“Frances may be nutty, but she’s calculating. And she likes to play games.”

Jenny leans over my shoulder and skims the letter. “It does say great aunt,” she says, and points to the words on the page.

“That doesn’t seem like a mistake.” “Oh, she didn’t,” Mum hisses.

She crosses over to the table and snatches the letter out of my hand. She stares at it long enough for the onions to give off a burnt caramel smell, and finally tosses the letter onto the table and returns to the stove. Mum moves the cast-iron frying pan off the hob before the whole thing catches fire.

Jenny mumbles the rest of the letter’s contents as her eyes scan the typeface again. “Please present yourself at the offices of blah blah … it’s just instructions for the meeting. It’s in a couple of days, somewhere in Dorset called Castle Knoll.

“Oh my God,” she whispers, “an estranged aunt in a sleepy countryside village? A mysterious inheritance? This is a serious case of life imitating art.”

“I’m sure this is meant for Mum. Apparently Great Aunt Frances is superstitious to the extreme, so

I doubt she’d just change her mind about something like this, and disinherit Mum. Though actually,” I add slowly, “given the stories I’ve heard about Great Aunt Frances, this might be the kind of thing she’d do.”

I look at Jenny’s awestruck expression, and decide that I owe her a real deep-dive into the weird background of Great Aunt Frances. “It’s family lore,” I say. “I’ve really never told you?”

Jenny shakes her head, and sips from the remaining glass on the table. I look over at Mum.

“Do you want to tell the story of Great Aunt Frances? Or shall I?”

Mum goes back to the oven and wrestles with the door again, pulling out an aluminium tray of something unidentifiable. She takes the cast-iron frying pan and scrapes the singed onions onto the top of it, grabs three forks from the basket where she keeps loose cutlery, and sets the whole thing between us, forks stuck in at odd angles. Then she sinks into a chair and takes another drink of wine, shaking her head at me slightly.

“Okay then,” I say, and I try to put on my best storytelling voice. Jenny takes the wine bottle and fills up my glass.

“Great Aunt Frances was 16, and it was 1965. She and her two best friends went to a country fair and had their fortunes read. Great Aunt Frances’ fortune comes out something like this – You’re going to be murdered, and end up a pile of dry bones.”

“Ooh, very over the top, I love it,” Jenny says. “But if you’re going to write mystery novels, Annie – and

I say this with all the love in my heart – you need to work on your delivery.”

Mum has the letter again, and studies it as if it’s evidence to some crime. “That wasn’t the fortune,” she says quietly.

“It was: Your future contains dry bones. Your slow demise begins right when you hold the queen in the palm of one hand. Beware the bird, for it will betray you. And from that, there’s no coming back. But daughters are the key to justice, find the right one and keep her close. All signs point toward your murder.”

I stab one of the forks into the thick cream of what I suspect is potatoes dauphinoise from the

Tesco freezer section.

“Right. Anyway, Great Aunt Frances has spent her whole life convinced that this is going to come true.”

“That’s … I can’t figure out if that’s tragic, or very savvy of her,” Jenny says. She turns to Mum. “So, Annie’s really never met this lady?”

Mum sighs, and picks at the onions. “Mostly we just let Frances live in her big house and get on with things.”

“Wait, so you have an aunt with a country estate and you just ignore her?”

Mum waves a hand to swat

Jenny’s comment away.

“Everyone ignores Frances. She’s nutty. So much so that she’s a local legend – the weird old lady with a huge country house and piles of money, just digging up dirt on anyone who crosses her path in case they might turn out to be her murderer.”

“So are you going to call this solicitor about the mix-up?” I ask.

Mum pinches the bridge of her nose, and hands me the letter. “I don’t think it is a mix-up. I’d come with you to Dorset, but that date is deliberate.”

I look at it again. “Your private view at the Tate,” I say slowly. “She’s trying to make sure you can’t come?”

“Frances may be nutty, but she’s very calculating. And she likes to play games.”

“Okay,” I say. My shoulders sag at the thought of missing Mum’s Tate private view, but it looks like this meeting concerns our livelihood.

I’ll just have to hope the opening goes well, so that there will be others. “But then, why me?”

Mum lets out a long hiss of air before she speaks. “She lives her life by that fortune, and for years I was her sole benefactor because of that line – daughters are the key to justice.

“I’m the only daughter in her family, my father was Frances’ older brother.”

“The second part of the line,” I muse. “Find the right one and keep her close.”

Mum nods. “It looks like Frances has decided that I’m not the right daughter any more.” AWW