then she’d promised herself a smoke and a sit on the bench before she moved on to the Campbells’.

Margery Thalaine sounded nervous, her voice high and a little shaky. Whoever they were, if they were hassly salesmen, she would surely know to bring them into Kay so she could tell them to fuck off. They came to this area every so often because of all the money and the polite old people. It took the staff to tell them where to go.

Sure enough, steps through the hall, low voices making conversation but now Mrs. Thalaine quite chatty, not sounding irritated the way she did when she was being made to do something she didn’t want to.

A pause outside the door and then it opened. Mrs. Thalaine stood there for a moment, the suits behind her, and Kay read her face for clues. Calm. A little excited. She wasn’t supposed to get excited.

“Kay? These are the police.”

At that Kay turned towards them, looked them up and down, getting their measure. The man looked back at her arrogantly, tipping his nose up, squaring up to her. The woman leaned forward and held her hand out.

“I’m DC Leonard.”

Kay would not shake hands with a police officer. She held her hands up, wet. The female dropped her hand. Kay didn’t respect many people and the police were low on her count.

Her wet hands dripped suds onto the floor she had just cleaned. Another thing to do. “You want me to…” She sounded cross, she knew she did, and she didn’t want to upset Mrs. Thalaine.

Mrs. Thalaine smiled weakly. “If you wouldn’t mind…”

Kay dried her hands, knowing she looked cross and promising herself she’d come back and explain on her way to the bus stop, that she didn’t like the police or trust them, that she’d had trouble with them.

She softened her voice. “Well, I’ll just leave it there today, if that’s all right with you.”

Mrs. Thalaine’s chin twitched anxiously so Kay touched her forearm as she passed on her way to the door, letting her know she wasn’t angry with her.

“Actually,” Kay turned back at the sound of Margery’s voice and saw that she had been comforted, “could you take the recycling with you?”

Suddenly angry, Kay pinched her mouth. “Can’t you take it round yourself, Margery?”

Margery pinched her mouth back. She didn’t like Kay calling her by her first name in front of visitors. They looked hard at each other for a moment until Margery broke off and sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. “I’d rather you took it.”

Kay left the room and slammed the door behind her. She stomped through the long living room. Bright sun streamed in the long wall of small windows, hitting her pupils like a series of slaps.

She opened the door to the hall cupboard. There was the bag she had set out nicely for Margery: a bag for life, Waitrose, to take the poor look off her. Kay had set it there for her, near the door, handles up, ready to go.

Kay always arrived half an hour early, thirty minutes that she insisted she didn’t get paid for, just to listen to Margery moan and weep because she was lonely and so much had gone wrong and she couldn’t talk about her worries to her clubhouse ladies because none of them ever admitted to having troubles. And this morning over those stupid wee cups of tea that wouldn’t wet a mouse’s tongue, it took her twenty minutes to get Margery to promise she would leave the house at least once a day, and today’s expedition was to the recycling bins a hundred yards away.

Kay felt foolish and tricked, as if all the intimacy they had shared meant nothing, as if she had been kicked back into her place. But her sadness was too deep and she knew it was really about Joy. She didn’t love Margery. She was trying to replace Joy, that soft, kind intimacy, sometimes mother, sometimes child. Looking at the bag of recycling, she remembered a tiny withered hand touching her forearm. She had to clear her throat to chase the tears.

She glared at the bottles in the dark cupboard, called them bastards under her breath, cursed herself for being a mug. She turned and looked out of a living room window into the kitchen.

Through the French windows she could see the policewoman filling out a form on a clipboard. It’d be some neighborhood snoop scheme. Margery could run it, she could invite all her phony fucking pals into her house and feed them Markie’s biscuits and daft wee sandwiches and pretend that she wasn’t flat and fucking stony broke or scared to leave the house, that she didn’t wake up in the night and listen for her husband’s breathing just to make sure he wasn’t dead.

Kay took her coat down from the peg and threw it on. She took her handbag and slung the strap over her head, lifted the Waitrose bag and her own poly bag and then realized she needed the loo. She slammed the cupboard door, put the bags down in the hall and went into the bathroom.

Washing her hands, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her roots were showing. She could see specks of gray. She looked more than tired; she looked defeated. She stepped back, turned to the side slightly so the harsh daylight wasn’t on her. Holding her eye in the mirror, she smiled softly and liked what she saw.

