June Hirst's bungalow is the last one before the cricket ground, with a hedge cut so straight you could rule your margins off it, a green front door, and no gnome. The number had come from Rosie in the night, with no message, and then a minute later, Auntie June. Don't say I said. I rang it at quarter to ten from my mother's phone, standing in my kitchen in my coat, and June answered on the first ring as if she'd been sat with her hand on it for nine years.
"Who is this?"
"The night nurse," I said. "From the lane. Rosie gave me your number."
There was a long gap.
"Green door," she said. "By the nets." And put the phone down.
So at ten o'clock I stood on her step with my cast in a sling and my good hand in my pocket round my mother's phone, and she opened the door in a grey cardigan with her reading glasses on her head, and looked at me exactly as she had through the car window.
I'd practised it all round the cricket ground. I said it anyway.
"I was the nurse. In Harrogate. I was asleep."
She shut the door.
It didn't slam. It went to, quietly, like a classroom door with a teacher behind it counting to ten.
I sat down on her step.
It was cold, the kind that comes up off a cricket ground in November with nothing to stop it, straight off the moor, over the roller and the sight-screen and the empty benches, and goes up your coat. I sat with my cast tucked into my armpit to keep my fingers warm, and watched a man throw a ball for a spaniel that didn't want it. The spaniel looked at me. I looked at the spaniel. My mother's phone went twice, my mother, and I let it. I counted the panes in the pavilion windows. Thirty-six. I counted them again, because the first time I'd got forty, and it was thirty-six.
At twenty to eleven the door opened behind me.
"You'll get piles," said June.
"I can't. I've got a cast. It's the wrong end."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she stood back from the door.
Inside it was cold too, and clean, so clean you felt you should have taken your face off at the door. There was a carpet with the hoover lines still in it. There were photographs on every surface, and every one of them was the same woman, laughing at somebody who wasn't the camera, with her hat off, with a dog, on a beach in a cagoule with her hair going sideways, and in all of them a front tooth with the corner gone.
June made tea in a pot. She didn't offer a biscuit. She put the cup down in front of me on a coaster with a picture of Whitby Abbey on it, handle turned the wrong way for my good hand, and sat down across from me in her cardigan, with her back not touching the chair.
"Go on, then," she said.
"She was laughing," I said. "On the last night. Sitting up, all pink, wicked." I turned the cup round with one finger. "She'd asked me for the lot. In October. She got hold of my wrist and asked me. So why was she laughing?"
June didn't say anything for so long I thought she'd decided not to.
"October was the letters," she said.
"What letters?"
"Moira Pell. Twenty years of her." She was looking at the teapot. "She found them in his golf bag, of all places."
"Moira," I said. "Moira's a lorry."
"He named a lorry after her. Ellen used to wave at it on the ring road."
I laughed. I didn't mean to, it came out of me like a cough, and June looked at me over the teapot, and her mouth went, at one corner, for about a second, and came back.
"So in October she wanted to die," June said. "It was the pain and the letters in the same fortnight, and I'd have wanted it too. She asked everybody, the doctor, me, the man who read the meter."
"And me."
"And you." She put her cup down without drinking from it. "Then the hospice changed her pump, and it worked. She came up like a cork."
"She wanted her hair doing," I said.
"Sandra, Wednesdays at two." June looked at the window. "Sandra did it anyway, for the coffin. Ellen would have hated the colour."
"She wanted to live long enough to leave him," June said.
She got up. She went to a bureau in the corner, a walnut one with a key, and came back with a cookery book, Delia, the big one, and opened it at a page about meringues, and took out a card and put it down on the table between us, next to the Whitby Abbey.
It was a little cream card with a printed heading. Lister and Co, Solicitors, Harrogate. And under it, in somebody's office handwriting, Mr P. Lister will call on Mrs E. Hirst, Thursday the twenty-third of November, ten thirty. On the back, in blue biro, in a hand that went uphill: June. In case he finds it. E.
"That was her man to see," said June.
I looked at it. I didn't touch it.
"Gareth," I said.
"Gareth was to fetch Mr Lister from the station. Mr Lister doesn't drive." June's voice didn't change at all. "Gareth thought he was bringing her a pen for his loan."
I put my good hand flat on the table.
"She told me on the Sunday, after church," said June. "She told Frank at supper. To watch his face."
"What did his face do?"
"She rang me at ten to say he'd had seconds."
The clock on June's mantelpiece was one of those with the little brass balls that go round one way and then the other way, under a glass dome, and I watched them go round, and back.
"He told me she asked him," I said. "On Tuesday. He said she asked me and she asked him, and to let it lie."
"She did ask him. In October." June folded her hands on the table, one over the other, very tidy. "He waited till she'd stopped asking."
I did a thing then I've never done in front of anybody. I put my forehead down on the table, on the cold polish, between the card and the cup, and I left it there.
June let me. She didn't touch me. She waited. When I sat up she'd turned my cup round, so the handle was by my good hand.
"Why?" I said, to the table. "She was dying anyway. She'd have been gone by Christmas."
"Not before Thursday." June's voice came down to me from somewhere above. "Our father's farm, her money, her half of Harrogate. She was leaving him his shirts."
I sat up.
"High Royd," I said.
"High Royd was our father's. He's lying in it."
"Rosie's dad's borrowed against it. Two hundred and forty thousand pounds. I heard him on the phone."
