Elaine had argued with her, of course, wanting to put a bed in the sitting room, but for once Fanny’s soft refusal had held sway over her roommate’s brisk efficiency. The wheelchair was bad enough. For Fanny, a bed in the sitting room would have meant admitting the possibility that she might not improve.

Her cat, Quinn, still lay curled on her feet. The only sound in the flat was his faint purring. It was the silence that had awakened her, Fanny suddenly realized. There were no footsteps upstairs, no sound of movement in the kitchen. Elaine was always up first, making coffee and puttering around the flat. Before leaving for her job as an administrative assistant at Guy’s Hospital, she allowed time to make Fanny tea and toast and helped her with her morning routine.

Perhaps Elaine had overslept, thought Fanny – but no, Elaine was as punctual as Big Ben. Could she be ill? “Elaine?” Fanny called out tentatively, pulling herself up by using the arms of the chaise. Her voice seemed to echo emptily, and a spark of fear shot through her. “Elaine?”

There was no answer.

Suddenly, Fanny remembered her dream, a jumbled nightmare of doors closing softly, and felt again the dream’s inexplicable sense of loss. It made her think of the deathbed watches she’d kept as a private nurse before her illness, of the way she’d felt when she’d awakened from an inadvertent doze and known instantly that her patient had died while she slept.

Just as she knew, now, as the silence closed around her, that the house was empty. The sound of the door closing in the night had been no dream.

Elaine was gone.