Trick of the Dark

1

Friday

It was the first night Jay could remember that they'd slept together without making love. The conversation begun in the sauna had chased its own tail for the rest of the evening, always coming back to the terrible point where they had to confront their decision to point the police in the direction of the people they were convinced had killed Philip. They kept revisiting the afternoon when they'd lain in bed and talked through the failure of the police to make any headway in solving Philip's murder.

Jay, who knew her Agatha Christie, had spoken then of the ordeal by innocence, the taint that would always cling to Magda if nobody was brought to book for the crime. 'Even though everyone who knows you and knows the situation wouldn't think for a moment you could have killed Philip. But that doesn't matter to the pumpkins out there. As soon as we come out, before you know it, there'll be a Facebook lynch mob, "I bet I can find a million people who believe Magda Newsam is an evil man-hating lesbian who murdered her husband for the money."'

And it wasn't as if they'd made anything up. The insider trading was real enough. Jay had just made it obvious. Even now, she couldn't avoid feeling proud of how well she'd handled the situation. It was a great feeling, to sort out so big a thing for someone you loved. Now she just had to pray that it stayed sorted the way they'd arranged it. Otherwise they could end up changing places with Paul Barker and Joanna Sanderson. That would be the nightmare scenario — her and Magda taking the fall. That simply couldn't be allowed to happen, and she'd do whatever it took to make sure it never did.

Worst-case scenario, there was always the Costa Rica option.

With all this on their minds, she thought it was a miracle they'd slept at all. But Magda had exhaustion on her side. And even Jay had managed to fall asleep in the coldest, darkest part of the night.

She'd had meetings for most of the day, her mind occupied with 24/7's latest expansion plans. The only disruption in the smooth flow had been Anne recounting an odd encounter with some cop who'd come to the office wanting to know whether they'd had some cold-case suspect as an intern. 'It was while we were still in the development stages, so obviously we didn't have any work placements running then,' she'd said. 'And you were travelling all week, so it was even less likely.'

'When was this?'

'May 2004,' Anne said, already turning over to the next page in their agenda for the morning. She gave Jay a look freighted with meaning. 'The week Ulf Ingemarsson died.'

Jay resisted a shudder. She remembered May 2004. What the hell was going on? Inquiries from strange detectives about her movements around the time Ingemarsson was murdered might not be quite as innocent as they appeared. As if she didn't have enough on her mind. No, in May 2004, she certainly wasn't wiping the arse of some graduate intern. 'Definitely not,' she said.

'Odd, though,' Anne said absently, scribbling some notes in the margin. 'After he'd gone, I remembered how I had to look out your travel receipts for that nice Spanish detective who came over after the girlfriend started kicking off. I knew exactly where you'd been and when, but he said he needed proof.'

Of course she'd known exactly where Jay had been. Anne's devotion was legendary. The lengths to which she would go to ensure smooth running for Jay's professional life knew no limits. Jay suspected that Anne was in love with her but that she preferred the attachment to be unrequited. You could never discover someone's feet of clay if you didn't actually push the relationship to intimacy, after all. It was an arrangement that suited both of them. But sometimes, like today, Jay wondered if she really knew everything Anne did in her service. She had a sneaky suspicion there were things she would be better off not knowing.

It was a relief to get away from the office and walk back through the quieter side streets of Knightsbridge. She never allowed the office to follow her on her walks; she'd mastered the art of letting her mind roam free. It always amazed her how London changed so quickly. You could go from the bustle and throb of a main artery to empty residential streets in a couple of minutes. Her own house felt like an oasis, the triple glazing keeping the city's rattle and hum at bay. But there were plenty of escapes from the bustle if you knew where to look. She remembered her first encounter with the London the tourists don't see.

After she and Louise had been split apart like a log under an axe, Jay had let herself be picked up at a gay night in one of the Oxford clubs by a good-looking butch in bike leathers. Susanne was a graphic artist who lived in North London and came to Oxford to visit her sister. They both knew there was nothing between them but fun, and there had been no hard feelings when Jay had abandoned Susanne at the party where she'd met Ella Marcus. Ella was the fashion editor of the kind of women's magazine that featured clothes no normal woman would ever wear. She was glamorous, prosperous and she liked Jay's mix of intellectual sophistication and cultural naivete. She enlivened Jay's final year at Oxford and initiated her into the kind of life it was possible to live in the capital. Theatre, galleries, art house cinema and an absolute commitment to the cutting edge. Once the mass market got its hands on something, it was over for Ella and her crew.

It had been fun while it lasted. Jay escaped with her heart and her pride intact, and the delicious knowledge that their relationship had scandalised some and annoyed others. They'd stayed in touch — Ella had been one of the first journalists to get behind doitnow.com and, later, 24/7.

Jay was still thinking about Ella when she got home. It was more enjoyable than the other things on her mind. She needed to maintain the distraction, but Magda was working late. Since she was in a romantic mood, she decided it might be time to navigate the treacherous shoals of what she could tell the world about how she and Magda had connected after so long. This would be tricky. Things she didn't want Magda to know; things she definitely couldn't afford for the world to know; and things that needed to be spun like spider silk to keep the rest of the world happy.

For a moment, she felt a flutter of annoyance. This was supposed to be her story, but even here she couldn't be honest. The truth was, the truth was impossible to share with anyone else. But maybe for now she could write the real story of what happened between the two of them on Magda's wedding day. Nobody else would have to see it, not even Magda. Jay could edit it afterwards. It might even be easier to do it that way. In black and white, she would recognise the things she must not say.

My first job at the conference that Saturday afternoon was to deliver a seminar on viral marketing. I'd be lying if I said I had enjoyed myself. Afterwards, trying to cool down on that stifling July afternoon, I walked back along the river, breathing in the same heavy scent of lilies that had perfumed those heady summer nights when I was a baby dyke. But before I could sink too far into the slough of memory, the grumble of car engines pulled me back into the present. I looked up the bank and watched a trail of cars led by a white Rolls-Royce drive past the Sackville Building and down to the meadow. Someone had mentioned earlier there was a wedding in college that afternoon. I couldn't have been less interested.

I carried on along the riverside to the end of the path, where steps cut into the steep grassy bank led back up towards the Sackville Building. I was about halfway up when the wedding party started to spill out of the narrow pathway from the meadow. The bride and groom led the way. He was the tall husky type, dark hair so freshly barbered I could see a thin white line between his tan and his hairline. Although it didn't look as if there were much spare flesh under his morning suit, he had the cheerful, chubby face of a pre-adolescent schoolboy, all turned-up nose, chin round as a plum and cheeks like a latex puppet. He resembled a Bunter whose postal order has finally arrived.

The bride could not have been a greater contrast. Tall, with most of her height in long shapely legs, she wore a sleeveless knee-length sheath of ivory slubbed silk revealing arms evenly tanned the same golden colour as her legs. The Cossack-style toque on her head was of the same material, toning perfectly with a swatch of honey blonde hair. I have always been a sucker for blondes with long legs. But this afternoon it was far, far more than a momentary stab of lust that knocked the feet from under me. Literally.

I knelt by the steps, ravished and ravaged. The instant I recognised the bride, some self-defence mechanism kicked in, telling me, 'It's not her, it's not her! You're hallucinating; you're kidding yourself. You can't recognise someone after sixteen years. She was only twelve the last time you saw her. This woman only looks like she could be her. Don't be stupid, get a grip!' I tried to convince myself and forced myself upright. I got as far as staggering up another step before the revelation that clinched it.

