But at least she had a life. She closed her eyes, willing anger to retreat. She knew from experience that anger made pain recede. That was why she was feeling it now, but in the long term anger didn’t help anything. Pain would always surface.

She couldn’t let her anger show. Nor her pain.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ she managed, and was thankful she was on the end of the phone and not by her brother’s bedside. She didn’t want him to see her like this. She was trembling all over, shaking as if she’d been placed on ice.

‘I’m sure,’ he said, more strongly. ‘I’m going to sit on our back veranda and…’

His voice broke off. He didn’t have to finish. They both knew the word that would finish the sentence. This was a family song, sung over and over.

‘Will you do this for me, Ginny?’ he asked in a voice that had changed, and once again there was only one reply.

‘Of course I will,’ she managed. ‘You know I will.’

She always had, she thought, but she didn’t say it. There was no point in saying what they both knew.

The cost of life was losing.

CHAPTER ONE

SHE was lying where he wanted to drive.

Dr Fergus Reynard was lost. He’d been given a map of sealed roads, but sealed roads accounted for about one per cent of the tracks around here. Take the second track left over the ridge, the district nurse had told him, and he’d stared at wheel marks and tried to decide which was a track and which was just the place where some obscure vehicle had taken a jaunt through the mud after the last rain.

Somewhere around here, someone called Oscar Bentley, was lying on his kitchen floor with a suspected broken hip. Oscar needed a doctor. Him. The hospital Land Cruiser had lost traction on the last turn. He’d spun and when he’d corrected there had been a woman lying across the road.