He answered on the third ring, on a very crackly line.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’

‘Off Shoreham. We’re ten miles out of the harbour mouth, heading to the dredge area. Be out of range in a few minutes – what’s up?’

‘I need to talk to you. Caitlin’s deteriorated – she’s very ill. Desperately ill.’

‘Shit,’ he said, his voice already sounding fainter as the crackling got worse. ‘Tell me.’

She blurted out the gist of the diagnosis, knowing from past experience how quickly the signal could fade. She was just about able to make out his reply – the ship would be back in Shoreham in about seven hours, he would call her then, he told her.

Next, she phoned her mother, who was at a coffee morning at her bridge club. Her mother was strong, and seemed to have become even stronger in the four years since Lynn ’s father had died, once admitting to Lynn that they really had not liked each other very much for years. She was a practical woman and nothing ever seemed to fluster her.

‘You need to get a second opinion,’ she said right away. ‘Tell Dr Hunter you want a second opinion.’

‘I don’t think there’s much doubt,’ Lynn said. ‘This is not just Dr Hunter – it’s the specialist too. What’s happening is what we’ve feared all along.’

‘You absolutely must have a second opinion. Doctors get things wrong. They are not infallible.’

Lynn, with some reluctance, promised her mother she would ask for a second opinion. Then, after she had finished and was driving back home, she churned it over in her mind. How many more second opinions could she get? During these past years she had tried everything. She’d scoured the Internet, looking at each of the big US teaching hospitals. The German hospitals. The Swiss ones. She’d tried all the alternative options she could find. Healers of every kind – faith, vibration, distant, hands-on. Priests. Boluses of coloidal silver. Homeopaths. Herbalists. Acupuncturists.

Sure, maybe her mother had a point. Maybe the diagnosis could be wrong. Perhaps another specialist might know something Dr Granger did not and could recommend something less drastic. Perhaps there was some new medication that could treat this. But how long did you keep looking while your daughter continued to go downhill? How long before you had to accept that surgery was perhaps, in this case, the only option?

As she turned right at the mini-roundabout off the London Road, into Carden Avenue, the car heeled over, making a horrible scraping sound. She changed gear and heard the usual metallic knocking underneath her from the exhaust pipe, which had a broken bracket. Caitlin said it was the Grim Reaper knocking, because the car was dying.

Her daughter had a macabre sense of humour.

She drove on up the hill into Patcham, her eyes watering as the immensity of the situation started to overwhelm her. Oh shit. She shook her head in bewilderment. Nothing, nothing, nothing had prepared her for this. How the hell did you tell your daughter that she was going to have to have a new liver? And probably one taken from a dead body?

She turned up the hill into their street, then made a left into her driveway, pulled on the handbrake and switched off the engine. As usual it juddered on for some moments, spluttering and shaking the car, and banging the exhaust pipe beneath her again, before falling silent.

The house was a semi in a quiet residential avenue and, like many homes in this city, on a steep hill. It had views, across trees that masked the London Road and the railway line, of some of the swanky, dreamy houses and massive gardens of Withdean Road on the far side of the valley. All the houses in her avenue were of the same basic design: three-bedroomed, 1930s, with a rounded, metalled Art Deco influence which she had always liked. They had small front gardens with a short driveway in front of the attached garage and good-sized plots at the rear.

The previous owners had been an elderly couple and when Lynn moved in she’d had all kinds of plans to transform it. But after seven years here, she had not even been able to afford to rip out the manky old carpets and replace them, let alone carry out her grander schemes of knocking through walls and re-landscaping the garden. Fresh paint and some new wallpaper were all she had managed so far. The dreary kitchen still had a fusty old-people smell to it, despite all her efforts with pot pourri and plug-in air fresheners.

One day, she used to promise herself. One day.

The same one day that she promised herself she would build a little studio in the garden. She loved to paint scenes of Brighton in watercolours and had had some modest success in selling them.

She unlocked the front door and went inside, into the narrow hallway. She peered up the stairs, wondering if Caitlin was out of bed yet, but could hear no sound.

Heavy-hearted, she climbed the stairs. At the top, taped to Caitlin’s door, was a large handwritten sign, red letters on a white background, saying: KNOCK, PURLEASE. It had been there for as long as she could remember. She knocked.

There was no answer, as normal. Caitlin would be either asleep or blasting her eardrums with music. She went in. The contents of the room looked as if they had been scooped up wholesale from somewhere else by a bulldozer’s shovel, brought here and tipped in through the window.

Just visible beyond the tangle of clothes, soft toys, CDs, DVDs, shoes, make-up containers, overflowing pink waste bin, upended pink stool, dolls, mobile of blue perspex butterflies, shopping bags from Top Shop, River Island, Monsoon, Abercrombie and Fitch, Gap and Zara, and dartboard with a purple boa hanging from it, was the bed. Caitlin was lying on her side, in one of the many extraordinary positions in which she slept, arms and legs akimbo, with a pillow over her head, bare bottom and thighs protruding from the duvet, iPod earpieces plugged into her ears, the television on, playing a repeat of a show Lynn recognized as The Hills.

She looked like she was dead.

And for one terrifying moment Lynn thought she was. She rushed over, her feet tangling in her daughter’s mobile phone charger wire, and touched her long, slender arm.

‘I’m asleep,’ Caitlin said grumpily.

Relief surged through Lynn. The illness had made her daughter’s sleep patterns erratic. She smiled, sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked her back. With her mop of short, gelled black hair, Caitlin looked like a bendy doll sometimes, she thought. Tall, thin to the point of emaciation, and gangly, she seemed to have flexible wire inside her skin rather than bones.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Itchy.’

‘Want some breakfast?’ she asked hopefully.

Caitlin wasn’t a full-blown anorexic, but close. She was obsessed with her weight, hated any food like cheese or pasta, which she called eating fats, and weighed herself constantly.

Caitlin shook her head.

‘I need to talk to you, darling.’ She looked at her watch. It was 10.05. She had told them yesterday at work that she would be in late, and she was going to have to phone again in a minute and tell them she would not be in at all today. The doctor only had a short window of time, mid-afternoon, to see Caitlin.

‘I’m busy,’ her daughter grunted.

In a sudden fit of irritation, Lynn pulled out the earpieces. ‘This is important.’

‘Chill, woman!’ Caitlin replied.

Lynn bit her lip and was silent for some moments. Then she said, ‘I’ve made an appointment with Dr Hunter for this afternoon. At half past four.’

‘You’re doing my head in. I’m seeing Luke this afternoon.’

Luke was her boyfriend. He was enrolled in some course in IT at the University of Brighton which he had never been able to explain to her in a manner she could understand. Among the total wasters Lynn had encountered in her life, Luke was up there in a class of his own. Caitlin had been dating him for over a year. And in that year Lynn had managed to extract about five words from him, and those with some difficulty. Yep, yeah, like, you know seemed to be the absolute limits of his vocabulary. She was beginning to think that the attraction between the two of them must be because they both came from the same planet – somewhere at the far end of the universe. Some sodding galactic cul-de-sac.