A couple of yards behind the bride were her parents. I might have made a mistake over Maggot Newsam sixteen years on, but I could never have been wrong about Corinna and Henry. Henry looked like an exaggerated version of his younger self, an exemplar of the wreckage drink makes of a person. But Corinna was timeless. Unmistakable, from the shellacked hair to the unfashionable shoes.

I stood there watching the wedding guests pass, a whirling kaleidoscope of memories blurring my vision. Snatches of music from Crowded House, Corinna's favourite band, kept fading in and out of my head like a badly tuned radio station. Dazed, I eventually managed to walk calmly up the remaining steps. One or two of the conference attendees sitting under the shade of the cedars looked at me oddly, but I did not know any of them, so I did not care.

I carried on past the Sackville Building to the punt station. Patsy Dillard, the conference organiser's wife, waved as I approached. 'Jay, we've got the cushions and the pole, but we didn't realise the punts are locked up,' she called. 'Can you go to the lodge and get the key for the padlock?'

'Of course. I'd be happy to.'

'Are you all right?' Patsy demanded when I came back with the key for the heavy padlock that fastens the anchor chain of the punt to the dock. `You look as if you've seen a ghost.'

I forced a smile. 'It's a long time since I graduated from this place, Patsy. It's wall to wall ghosts for me. I can barely see today for the shadows of yesterday.' I took the key back, but the lodge was empty so I left it lying on the counter where the porter was sure to see it as soon as he returned. It's funny, I remember all the details so vividly, even the small unimportant stuff.

Since I was near Magnusson Hall, I decided to slip inside and revisit the Junior Common Room. This had been the domain where I reigned as president of the JCR. The room was surprisingly little changed since the days when I presided over meetings there. Certainly the smell was still the same: stale cigarette smoke and alcohol overlaid with the synthetic lemon of furniture polish and a whiff of chlorine bleach wafting in from the neighbouring toilets. The dartboard was still there, though by then they had run to a spotlight.The table football still lurked in a gloomy corner by the bar, where they had replaced the wooden hatch that served in my day with a metal grille. Bizarrely, the chairs looked exactly as decrepit and uncomfortable as they always did; it was hard to believe they were the same ones, but equally hard to work out where the Domestic Bursar might have managed to acquire a roomful of doppelgangers, or indeed why she might have wanted to.

More importantly, the French windows were still there, leading out on to the long lawn shaded by a pair of cedars. That day they were wide open, providing a short cut for the wedding guests from the marquee to the toilets. I watched for a few minutes, eyes roving over the peacock colours of the guests. But the face I was searching for was nowhere to be seen. Oh well, I thought. Busy bride.

I turned away and walked back towards the front entrance of Magnusson Hall, making a detour to the ladies' toilets. Nothing much had changed there either. Everything was still institutional cream paint and white porcelain. Even the rape crisis line sticker was still there. Improbably, it looked identical to the one that had been there fifteen years earlier, its adhesive specially formulated to make it impossible for the cleaning staff to scrape it off.

Inside the cubicle, I sat for a few minutes, relishing the cool of the cistern against my back, feeling it lower the heat of my body by a degree or two. The sound of the next-door cubicle closing disturbed my relaxation, and a quick glance at my watch reminded me I didn't have much time before my panel on growing an online economy. I flushed the toilet and let myself out, turning on the tap to splash face and hands with refreshingly cold water.

As the other cubicle door opened, I raised my head and looked in the mirror. Beside my dripping face, the ivory silk and golden skin of Magda Newsam appeared like the mirage of an oasis. Our eyes connected in the mirror, inevitably. I watched Magda's expression change from indifference to shock. Her mouth opened as her face flushed.

I wiped the back of my hand over my mouth and said, 'Hello, Maggot.'

Magda shook her head in disbelief. 'Jay?' she said in the tone of childhood wonder, eyes still locked on mine, mouth moving hesitantly towards a smile.

I grabbed a paper towel without looking and sketchily wiped my face, keeping my eyes on Magda. I couldn't get enough of how lovely she'd become. Magda had been a gawky but interesting child, never called beautiful. She is now, and I saw that clearly, no doubt about it. Some strange twist of genetics had taken the unpromising raw material of her moderately attractive but very different-looking parents and turned it into planes and curves that photographers would fight over. I found it hard to credit that this beautiful face was smiling so radiantly at me.

'It is you, isn't it?' Magda yelped, her voice rising through an octave with excitement.

'Who else would it be with this face on?' I turned to meet the grin head on.

Magda took a step towards me, then stopped. 'I can't believe it,' she breathed. I imagined I felt the disturbance of the air on my skin.

'Why not?'

'It's like seeing a ghost. Some manifestation of my subconscious mind,' she said softly, her voice rich with music that had always been there, but which was now the controlled modulation of an adult, not the artless piping of a child.

'A dream?' I said, trying for sardonic and failing.

'Come true. You just disappeared out of our lives. One day, you were always there, then suddenly, you were gone. No warning. Just gone. No explanation, no goodbye.'

Magda wasn't the only one with vivid recall of the sudden exile. 'It wasn't my choice, Maggot,' I said softly.

'My God, nobody's called me Maggot for years,' Magda exclaimed, laughter bubbling under. 'Not even Wheelie. But what are you doing here? Is this a surprise for me? Did Ma invite you?'

Not bloody likely, I thought but didn't say. 'I'm here for a conference,' I told Magda. 'I had no idea about… all this,' I added, my voice cracking unexpectedly. Without conscious thought, we'd both moved a step forward. There were less than a dozen inches between us. I could smell something sharp and spicy on Magda's skin, like lime and cinnamon. I could even see the dilated pupils of her eyes. My stomach hurt.

'Jesus, Jay,' Magda said, her voice bewildered and tense. 'I wish to God you'd come back before this.'

'Me too,' I croaked. I wondered if my face mirrored Magda's mixture of awe, confusion, fear and wonder. 'Better late than never?' I asked. It felt like a plea, a prayer, a supplication.

'I got married this afternoon.' It sounded like a confession.

'Sorry. I should have offered my congratulations.'

'Oh Christ, what have I done?' Magda's voice was low and angry.

Suddenly, I felt afraid. The emotions dancing around us were too powerful, like live cables snaking across the floor, sparking and threatening. I took a step backwards. I did not want to walk that way again. I could see something opening before my feet and it looked more like a pit than a path.The last time, I'd sworn it would be the last time. 'Good luck, Maggot. It was good to see you,' I said, pulling down the shutters behind my eyes.

'Wait,' Magda cried. 'You can't just go. I've only just found you again.'

'It's your wedding day, Magda. There's a marquee full of people waiting for you.' Don't make me feel this, Magda. Please, was what I thought.

'Meet me later,' Magda said urgently, her hand reaching out and gripping my wrist. 'Meet me later, Jay. Please? Just so we can catch up? Swap addresses?'

'I'm not sure that's a good idea,' I said, dry-mouthed at the touch of her. I'd never felt the way I was feeling right then, never anything so instant, so terrifying.

Magda grinned, an open, unselfconscious beam of generous mirth. 'Of course it's not a good idea,' she said. 'But I'm the bride. You're supposed to humour me.'

I was hooked. 'Give me a time and a place.'

Magda frowned, as if calculating something. 'Nine o'clock? The far end of the meadow? You know the old boathouse? It's virtually fallen down now, but if you go round the blind side, no one can see you.'

So saying, she let me know that she understood that any meeting involving me was something no one should see.That was fine by me. The last thing I wanted was a confrontation with the mother of the bride. 'I'll be there,' I said, wondering even as I spoke whether I'd taken leave of my senses.

'Promise?'

'I promise.'

Magda's smile lit her up like a beacon. 'Till then,' she said, moving round me, still holding my wrist. Then her mouth was on mine.

