She unlocked the door and George came in. He had a jacket on over his blue-and-white striped pyjamas, his hair was sticking up and his face was very pale.

‘What on earth’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘Why did they phone you so early? Is it an emergency?’

He didn’t answer for a minute, just looked at her as if unable to speak.

‘George, you’re frightening me. What is it?’

He ran his fingers through his hair distractedly. ‘I’ve got to tell you, but I don’t know how to,’ he said.

‘Tell me what? Is it Petal?’ she asked in alarm, clutching the eiderdown around her even more tightly. ‘Has something happened to her?’

He came closer, and his face was contorted with anguish. ‘No, it’s not about Petal, it’s your parents.’ He paused, putting his hands up on his head as if trying to force himself to get the words out. ‘I’m so sorry, Molly. There’s no easy way to say this. The shop caught fire last night and they both died.’

For a few moments Molly thought she was dreaming. Yet George had pulled her to him tightly as he spoke and his tweed jacket felt real enough against her cheek, and she could hear him breathing hard as he leaned his face against her head.

‘A fire?’ she exclaimed. ‘How could that happen?’

‘It started in the store room at the back of the shop. The firemen think your dad must have left the electric fire on in there and it was too close to a cardboard box or something. Once it got going, it found plenty to burn, and the staircase up to the flat is right over the store room.’

‘You mean they were trapped upstairs and were burned alive?’ Molly moved back from him and looked at him in horror.

‘I think they were overcome by the fumes long before the flames reached them,’ George assured her. ‘They probably didn’t even wake up.’

Molly went over to the window and pulled the curtain back. She thought she ought to cry, but she felt curiously numb, as if she’d been told about a couple of strangers. It was still dark outside; all she could see of Russell Square was a golden circle of light beneath the lamp post outside the hotel. But she could hear the rumble and clinking sound of the milkman’s float on its round.

‘Molly! Speak to me!’ George said.

‘What is there to say?’ she asked, turning towards him. ‘It’s one of those times when there are no words. Mostly, I hate Dad, but I wouldn’t want anyone, not even my worst enemy, to die like that. And Mum! What did she ever do to deserve such a death?’

‘I know. It’s so cruel,’ he agreed. ‘Oh, Molly, she certainly didn’t deserve such a death. She should have grown old surrounded by grandchildren who loved her. She should have been around to see you and Emily make the peace with your father, and for him to change his ways. But we’d better get dressed and get a train back there. I’ll go down and get a tray of tea first.’

When he had left the room Molly tossed the eiderdown on to the bed and began pulling on some clothes. She got as far as putting on some slacks and a jumper when, suddenly, the enormity of what had happened hit her like a tidal wave, and the tears came.

It was over fifteen months since she had left Sawbridge, and she hadn’t seen her parents in that time. She’d spoken to her mother on the phone, written dozens of letters, but that wasn’t the same as seeing her, putting her arms around her and kissing those soft cheeks. She could offer perfectly good reasons why she hadn’t been home – lack of opportunity and money and, of course, the bad feelings about her father – but now they all looked like petty excuses.

George came back into the room carrying a tea tray. Seeing her tears, he put it down and took her in his arms, rocking her silently.

‘This is so awful,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine anything worse, and I can’t think of anything to say which would make it better. But let’s have some tea. I’ll find out what time the trains are, and ring the Bridgenorths for you.’

‘I always thought when I went home again it would be in triumph because I’d got a good job and a future,’ Molly said brokenly. ‘I wanted to rub my dad’s nose in it.’

‘You have got a good job and a future,’ he said. ‘And don’t make the mistake of blaming yourself. No one could’ve been a better daughter than you were. Your dad really was a nasty piece of work – his death doesn’t change that. But of course you’re going to grieve, for what is past and for what could’ve been. Your mum was a lovely lady; she’ll be missed by so many people. I know you must feel you’ve got no one now but remember you’ve still got me.’

Molly clung to him, soothed a little by his calm manner and his kindness.

‘Cup of tea now,’ he said, edging her back so she could sit on the bed. ‘I’ll pack your stuff for you.’

It was late afternoon, dark and very cold when they arrived back in Sawbridge. There were Christmas lights up in the high street, and most of the shops had cheerful Christmas window displays. But Heywoods, which had always been the most prominent shop in the street, was in darkness. There was just enough light from the street lamps to see that all the windows were broken, the frames burnt, and there were marks where the flames had licked right up to the first floor.

‘It looks much worse at the back,’ Jack Ollerenshaw volunteered. He was a friend of George and had come to pick them up from the station. ‘But you don’t want to even think about that now, Molly.’

Mrs Walsh hugged Molly wordlessly for several minutes before drawing her into the living room, taking her coat and making her sit down.

The room was very neat and tidy, and a delicious smell of roasting meat was coming from the kitchen. ‘You must think of this as your home, my love,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘My hubby and I feel deeply for you, and if we can do anything to make you feel just a bit better, you just shout.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Walsh, I really appreciate your kindness. I’m very glad I had George to travel home with. It would’ve been awful on my own.’

‘You are to have George’s bed, and he’ll go in with our Harry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what the procedure is in cases like this one. You weren’t here, so there would be no point in the police asking you questions, though I expect you’ll have to contact the insurance company. Will there be a post mortem, George?’

‘I imagine so,’ he said, frowning at his mother, as if to warn her to keep off such subjects. ‘I’m just going to nip along to the police station to let them know we’re here. Will you be all right, Molly?’

Four days later Molly wanted to scream each time someone asked her if she was ‘all right’. Of course she wasn’t. How could anyone be all right when their parents had just died in a fire?

She wasn’t just angry at people who asked such a senseless question, but with her father. A fire investigator had found a whisky bottle in the store room. It had broken in the heat of the flames, but there was evidence that the bottle and a glass had been on the desk and the pathologist had found that her father had been drinking heavily.

Even if Molly had been away for a long time, she could imagine the scene as clearly as if she’d been in that store room. He would’ve been skulking there with the one-bar electric fire keeping him warm while he drank his whisky. He had always made out he did paperwork on his nights in there, but Molly knew he just sat and got drunk. Upstairs, her mother had to go to bed to keep warm when the coal ran out because he was so miserly with it.

The investigator’s report said they believed that Mr Heywood had forgotten to turn the fire off when he went upstairs. He may have accidentally kicked it too close to one of the many cardboard boxes in the store room. It would have taken as much as an hour for the first box to go from singeing to bursting into flames but, from that point on, there would have been no stopping it, because the room was full of flammable goods, including a tank of paraffin.