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and starlit, the moonlight soft and mellow as a pear.
    Jonathan is there, hurrying across the clearing. He must have come down from Membery directly through the woods, where there’s no proper path, slithering and sliding, picking his way through the brambled undergrowth, bypassing the route by the waterfall, which the police have cordoned off with blue and white tape. She’s struck by his physical resemblance to Mark, although he’s not so tall and loose-limbed. He walks more deliberately, without Mark’s lank, casual grace. In character they’re not at all alike. None of the brothers are, their make-up is totally different, almost as though they possess different sets of character genes. Her initial glimpse of them, that day when she’d first seen them together at Henley, that certain facial similarity, gave her the wrong idea entirely.
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    Jonathan wasn’t normally very demonstrative, but he threw his arms wide now as she opened the door for him and hugged her close, and for a moment or two she allowed herself to stay there, cocooned in his brotherly comfort. ‘I guessed you wouldn’t have obeyed doctor’s
orders and be in bed. Couldn’t sleep, eh? No wonder. Was it very terrible?’
    â€˜Well, it wasn’t exactly a birthday treat!’ she said, disengaging herself, speaking in the sharp, often too sharp, way she had. Words she was invariably sorry for having spoken, as she was now, when she saw his immediately chastened face, plus a secret look that slid over it and was immediately wiped off. ‘I’m sorry, that sounded … I know what you meant.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘It was pretty ghastly, Jon, but I’d rather not talk about it, for now.’
    Would she ever forget it, though? The slow recognition that the thing circling round and round under the waterfall, the draperies lifting and sinking from the water, the hair floating like pondweed, was human, was a woman, was Bibi ? That it was already, by a long chalk, too late to save her? Even if there had been the remotest possibility that Fran, by herself, could have manoeuvred her up out of the water and over the rocks on to dry land?
    Nevertheless, she’d tried to, oh heavens, how she’d tried! She’d lain down on the rocks and stretched desperate hands down to grasp — anything, the floating dress, the sodden hair, before admitting the impossibility, nearly falling into the water herself in the process. She’d stumbled back to the house to dial 999 and told the calm voice at the other end what had happened. After what seemed like for ever, they arrived, an ambulance, paramedics, a nurse — and a police doctor who told her that Bibi must have been dead for nearly an hour before she’d been found. Still numb with shock, Fran had allowed a police driver to take her up to Membery, to give what support she could. Alyssa had wanted her to stay the night but, certain that Jane would stay with Alyssa until Jonathan and Jilly arrived, she’d managed to put her off by saying she wanted to be at home in case Mark rang. The truth was, she had simply needed to be alone. Alyssa wouldn’t have understood her need for solitude, especially after such a shock, but she accepted Mark as an excuse, after making Fran swear to take the pill the doctor had left, and then go straight
to bed. Fran hadn’t taken the pill, she didn’t intend to. She knew the effect sleeping pills had had on Bibi and she didn’t want to feel disorientated, the way she’d said she felt, the next day.
    Jonathan said, ‘Have you had anything to eat? Thought not. I’ve brought some food.’
    He’d raided the kitchen up at Membery and there was a feast: an eclectic mixture of smoked salmon, olives, avocado, watercress, garlic sausage, Parma ham, Brie. Party food, ordered by Alyssa for his homecoming. He sat her down in the kitchen and warmed ciabatta in the oven, put