It wasn't the sort of kiss a new bride should give anyone except her husband.

And then Magda was gone, just as suddenly as I had been excised from her life all those years before.

Writing it brought it all back in its immediacy. Jay could feel the shivery suddenness of it all, the bewildering baffle of emotions she didn't expect to experience in a ladies' toilet in Schollie's, of all places. And Magda's reaction. Still it blew her away to remember the look on Magda's face as all the pieces of her personal jigsaw finally fell into place. It was the kind of moment that happens in movies and musicals, not in real life. Or so she'd thought.

Until it had happened to her.

It had been a beginning. Standing by the sink in the ladies' toilets, Jay felt like she'd been sandbagged. But that was just the start. There were still miles to go before she would sleep.

2

Driving to from Glasgow to Skye on a sunny day was one of the more visually spectacular experiences of Charlie's life. Mountains and water, conifers and bracken, tiny communities dotted randomly on the landscape and — the icing on the cake — driving over the bridge across the Atlantic to the island itself. It was all picture-book perfect. The sort of experience that made the most hardened urbanite long for the simple life. Charlie understood herself well enough to know that she'd go crazy in a week, but for the duration of the long glamorous drive it was possible to enjoy the fantasy. It didn't hurt that she had Maria there to share the driving. But enjoying her partner's company didn't stop the perpetual consciousness that there was another woman absorbing her attention. What was it Lisa had said in her last email? Perhaps the clear island air will help you clear your heart. You can't move forward until you know what's past and what's coming with you on the journey. Sometimes things are only attractive because we know in our hearts we can't have them. I want you to be sure about all the possible consequences of your choices, Charlie. Some things there's no going back from.

As usual, Lisa's words left Charlie with more questions than answers. Was it all a game, or was it a series of tests designed to help Charlie draw out the right answers from inside herself? Whatever was going on, she needed to stop dithering. It was beyond unfair to Maria, who didn't even know her future was in the balance. Charlie had no instinct for cruelty and she was uncomfortable with what Lisa called the possible consequences of her choices. But Lisa was like a fever in her blood. The trouble was, Charlie didn't know whether she wanted to resist or to succumb.

They stopped to eat in Fort William, Maria leaving Charlie to finish her meal alone so she could have a quick walk round the town. She came back as excited as a small child. 'It's so different, ' she said. 'Why have we never come to the proper Highlands before?'

'We went skiing at Aviemore one year,' Charlie said.

'That's not proper, though. Skiing, you could be anywhere as long as the snow's half-decent. But this place is lovely. We need to do this sort of thing more often.'

'What? Spend two days driving on crappy roads to have one day on a Scottish island interrogating mountain men?' Charlie wasn't quite sure whether she was pretending to be curmudgeonly or if her grumpiness was genuine. Maria was right, though. There was something special about moving through this landscape, even if the reason for their trip was unusual.

'You're loving it,' Maria said. 'And it's your turn to drive. Once you're behind the wheel, you'll be too busy enjoying the challenge to complain about the crappy roads. Come on, let's go.'

Charlie thought it would be hard to beat the grandeur of the Great Glen, the hump-backed whale of Ben Nevis on their right as they drove up the lochside. But when she saw the Skye Bridge, she had to recalibrate her scale of breathtaking. Sleek, elegant and somehow organic, it had the wow factor. Beyond, the dark ridge of the Cuillins was outlined.

'How could you drive through all of this knowing you were going to kill someone?' Maria said. 'I mean, it's knockout, isn't it? It makes me feel insignificant. How can you experience all this and feel that your concerns are important enough to kill for?'

Charlie sighed. 'Not everybody has that reaction. Some people see the landscape almost as a challenge. "You might be big and you might be here long after I'm gone, but I'm going to make my mark too, just you watch".'

'Why couldn't she just kill her someplace ugly? Make it look like a mugging?'

'Because she's clever enough to know that the police are not stupid. Smart guys like Nick are trained to tell the difference between a real mugging and a fake one. If Jay had formed the intention of killing Kathy Lipson, it was a clever move to bring her to a place where there's so much lethal potential. People die on the Scottish mountains every year. Some of them from inexperience, arrogance and stupidity. But for some of them, it's just bad luck. Either way, you're dealing with a system that's predisposed to see accident rather than design.'

Maria nodded. 'So you're saying that Jay took advantage of the psychological environment as well as the physical one?'

'It looks that way.'

'It's a bit chancy, isn't it? I mean, a lot of things had to come together for it to work. The weather conditions, Kathy agreeing to such a potentially dangerous climb, there not being anybody else around.'

Charlie slowed as they crossed the Atlantic. 'We're actually driving over a finger of an ocean now. How amazing is that?' They were both silent for as long as it took them to reach land again. 'It wasn't as chancy as you might think,' she said. 'I managed to track down the Fatal Accident Inquiry online. There was a list of witnesses, the mountain rescue guys, so I was able to track a couple of them down. The Scottish court records system is amazing. Open access to all sorts of stuff-'

'Never mind that,' Maria interrupted. 'What do you mean, it wasn't chancy?'

'Her father gave evidence at the inquiry, and he talked about how experienced she was. She'd climbed in the Alps, in the Rockies, in the Andes. She'd done ice climbing before, and she'd always talked about doing the winter traverse of the Cuillins. So if Jay wanted to set her up, it was handed to her on a plate. If anything, Jay was the less experienced climber in winter conditions. Where she nearly got seriously unlucky was in getting hurt herself.'

'If she really did get hurt,' Maria said. 'She didn't break anything, did she?'

'No, she tore the ligaments in her knee.'

Maria snorted. 'It's easy to make out that a soft tissue injury's a lot worse than it really is.'

Charlie grinned. 'You're starting to sound like Corinna.'

'Well, the more you tell me about these so-called accidental deaths, the more unlikely they sound.'

'But there's no proof. It's all very suggestive, but there's nothing I can take to the cops and say, "Look, here's incontrovertible evidence that somebody committed murder." And without that, it's just a slander action waiting to happen.' Her voice trailed off as she tried to make sense of the sat-nav. 'I think I have to go left here,' she said.

Maria took the printed instructions out of the glove box. 'Yes. Then after four miles you turn right and the hotel's on the left.' She looked across the empty landscape of machair and rock. 'I'm starting to understand why she could expect to be undisturbed up there. The only things with a pulse are the sheep.'

'Yeah. Apparently some of the routes up here get busy, but only in the summer months. In the winter it's not hard to be alone in the Cuillins.'

'See, that's why I like walking, not climbing,' Maria said. 'Less opportunity to get shoved off a precipice if you get bored with me.'

Charlie forced a laugh. 'As if.'

'As if you'd shove me, or as if you'd get bored?'

'Both,' Charlie said firmly. And it was true. That was the worst of it. She wasn't bored with Maria. Just then she saw a signboard for the hotel. 'There it is,' she said. 'Glenbrittle Lodge Hotel.'

They turned off the single-track road towards a low stone building that sprawled across the flat bottom of a glen flanked on both sides by slopes of grey scree. Its slate roof and broad gables gleamed in the late afternoon light. 'It's amazing how many shades of grey and green there are,' Charlie said as they approached.

'Almost as many as there are shades of teeth,' Maria said. 'You'd be amazed at the colour chart for crowns and veneers.'

By the time they made it to their room, they were both charmed by the hotel. As they'd drawn up alongside the half-dozen cars already there, a young man in work boots, a kilt and a ghillie shirt had emerged and insisted on carrying their bags into a wood-panelled reception area where a log fire crackled and hissed in a deep stone fireplace. A decanter and glasses sat on the checkin desk, and before they could protest, they each had a whisky in hand. 'This started life as a hunting lodge,' the young man said, his accent revealing that wherever he was a local, it wasn't here. 'We kept the traditional feel as much as possible. We're pretty quiet this weekend, so we've upgraded you to the Sligachan suite. It's got a view right up the glen towards the Cuillin. I think you'll like it.'

