Without stopping to remove her coat, she went straight up to her study. First of all, she opened up the small brown case. It was packed full of women’s clothes, the smell of age and decay in their folds. She looked through their layers and saw nothing suspicious. She closed it and pushed it under the desk, then picked up a splitting bin-bag and up-ended it so that all its contents spilled out onto the floor with a rustle and a clatter: folders and papers and knick-knacks, even a few pieces of jewellery. She did the same to the next one, objects and scraps of paper tumbling onto the floor, but left the third, softly bulging, which appeared only to contain clothes. She stood back and surveyed the heap in front of her: it looked like rubbish and reminded her of the times she had seen Chloë trying to sort out the chaos in her room, tossing old essays, fliers, letters, torn tights and scrunched-up tissues into a discard pile. But Erin Brack might have been killed for a clue that was buried here, among the cast-offs of a family’s life.