June's face didn't move.
"You can't inherit from someone you killed," she said. "Everything he got from her comes back to me."
"Is that true?"
"I looked it up." She picked her cup up at last, and drank, and put it down. "I've had nine years to look it up."
"Nobody'd listen," I said.
"I told the GP. I told the police."
"And?"
"They said the agency nurse had been with her all night." She looked straight at me. "I said the agency nurse was asleep."
I didn't have anything for that. I sat there in her clean cold front room with my cast in my lap, and the brass balls went round, and back, and round.
"Have you something to write with?" said June.
I hadn't. She got a fountain pen out of her cardigan pocket and a pad from the bureau, and wrote, small and upright, an email address and a name, Daniel Lister, and blotted it on her napkin, and tore the sheet off and gave it to me.
"The son, now," she said. "I'm ringing him this afternoon. You'll write to him today."
"I was asleep," I said.
June stood up and took my cup, though I hadn't finished.
"Then wake up," she said.
At half past one I stood in my kitchen and rang the High Royd landline from my mother's phone. I'd been home an hour. I'd done the washing-up, which there wasn't any of, and I'd wiped the table round the envelope. I'd got my mother's phone out and started the email to Daniel Lister with my thumb, and got as far as Dear Mr Lister, I was the nurse, and stopped, and read it, and read it again. Then I'd stood at the sink, because before I wrote another word to anybody I wanted to see his face when I said it.
It rang four times.
"High Royd," said Owen.
My stomach went, a bit, as it does when a voice you know comes out of somewhere you didn't put it.
"It's me. Is he awake?"
"Kit? You all right? Where are you?"
"Is he awake, Owen?"
"In and out. Hang on." The phone went against his chest, and he went through, and there was his voice, and nothing, and then Frank's, a long way off, dry and thin, and then Owen back. "He says come up. He says I'm to let you in."
I put the radio on in the car and a man said snow by tonight on the tops, and I turned him off, because I'd had enough of men telling me what was coming. The lane was white at the edges already, where the frost hadn't lifted all day, and the sky over the moor was the colour of a dirty sink. I got my car up as far as the yard. Owen had the back door open before I'd turned the engine off, and he stood in it in his fleece, and said, "He's had a yoghurt," and held the door, and went back to the kettle.
Frank was sitting up. Somebody had cranked the bed and put a second pillow in, and his crossword was on his knee with his pen across it, and his eyes were open and clear.
"Nurse."
"Moira," I said.
He looked at me over the oxygen.
"Best thing I ever drove," said Frank.
"Moira Pell. Twenty years. In your golf bag."
"Ellen never could leave a bag alone."
"You named a lorry after your fancy woman and drove it up and down the motorway for ten years."
"Eleven," said Frank. "She had a lovely gearbox."
"Thursday the twenty-third of November, half past ten. Mr Lister." I was standing at the end of the bed with my good hand on the rail. "She was having him in to cut you out. She was having her hair done for it."
"Ellen was very fond of appointments." He picked the pen up off the crossword and looked at it, and put it down. "She'd have taken the roof off my son's head, love. Out of spite. I gave that woman twenty-four years."
"And Rosie gets a roof."
"Rosie gets a roof." He said it quite simply, as if I'd asked him the time. "I saved this family once, Kit. I'm saving it again. When I'm gone nobody in Sallowford will say her grandfather's name in the Co-op as they say yours."
"You told me she asked you."
"She did."
"In October," I said. "She asked you in October. And then she stopped. And she'd booked her hair, Frank."
He didn't say anything.
"I could smell you," I said. "On Tuesday. When I did your pillow. Your soap. You were over that bed with your hand in the box and I was a yard away in the chair, and you smelled exactly like you do now."
The oxygen went in. The oxygen went out. He looked at me a while, and then the pleasantness went out of his face, as if he'd put it down on the bedside table.
"I saw you on the market," said Frank. "Three years ago. In your uniform, buying fig rolls off the man with the van. I knew your face from the chair."
I held on to the rail.
"Did she wake up?" I said. "When you did it?"
"No," said Frank. He looked at me a moment longer. "Neither did you."
"I'm going to the Review," I said. "I'm going to tell them all of it. The key and the chair and the six, and Moira, and your soap. I don't care who believes me."
"Then go home first, love," said Frank.
He settled back on his pillows. He folded his hands on the blanket.
"Owen'll have the kettle on."
I didn't say anything. In the kitchen, through the open door, a cupboard went, and a knife on a plate.
"He's been making your toast for five weeks," said Frank.
"And Malcolm has a letter," he said. "If you're breathing at my funeral, he opens it. Ask your lodger what's in it."
I stood at the end of his bed. I could feel my heart in my cast, in the broken bit, going.
Then I went round the side of the bed and opened the sideboard drawer, and got out the box with the pink sponges in, from behind the Flying Scotsman, and the cup, and the balm. I put a sponge in the water and did his mouth, and he kept his eyes on my face the whole time, and my hand didn't shake once.
Then I put it all back in the box, and the box back behind the jigsaw, and went out.
Owen was at the kitchen counter with his back to me, in his fleece, with the grill on. He had two slices on the board, and the butter, and he was doing it right to the edges, all of it, with the knife, for a man who'd eat two bites.
He looked round.
"Drive safe," said Owen. "It's coming in icy."
"You too," I said.