He was right. Maria surveyed the bedroom with its kingsize four-poster and subdued tartan fabrics while Charlie checked out the marble and painted porcelain of the bathroom. 'Wow,' Maria said, crossing to the window and checking out the view. 'This is lovely, Charlie.' She swung round as Charlie came back into the room. 'Come here.' She opened her arms and Charlie stepped into her embrace, losing herself momentarily in familiarity, wishing this oddly tender moment could expand to push out any other thoughts or feelings. Maria nuzzled her ear. 'When was the last time we did something this romantic?' she whispered.

Charlie chuckled. 'What? Tried to nail a serial killer? I can't think.'

Maria laughed, pushing her away. 'Kill the moment, why don't you? So, what's the plan for this evening?'

'It would be good to see if any of the staff were around ten years ago. I was hoping for an aged retainer. Maybe the barman will be more of a relic. But right now, I want a bath and a nap before dinner.' She twitched one corner of her mouth in a half-smile. 'You could join me if you wanted?'

Maria didn't need asking twice. And if Charlie's mind slipped sideways a couple of times in what followed, she didn't think Maria noticed. There were worse sins, and she hadn't committed them yet, after all.

It was almost eight before they made their way down to the restaurant, another panelled room with beautifully laid tables gleaming with silver and crystal. Only two tables were occupied and the waiter seated them on the other side of the room so they had a sense of privacy. The mood between them was relaxed and intimate. Charlie felt less tense than she had for weeks. She picked up the menu and made her choices quickly. Then she looked around properly for the first time, shifting slightly so she could check out the other tables while Maria was still frowning over the possibilities.

It was as well that Charlie didn't have a mouthful of food or drink or she would have choked. At first, she couldn't believe her eyes. But there was no mistake. Across the room, two women were leaning across their table towards each other, talking animatedly in low voices. The younger woman, an unexcitingly pretty blonde in a multicoloured silky shirt, was a stranger. But sitting opposite her, apparently oblivious to anyone or anything else, was Lisa Kent.

If she'd just taken a punch to the head, Charlie couldn't have been more dazed. What the fuck was going on? Lisa knew her plans. But she'd said nothing to indicate that she would be here. Yet here she was, flirting with another woman in the very restaurant where she knew Charlie and Maria would be at dinner. It beggared belief. Suddenly realising that Maria was speaking, Charlie pulled attention back to her own table. 'Sorry?'

'I said, do you think they're batting for our team,' Maria said, inclining her head towards Lisa and her dinner date.

'If not, they should be,' Charlie said mechanically. 'What are you having? Have you decided?'

Afterwards, Charlie would remember nothing of what she'd eaten or drunk, except that quite a lot of red wine was part of the deal. Judging by Maria's rave reviews, the food had been exceptional, and she must have managed to keep up her end of the conversation. But all she could think about was Lisa on the other side of the room and what her presence might mean. Was Lisa crazy? Was she trying to create some monstrous confrontation? Or worse, some bizarre girlfriend-swapping encounter group? Or could it possibly be that she was as stricken with Charlie as Charlie was with her? She hadn't allowed herself to think that way before, but it was feasible. Wasn't it? But if Lisa was drawn so powerfully to Charlie, why had she brought someone else with her? Was she trying to make Charlie jealous? If so, she'd succeeded.

The other women left the restaurant before Charlie and Maria, nodding a polite greeting in passing as one does to fellow guests in a small hotel. 'They seem friendly,' Maria said. 'Maybe they'll be in the bar afterwards.'

'I'm not sure I want another drink,' Charlie said.

'I thought the point of us being here was for you to interrogate any passing islander?' Maria's voice was teasing. 'Or have you rediscovered a better reason for whisking your beloved off to romantic hotels?'

The idea of making love with Maria while Lisa was in the same building was impossible, Charlie realised. 'I think you've had the best of me,' she said. 'And you're right, of course. I shouldn't forget why we're here.' She drained her wine. 'Come on then, let's go and see if the bar staff were out of nappies when Jay and Kathy were here.'

The bar was a cosy room at the far end of the hall. Lisa and the other woman were sitting near the door, as far from the bar as possible. As they walked in, Lisa turned the full blaze of her eyes on Maria. 'Hi,' she said. 'Can I persuade you to join us for a drink? It seems silly to sit on opposite sides of the room.'

Before Charlie could refuse, Maria had already accepted the invitation. 'Thanks. I'm Maria, by the way, and this is Charlie.'

Lisa gave Charlie a welcoming smile, inclining her head. 'I'm Lisa. And this is Nadia.'

Nadia waggled her fingers at them. 'This is cool,' she said.

'Let me go and get some drinks,' Charlie muttered. 'What can I get you?'

'We're both drinking red wine.'

'I might as well get a bottle, then,' Charlie said, heading for the bar. There was nobody in sight, but a notice next to a bell push instructed her to press for service. She couldn't decide whether bewilderment or fear had the upper hand. Before anyone could respond to the bell, Lisa appeared at her side.

'I told Maria I'd help you choose,' she said.

'Are you fucking her?' It was out before Charlie could stop herself. Low and harsh, bitter and brutal.

'I could ask you the same question,' Lisa said. 'And it would be just as meaningless. We both know sex can mean everything or nothing. And we both know whatever is happening between us, it's about a lot more than sex. Smile, Charlie, Maria can probably read your body language at a hundred yards.'

Just then, the young man from reception arrived behind the bar. He grinned and said, 'Tonight I am the jack of all. What can I get you ladies?'

'We'd like a bottle of red. A Shiraz or something similar,' Charlie said.

'We like something fruity and chewy,' Lisa said with as much innuendo as a seventies comedian.

The barman blushed. 'I'll see what I can do,' he said, disappearing again.

'Why are you here?' Charlie said. 'And why are you pretending you've no idea who I am?'

Lisa smiled, her eyes sparkling with amusement. 'Relax, Charlie. You already played the incognito trick on me, remember? I thought it might be fun to turn the tables. And I wanted to see you. Is that so bad of me?'

Charlie felt herself softening. If Lisa's feelings were anything like her own, it made perfect sense. She could imagine doing the same thing. 'No,' she said. 'I just wish you'd given me some warning.'

'That would have taken all the fun out of it.'

'It's not a game, Lisa. Maria's here. How do you think she's going to feel down the line if I leave her for you and she remembers this weekend? She's going to feel humiliated.'

Serious now, Lisa nodded. 'You're right. I'm sorry. But I couldn't help myself. I know this is going to sound a little strange. But you know what I really wanted?'

'No, I don't. Because what is happening to me now is so out of my experience.' Charlie forced a smile in Maria's direction.

'I wanted to see what you're like when you're not with me,' Lisa said. 'I wanted to see the sides of you that I would never see otherwise. If I'm going to be with someone I want to make an informed decision.'

Charlie's reply was sabotaged by the reappearance of the barman with a bottle of Wolf Blass Shiraz. 'That'll do fine,' Charlie said. 'Charge it to my room.'

He reached for a corkscrew and set about the bottle. 'So I wanted to see you with Maria and I wanted to see how you chased your crazy chimera,' Lisa said.

'By "crazy chimera", are you referring to yourself or to Jay?'

'Oh, Charlie,' Lisa said reproachfully. 'Jay, of course. I wanted to try to understand why it's got such a grip on you.'

