Epilogue

They were going to bulldoze Rosscarron Cottages. The remaining owners were happy to settle for the insurance money, it would save the council expensive repairs to the utilities, and there wouldn’t be political trouble about the work that should have been done to prevent the landslide in the first place.

It seemed to Fleming a fitting outcome. The road to nowhere would now lead to nothing, just as Lisa Stewart’s short life had done. The sea, over the years and the winter storms, would gradually claim its new territory, and with its salt cleansing, the passions and hatreds and terrible deeds would be swept away and forgotten.

With a sigh she turned back to her desk. You couldn’t clean up people’s lives in the same way. There in front of her, in the files and on the screen, were the records of more pain and suffering and corruption.

And Kim Kershaw had not recovered. She was buried with the damaged daughter, who, if you believed in a heaven, was whole and happy now, reunited with the mother who had loved her more than life itself.