“I’m nice,” she whispered, thinking about listening to Margery’s complaints. She nodded, knew she was right. “The gift’s to the giver.”

Becalmed, she unrolled some toilet paper and wiped the watery splashes off the basin, buffing it to a shine, threw the paper in the toilet, flushed it and walked out to the hall, picking up the bags on her way out.

She knew Mrs. Thalaine would see her walking away from the door, stepping awkwardly across the badly spaced paving-stone path set into perfectly raked white gravel chips. Kay didn’t look back but thought to herself that she should go home and get the photos of Joy out and she wasn’t going to kid herself anymore. She wouldn’t come early tomorrow. She’d come on time. And she decided to buy a hair dye on the way home and maybe some cream for her hands.

She kept her head high until she was sure she was out of view of the kitchen window and then she reached into her handbag for her cigarettes, lit one and sauntered around the corner, enjoying it, knowing she was early for the Campbells and needn’t hurry.

It was breezy, rain threatening, too windy for an outdoor smoke to taste pleasant but she enjoyed it anyway because it was her time. That’s all she got for herself nowadays, the spaces in between, but it was enough for her.

The wheelie bins and recycle point was a source of much local dispute. No one wanted to see the bins or have them near their house. A compromise had been reached. A space the length of two cars had been tarmacked and surrounded by high box hedging. It always made Kay smile, the prudishness of it, as if they were ashamed of needing to use a bin. It was a natural windbreak. She leaned into the cushioned hedge and took another draw on her cigarette. It was a nice one. She felt the anger at Margery sucked deep down into her lungs and dissipate through her stomach.

The sound of a car engine came over the hedge so she dragged one last draw, a nasty scratchy one, and dropped the cigarette on the ground, crushing it with her heel and stepping away from it. There had been complaints about cigarette butts left by the bins. Picking up the Waitrose bag for life she thought “fuck Margery,” lifted the lid for the household rubbish and threw it in just as the car came past.

The car stopped behind her and she turned to it, expecting to be ticked off by a local for dropping her smoke there, but it was the police from Margery’s.

The male officer was driving. He rolled down his window, a stupid big grin on his face, and he was nodding slowly as if she was a bit simple.

“Should that not have gone in the recycling?”

The grin was big, open-mouthed, she could see his tongue twitch and glint inside.

“If she cares so much about the environment she can bring it back herself,” said Kay sullenly.

Undeterred, he carried on grinning and talking slowly, his accent muted as if she wouldn’t understand. “Do you not care about the environment?”

She saw his eye stray to her tits and that he wasn’t even respectful enough to be embarrassed when he saw that she had noticed. She folded her arms over them.

“Did you just stop here to blind me with your wit, or was there something I could help you with?”

Scolded, he slunk back in his seat. The woman officer who had tried to shake hands with her leaned over to the window. “You Kay Murray?”

“Yeah.”

“You used to work up at Glenarvon?”

“Sure, up until a couple of months ago when Mrs. Erroll died.”

“Could you come up and tell us if anything’s been taken?”

“Was it burgled?”

“We don’t know. We don’t know if anything’s missing.”

Kay frowned. “Ask Sarah Erroll. She’s home, I think.”

“I’m afraid Sarah Erroll was killed last night during a break-in. Mrs. Thalaine said that Sarah was selling off items of furniture and crockery and stuff but we don’t know if the intruder took anything. Could you come up and tell us if you think anything’s missing?”

“Killed? Sarah? In the house?” Kay was aware that she was slurring.

“Oh.” The woman seemed to realize suddenly that Kay was upset by the news. “I’m afraid so, sorry for telling you like that…”

“Who’s killed her?”

The man wasn’t grinning now. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“She’s twenty-four…” Kay was calculating the difference in ages with her own kids, eight years between her and Joe.

The woman officer tried again. “I’m sorry, were you close?”

She was about to light another cigarette to blunt the shock when she realized that Margery was alone in the house, sitting with news of another sudden death, another reason to be afraid. “You never told her, did ye?”

“Told who?”

“Marg—Thalaine, Mrs. Thalaine?”

They looked at each other and she knew they had.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She hurried around the bonnet of the car, touching it, finding it warm.

“You’ll come up?” the woman called to her through her own window.

“After,” shouted Kay as she sprinted back along the road. “I’ll come after.”