'Because I think Corinna's right.' Charlie shook her head at the barman. 'Just pour, I'm sure it's fine.'

'You see, that's what I don't get,' Lisa said. 'Why are you investing so much of yourself in this? It's going nowhere, but it's obsessing you and it's not where you should be focusing your energy.'

'What should I be focusing on?' Charlie said, responding to the flirtatiousness in Lisa's voice.

'Something that has the potential to go somewhere, of course.' Lisa smiled. 'I could offer some suggestions?'

Charlie could feel a blush climbing her neck. 'How can you be so sure it's going nowhere?'

Lisa's smile grew mischievous. 'Because you'd have told me if you were getting somewhere. You couldn't help it. You want to impress me, so you'd have told me.' She picked up the first two glasses and started to turn away.

'Not necessarily,' Charlie said. 'I think you're forgetting how wedded I am to the notion of confidentiality. I'm a medical doctor, it's an article of faith for me. And I've worked with the police enough to understand the importance of holding information close.'

'I still think you'd tell me,' Lisa said as Charlie signed for the wine and picked up the other glasses.

'Maybe you don't know me quite as well as you think you do, then.' And with a smile, Charlie walked past Lisa and headed for Maria.

3

Plugging back into that shocking surge of emotion had unleashed a flood of words. Producing this memoir had hardly been a struggle for Jay, but now she was writing with the brakes off, she was unstoppable. Of course, most of it would end up on the cutting-room floor, but there was something liberating about letting it spill. Just so long as it never made it out into the wild. She'd have to be careful with this. She was saving it directly to a memory stick rather than the hard drive; the memory stick itself would have to go into the safe-deposit box that was so secret it didn't even feature in her will. When she died, the contents would stay in limbo for ever.

Jay stood up and put herself through the sequence of stretches her osteopath had devised for her. The legacy of that terrible day on Skye had to be combated both emotionally and physically. Hence the osteopathy and the hypnotherapy. Luckily she had enough on her hypnotherapist to protect anything unguarded that might come out of her mouth while she was in an altered state. There was nothing quite like Mutually Assured Destruction to keep the power in a relationship balanced, whether it was personal or professional.

She rubbed some almond oil into her hands, enjoying the aromas of the essential oils of rosemary and black pepper she'd infused it with. She thought back to that afternoon in Oxford and how the minutes had dragged. Recalled the irresistible urge to share this extraordinary experience in spite of herself. As if she'd had a premonition of what might happen. Of what had happened.

Ten minutes before nine, I slipped down the back stairs of the Sackville Building and into the night garden.There was no one in sight. The conference attendees were drinking in the Lady Hortensia Sinclair Room or sitting out on the front lawn. The looming bulk of Magnusson Hall cut the wedding off from view. I moved into the shadows and flitted down the narrow avenue of plane trees that led to the meadow. Just before I emerged, I stopped and checked it out. There were a few dozen cars parked on the far side of the grass but they all seemed to be empty.

I stepped clear of the shadows and walked down the river bank to the dilapidated remains of the boathouse where Jess Edwards had met her end. More memories from the distant past surfaced, every bit as complicated as my memories of the Newsam family. After Jess's death, the college decided to set up a fund for a new, larger boathouse. Now, the Edwards boathouse graces the main stretch of the Isis alongside the older, richer colleges. Left empty, the old boathouse has mouldered to the point where it's caving in on itself like a decayed tooth. That night, I could see that the roof beam sagged hopelessly, the windows were long broken and the side walls bowed like the hull of a galleon. The collapsing structure hunched behind a paling fence that would have taken a determined squatter all of five minutes to penetrate.

I skirted the boathouse and found a small clearing a few yards wide between the fence and the spiked berberis hedge that marked the end of St Scholastika's domain. I'd brought a light wrap with me in the forlorn hope that the night might turn chilly, and I spread it over the ground. Not because it was damp, but because a bride shouldn't have grass stains on her dress. I leaned against a tree and waited, wondering if she would have changed her mind. Somewhere down the river, ducks splashed and cackled. I heard the heavy beat of a heron's wings, then the last wittering cries of the birds.

I didn't hear Magda approach, but she was right on time. In the beginnings of twilight, everything about her was heightened, as if someone had adjusted the contrast control of a TV. She'd changed into her going-away outfit, a simple dress of midnight blue silk with a full skirt. She'd taken off her hat and unpinned her hair, and it cascaded over her shoulders in gleaming waves the colour of pound coins whose initial brassiness has been blunted in the hand. The fading of bright sunshine brightened the blue light of her eyes and deepened the matt gold of her skin. Magda took a couple of steps towards me and smiled. 'You came,' she said quietly.

I shrugged away from the tree. 'It would be hard to break a promise made to you.'

'I think I've made a seriously bad mistake,' Magda said, taking another couple of steps forward.

It wasn't what I wanted to hear. I swallowed the lump that had lodged in my throat. 'I'll go, then.'

Magda shook her head and put a hand on my arm. Where the flesh touched felt like the burn of ice. 'Not about meeting you. About marrying Philip.'

Our eyes stared hungrily at each other. At that moment, the words didn't matter. Magda could have recited 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and it would have mattered as much or as little. All I was aware of was her touch, her face, her scent. Something was exploding inside my head and I couldn't make sense of anything except Magda's closeness. Knowing it was the most dangerous thing I'd ever done, I leaned into her and kissed her.

I thought we were never going to be able to stop. When we finally broke free, we were both trembling, our breathing ragged and noisy. 'Oh dear,' Magda gasped.'

I didn't mean…' I stuttered. 'I didn't mean that to happen.'

Magda touched my cheek with her fingertips, making my skin tingle. 'You'd have had to leave the country to prevent it.'

'Come and sit down,' I said, my voice thick and rough, like I'd never heard it before. 'We need to talk, Magda.'

We sat carefully on the wrap, side by side, my arm round her shoulders, hers round my waist. 'This didn't just come out of nowhere,' Magda said.

'It did for me.'

I could sense her smile. With her free hand, Magda fiddled in the evening bag slung across her body. She came up with a packet of Gitanes and a lighter then fumbled a cigarette out. She offered it to me but I shook my head. She gave a little shrug and lit it. The familiar aromatic smell hit me like a time machine. I hadn't smoked French cigarettes for ten years, but the taste was as familiar as my morning blend of coffee beans.

'Smoking's bad for you.' I was only half-teasing. Already I didn't want bad things to happen to Magda.

'I save them for special occasions. You remember these?' she asked. There was no need for a reply. 'You had no idea, did you? I worshipped the ground you walked on. When you and Mum went to the pub, I used to struggle to stay awake till you got home so I could sneak halfway down the stairs just to listen to your voice. I used to try and persuade Dad to take Mum out for the evening, so you would come and babysit. You were my first major crush.'

I took a deep breath, inhaling the second-hand tobacco taste. 'You're right. I had no idea. Eight years is a huge gulf at that age. I'm sorry, Maggot, I never noticed. I thought we just got on really well.'

'Which we did, of course. But I was crazy about you. If I was meeting Mum at Schollie's, I'd always try to get there early and hope that I'd see you. Then, suddenly, you were gone. One day you were part of the family, the next day you were anathema.'

'What did she tell you?' I really wanted to know.'

Patrick said you'd come to the door and Mum had told you a lie to make you go away.' Unconsciously, Magda had slipped straight into the dialect of childhood. 'I asked Mum what was going on and she said that she didn't want you in her home. She said she'd found something out about you and it meant you couldn't come to the house any more. I asked what you'd done that was so terrible, and she got all bad-tempered and said I'd just have to take her word for it.'

'And you never found out what it was I was supposed to have done?'

Magda chuckled. 'Not in so many words. But I read an interview with you a few years ago in a magazine where you talked about being gay. And that answered the question for me, really. Knowing Mum's views on "homosexuality".' She dropped her voice and stretched the word out syllable by syllable.

'And that's why you've married? Because Corinna hates gays?'

Magda hung her head. 'Sort of. It's what I do, Jay. I keep everybody happy. After you, I had crushes on other women, but lots of my friends did too. It wasn't exactly totally weird. But I had all that oppressive Catholic conditioning dumped on me. And then there were the parents. I've always had a really good relationship with Mum, and Dad's OK if you catch him before the fourth gin. But they're really anti-gay. Dad especially. He genuinely believes it's a mortal sin. So I never had the nerve to do anything about all these crushes I had.' She sighed. 'I just couldn't imagine the conversation. '

I understood. Better than she knew. I could never have had that conversation with my stepfather. Unlike Henry Newsam, he would have had no hesitation in trying to beat it out of me. And my mother wouldn't have stood in his way. Not when it came to following the word of God. 'And so now you've got married.'

Magda nodded, leaning into me. 'Philip's been asking me for ever. His baby brother was in med school with me, and we've sort of been going out for the last three years. We've only just started living together, but we've been an item, kind of. He's a nice man, Jay. He's kind. And he's undemanding. He's also as crazy about his work as I am about mine.'

'Which is?'

Magda gave a quick, puzzled frown. My stomach cramped. 'This is all new to me,' I said gently. 'I know nothing about the last fifteen years of your life, Magda.'

'Of course. Why should you? Philip's a partner in a specialist printing business. They produce a lot of financial instruments and confidential corporate stuff. And I'm a junior registrar in paediatric oncology. I work mostly with children who have been diagnosed with leukaemia.' She pulled a face. 'Another good reason for not experimenting with my sexuality. Hospitals run on rumour, and consultants don't like the combination of queers and kids.'

'Never been tempted?' I asked. I'll be honest, I was having trouble getting my head round the picture Magda was painting of an emotionally starved life.

Magda nuzzled my cheek. 'Of course I've been tempted,' she said. 'But I wimped out. You can sublimate a hell of a lot of sexual energy in the business of learning to become a doctor, you know. All that adrenaline, and the total exhaustion in between. It was just easier to go with the flow. Besides, it never seemed to be the right time and the right place with the right person. Until today.'

'It's your wedding day, Maggot,' I forced myself to remind her.

Magda sighed, a deep, empty sound that seemed to move her even closer to me. She flicked the end of her cigarette into the river. It was so still I could hear the hiss of the dying ember above the pounding of my blood. Then Magda looked up at me. There was still enough light to reveal her eyes glistening with tears. 'So why is it that I'd rather be here with you than over there with my husband?'

I closed my eyes. I didn't want to see Magda any longer. I couldn't handle the contradictory emotions tumbling inside me. 'Cold feet. That's all it is.'

'You know that's not true,' she protested. 'You feel it too. I know you do. You can't pretend you don't.'

'It's too late,' I said, my voice cracking under the strain. 'It's too late.'

Suddenly she was on her knees between my legs, hands gripping my shoulders. 'Don't say that,' she wailed, frustration mapped across her face. 'It can't be. I won't let it be. I've only just found you, Jay, I can't let you go.' She was almost sobbing, hair falling over us both like a curtain closing out the world.

I put my arms out to steady Magda. But she fell into me, pushing me back, body to body, the heat of our summer madness between us. 'Magda,' I protested. But it was a weak protest. My body was giving out a different message. We clung desperately to each other, like children before they discover inhibition.

'We've got to do something, Jay,' Magda moaned.

'You have to go back,' I said, gently rolling over and disengaging myself from Magda's grasp. It wasn't what I wanted. But what I wanted was probably not survivable. 'This is not the end, I promise you. But you have to go back now. You can't change the fact that you married Philip this afternoon. If he's the nice man you say he is, he doesn't deserve to be humiliated. Go back now, and call me when you can. Any time, day or night.' I groped in my pocket for the business card I'd put there earlier. The one with my private mobile number. I pressed it to my lips and handed it to Magda. 'Sealed with a kiss.'

Magda looked twelve again, about to burst into tears. But she took the card and tucked it into her bag. I checked my watch. It was just after twenty past nine. 'You've got to go, Magda. People'll be wondering where you are. Philip'll be wondering where you are.'

Magda nodded. 'You're right. Walk back with me?'

I smiled, but it was bittersweet. I thought I was done with hiding who I was and who I loved. But apparently not. 'Not all the way back. For your sake, not mine.'

'I know.'

We started back across the meadow, carefully not touching. There was no innocent contact possible between us.That much was clear. As we reached the shelter of the avenue, Magda gripped my wrist again, as she had earlier by the washbasins. 'This isn't a game, Jay. I mean this.'

'So do I. I never thought I'd fall in love like this again.'

Magda smiled. 'You said the L-word first.'

I truly hadn't meant to. And I'd regretted it the moment it passed my lips. Not because I didn't mean it but because I did. Still, love might well be a hostage to fortune, but I didn't think Magda was the person to use it against me. I returned her smile. 'One of us had to.'

'Right,' Magda said, suddenly sombre. 'One of us had to. Jay, this is scary. I feel out of control. Like we've started some chain reaction and I don't know where it'll end.'

'I know it's scary,' I said, stroking Magda's arm with my free hand. 'But I won't abandon you this time. I promise.'

Her breath exploded in relief. 'I've loved you for years, Jay.'

I moved closer, till my lips brushed her hair. 'I understand. I won't abandon you,' I sighed softly.

Magda released my wrist and without any further words, we walked up the twilight avenue to the gardens by the Sackville Building and into the shadows at the rear of Magnusson Hall. 'Chin up, Maggot,' I said, coming to a halt.

Magda looked over her shoulder as she rounded the corner of the building, her face ghostly in the cast of light from the porter's lodge, her smile a promise. Then she was gone, leaving me feeling dizzy and light-headed, wondering what I'd got myself into and how I was going to resolve it without Corinna assuming I was using her daughter to exact a long-delayed vengeance.

I turned away and walked into Magnusson Hall. This time, instead of going down to the JCR, I walked up to the first floor and followed the corridor down to the Mary Cockcroft Room, named after the college's first principal back in the 1920s and used for meetings and seminars.The Cockcroft was directly above the JCR, but only about half the size. Although it was almost dark, there was still light enough coming from the wedding party on the lawn for me to see that the room was in total disarray. Some sort of major refurbishment was clearly under way, with builders' and painters' bits and pieces scattered throughout. A couple of the windows were even out of their frames, the gaps covered with tarpaulins. Luckily, work on the deep pentagonal bay was either completed or had not yet begun, so I picked my way through the obstacles and crossed to the window.

Though there must have been nearly a hundred people milling around between the lawn and the marquee, I spotted Magda instantly, a measure of how tight we'd been drawn together. She was mingling expertly, a few words here, a laugh there, then subtly moving on to the next knot of friends or swirl of dancers pausing in their swooping polka to talk to the bride. As I watched, I felt dazed by her beauty and the change in circumstance that had brought it under my hand. It was almost more than I could credit.

Before she could start the next paragraph, Jay heard the distant sound of the front door closing. 'I'm home,' Magda called up the stairs. Probably just as well, Jay thought, saving the file and retrieving the memory stick. She slid it into her pocket and stepped away from the desk.

'I'll be right there, hon,' she shouted back, switching off the light as she left the office. It was a good place to stop, while things were still scary in a good way. Before they became terrifying for real.

4

Saturday

When Charlie woke, the light was too bright. Her head felt thick and heavy, her stomach uneasy. 'We're going to miss breakfast if you don't get out of your pit,' Maria said cheerily, one hand still on the curtain as she stared out at the view. She was wrapped in a bath towel, her hair a damp unruly mop. 'It's a gorgeous day.'

'Unh,' Charlie grunted. If she didn't move, it might be all right.

'I did think you probably should have passed on that last round,' Maria said, absolutely no sympathy in her face or her voice. 'But you seemed determined to drink your own body weight in Shiraz. It's not like you, Charlie. You generally know when to stop.'

'Yeah, well. We were having such fun,' she said tonelessly.

'Yes. They're good company, Lisa and Nadia.'

'Oh yes. Good company.' If you enjoyed spending your evening on tenterhooks, wondering whether the sky was about to fall on your head. Wondering whether she was revealing her true feelings every time she looked at Lisa. Wondering if Lisa was going to reveal her true identity, instead of hiding behind 'I'm a trainer. I help people develop a variety of people skills.' That Maria had not skewered such vagueness with her usual practicality still had Charlie reeling. It was a powerful reminder of Lisa's charisma.

Maria plonked herself down next to Charlie. 'Come on, babe. Time to get up. Look at me, showered already. I can't wait for breakfast. After that wonderful meal last night, it should be something really special. According to the room service menu, they have award-winning sausages and black pudding from Lewis.'

Charlie's stomach lurched at the very thought of black pudding from anywhere. 'I'll get in the shower,' she mumbled. Anything to escape Maria's relentless good cheer. She rolled out of bed, knowing it was fifty/fifty whether she was going to hold on to the contents of her guts. She made it to the shower, where things improved dramatically. They usually did, in Charlie's experience of hangovers. By the time she'd finished, the prospect of breakfast had grown markedly less unsettling.

The prospect of seeing Lisa, however, was as disturbing as ever. Hiding her feelings while scrutinising Lisa's every glance or remark for significance was exhausting. 'We should have ordered room service breakfast,' she grumbled as she dressed.

'That's what you said last night. God knows why, because you never want room service in a hotel. You always complain that it's never hot enough and they never get the order right.'

Seven years of negotiating Charlie's prejudices and preferences meant Maria was right, of course. 'I was a bit pissed. I suppose I fancied a lie-in,' Charlie said.

'Not much point when you have the mountain rescue guys coming at ten. While you're with them, I thought I might take a drive, see a bit of the island. Is that OK with you?'

Anything that took Maria out of the ambit of Lisa and Nadia was a major plus in Charlie's book. 'Fine.' She turned on the hairdrier, effectively ending the conversation.

To her relief, the dining room was empty when they walked in. Their table from the night before was the only one still set for breakfast. 'Looks like Lisa and Nadia had an early start,' Maria said. 'That's a pity. I was thinking about asking them if they fancied linking up this morning.'

Charlie hid her relief behind the breakfast menu, deciding to try her luck with the award-winning sausages and some scrambled eggs washed down with enough coffee to jump start her synapses. She tried not to think about the acid in Maria's freshly squeezed orange juice or the noise generated by her muesli crunch. Their meal was drawing to a close when Charlie's reprieve ended.

Lisa and Nadia drifted into the dining room. 'Morning,' Lisa said. 'You're very dutiful, getting up for breakfast. We were lazy and had it in bed.' She looked remarkably pleased with herself. Charlie was gratified to see Nadia was looking less thrilled with life. She had the faint pout of a woman who thinks she's not getting enough attention.

'I like my breakfast piping hot,' Charlie said. 'Always worth getting out of bed for.'

'What are your plans for today?' Lisa asked.

'Charlie's got some people to see this morning, so I'm going to go for a drive. What about you? You're welcome to join me, if you want.'

'That's very tempting,' Lisa said. 'Is this work then, Charlie?'

'I'm interviewing a couple of the mountain rescue team.' She'd managed to keep that out of the conversation the night before, she was pretty sure. Nadia looked as if she was about to pass out with boredom.

'Really? They have some sort of unique insight into abnormal psychology?'

'You'd be amazed,' Charlie said. 'They do have to deal with people in extreme situations. It can be very revelatory.'

'I suppose you have to manufacture things to keep yourself interested while you're waiting to find out your fate,' Lisa said with a sad smile. 'I know we didn't mention it last night, Charlie, but I am familiar with your situation.'

Nadia perked up. 'What are you on about? What's Charlie's situation?'

'I'm temporarily suspended from practising. I have a disciplinary hearing coming up,' Charlie said, wondering momentarily if this was Lisa's way of showing support. If it was, it backfired immediately.

Nadia's mouth opened and she covered it with her hand. 'Oh my God,' she said. 'I recognise you now. I thought you looked familiar. You're the one who got that bloke off who went on to murder all those other women. God. How do you live with something like that?'

'Charlie has nothing to reproach herself with,' Maria said, abruptly standing up. 'There's nothing clever or good about helping the prosecution convict an innocent man.'

'He wasn't very innocent, though, was he? He killed four women. And that's just what we know about,' Nadia said.

'He did not commit the first murder he was charged with,' Maria said. 'That's what everybody seems to forget.'

Nadia shrugged. 'But nobody else has been arrested, have they?'

'For heaven's sake, Nadia. We should stop talking about this,' Lisa said, visibly dismayed at the turn of the conversation. 'Thanks for your kind offer, Maria, but we're planning on making a full day of it. We're going up to Dunvegan Castle.'

'I'm sure you'll have a lovely time,' Maria said, her voice cool now. 'Charlie, you need to keep an eye on the time, your guys will be here soon.'

Charlie seized the chance to escape the room. 'I need to get my stuff. Thanks for reminding me. See you girls later.' And she was off, walking briskly out the door and trotting upstairs. She closed the bedroom door behind her with a sense of relief, squeezing her eyelids tight together to keep tears at bay. She felt like her emotions had been hurled into a washing machine on the spin cycle. It had been hard enough when she'd thought her feelings for Lisa were not reciprocated. But now that it seemed something significant was coming back at her, it was harder and harder to deal with the situation. The point where she was going to have to make a decision was growing closer. And whichever way she jumped, Charlie knew her present sense of being in hell would be a day at the seaside by comparison.

The two men sitting in the bar could hardly have looked less alike. One was short and wiry, folded into the chair like a jack-in-the-box waiting for the lid to lift. His wavy hair was black, his beard slightly ginger in the sunlight flooding into the bar. He had the raw-boned look of the Gaelic Celt, blue eyes dark and darting under a ridge of black brows. The other was much bigger, a Viking of a man with broad shoulders and chest. His red-blond hair was tied back in a ponytail, his thick beard a shade darker. His long legs sprawled carelessly at angles to each other. With their weathered skin and hundred-yard stares, they could have been any age from thirty to fifty. Charlie had no doubt that these were the men she was due to meet.

The small dark one jumped to his feet as she approached. The other, more languid, just leaned forward. 'Dr Flint?' the small one said, sticking his hand out to shake.

Charlie took it. 'That's right. You're Calum Macleod?'

He shook his head. 'No, I'm Eric Peterson. Everybody thinks I'm the local, but he is.' Now he'd spoken more than two words, it was evident that he came from much further south. Cumbria, at a guess. He jerked his head towards the other man. 'He's Calum.'

Calum nodded. 'Pleased to meet you,' he said, the soft sibilance of the islands evident.

Charlie ordered the Cokes they wanted and more coffee for herself then sat down. They went through the usual ritual of small talk, then after the drinks arrived with a plate of homemade shortbread, she took out her recorder. 'I hope you don't mind,' she said as they attacked the sugar-dusted biscuits. 'My memory isn't what it used to be.'

'You and me both,' Eric said. 'My wife says it's the drink, but I say it's because I've hit my head too often climbing. She says I've always been soft in the head. No respect, these local girls. You don't bring them up obedient enough, Calum.' He grinned, clearly used to being the cheerful life and soul of the party. Calum said nothing, settling for a delicate sip of his Coke to wash down the biscuit.

'So, I want to talk to you about what happened on Friday, 18 February 2000. Am I right in thinking you both remember that day?'

'I remember every rescue,' Eric said eagerly. 'I love to climb, but there's an extra rush that you get from going out there in extreme conditions, knowing somebody's life could depend on how well you do your job. I don't want to sound big-headed about it, but we do save lives out there, and that's a buzz like nothing else.'

Calum cleared his throat. 'You always remember when the mountain takes a life,' he said, his voice a soft, deep rumble.

'Well, yeah. Of course. It doesn't always have a happy ending. But we still got somebody off that day. And the lass that died' — the shrug of one shoulder — 'well, she was dead before we were called out. Nothing we could have done about that. These mountains, they're not to be taken lightly, you know.'

'When did you get the call-out? Do you remember?'

Eric looked at Calum, who nodded. 'I'm a teacher,' he said. Charlie struggled to get her head round that one. 'It was after the bell went. So, four o'clock. It's never good that late in the winter. You know it's going to be dark before you get on the hill.'

'Do you remember where the call came from? Was it the hotel here? Or the emergency services?'

'I never took the call. I just got a page.'

Eric bounced in his seat. 'I never took the call either. That was Gordon Macdonald. He was the on-call person for the team back then.'

'Is he still around? Could I talk to him, maybe?'

'He's dead,' Calum said. 'Car accident on the A82. Head on into a supermarket delivery lorry. Hellish.'

'Oh. I'm sorry to hear that,' Charlie said.

'But I remember Gordon talking about the call-out, later that night when we were all in the bar. He said it was peculiar. When we get a call, it's nearly always one of three sources.' Eric counted them out on his fingers. 'One: the emergency services get a call from the climber's mobile. Two: one of the other people in their party worries when they don't make a rendezvous. Three: the hotel or guest house or pub where they've left a climb plan and an ETA. But he said the call-out was wrong. It was a woman. She said she was calling from the hotel, here.' He waved his arm to encompass the bar. 'But we know all the staff here, and it wasn't anybody Gordon knew. She said she'd had a call that two of their guests were in difficulty on the In Pinn — that's the Inaccessible Pinnacle on the summit of Sgurr Dearg,' he added helpfully.

'She knows that,' Calum said. 'Gordon was uneasy about the call. So he phoned back. Only nobody put their hand up to phoning us. But right enough, they had a couple of guests who'd set off for the In Pinn that morning. So Gordon thought we should take a look.'

Eric picked up the story. 'It was a shit night. Really cold, snowing on and off. There was a wind coming off the north east like a knife. Not a night when we could call out the chopper. But we know the ground, so we made good time. It's not easy, looking for a couple of climbers on a mountainside in the dark and the snow. But the route up the mountain's reasonably obvious so we reckoned we were in with a shout if they were still on the hill. You'd be amazed how often we get called out for people that are sitting in some pub somewhere nursing a malt because they couldn't be bothered to get back to where they said they'd be.'

'We came up on the lassie a couple of hundred feet down from the main summit of Sgurr Dearg. She was in a bad way.'

'That's right. Shock, hypothermia setting in, and dragging one leg behind her like a useless lump of meat,' Eric said. 'We got the thermal wrap round her smartish, because obviously we needed to find out where her climbing partner was. We'd gone out for two women, but we'd only found the one. She was in a helluva state, but she told us right off. She'd had to cut the rope.' Even Eric shut up as he contemplated that.

'We all understood,' Calum said. 'It's something you think about. If you don't climb, you can't understand.'

'The way she explained it, it made sense,' Eric added. 'She didn't have any choice. Cut the rope or you both die. Cut the rope and one of you has a chance. To tell you the truth, we all felt for her. We knew she'd get stick, but there was nothing else she could have done. Not and lived.'

'Were you surprised that they were up there in those weather conditions?' Charlie asked.

Eric's face twisted into an expression of concentration. 'Not really. The forecast hadn't been that bad. The weather definitely closed in much worse than we expected that afternoon. And what you have to remember is that if you love to climb in snow and ice, there is nothing in the UK to match the Cuillin ridge in winter. Nothing. It's the biggest challenge in British winter climbing. The nearest you can get to the Alps.'

'So you didn't think it was selfish? Out of order, going up in weather like that, knowing that if anything went wrong it was putting you guys at risk?' she persisted.

'If you think like that, all climbing's selfish,' Calum said. 'I wouldn't quarrel with their choice that day.'

'They got unlucky,' Eric said. Out came the fingers again. 'One, the weather turned against them. Two, the lass Kathy, she slipped on the narrowest bit of a narrow ridge. Three, she hit her head so she couldn't help herself. Four, the other lass couldn't find an anchor for the rope. And five, the other lass dropped her backpack with all her gear on board so she had no equipment to get them out of the mess they'd gotten into. They were — forgive my French — fucked every which way. I tell you, we all pray we never have a day like that on the hill.'

'So you knew even then there was no point in looking for Kathy Lipson that night?'

Calum gave her an incredulous look. 'We knew she'd gone the best part of three thousand feet down a mountain. What do you think?'

'Our priority was getting the other lass off the hill and to hospital. You look to the living before you think about the dead,' Eric said. 'But we knew we'd be out there at first light. You don't want civilians stumbling across a body. Believe me, you don't want to think about what somebody looks like after a fall like that.'

He was right. Charlie absolutely didn't want to think about it. 'You said that Jay Stewart had dropped her backpack. Do you know how that happened?'

'She was spread-eagled across a ridge in the middle of a blizzard supporting another woman's entire body weight. The pack slipped through her fingers as she was trying to get access to her gear. Like Eric said, bad luck. Sometimes when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong.' Calum stared gloomily into his Coke, then knocked it back. 'Like dominoes.'

They all sat locked in glum silence for a long moment, then Eric looked around expectantly. 'You think they'd bring us some more biscuits if we asked?'

Charlie went off in search of more biscuits. She wasn't finished yet and if shortbread was what it took, she'd make sure they got it. When she returned, Calum was on his feet, examining an old map of the island that was framed on the wall. 'They're bringing some more,' she said. 'Did you ever find Jay's pack?'

'We found it before we found the body,' Eric said. 'It burst when it hit the ground. There were cams and hexes and nuts scattered all round, a split water canteen, all the usual stuff.'

'What about her phone?'

Calum turned back. 'It was near the backpack. Busted to smithereens. It looked like it had come flying out on the way down.'

'That's right,' Eric said, excited at having his memory jogged. 'She said it had been in a side pocket on its own.' He caught Charlie's look. 'What? You thought we wouldn't ask about a phone? We're not new to this, you know. Out here, it's a bit like the Wild West. The cops can't be everywhere so we've got to weigh in and do what we can to help. So we ask questions if there's anything needs explaining. And Gordon was still trying to make sense of the funny phone call. He wondered if she'd maybe called a pal or something. But she said no, she'd lost the phone before she could use it. So we were none the wiser.'

She could have been lying, Charlie thought. Maybe she did make a phone call. But if you're hanging off a mountain with your business partner on the end of a rope, who are you going to call? 999 was the obvious answer. Charlie couldn't imagine calling anything else. Even if you couldn't do that with a sat-phone, which she didn't know anything about, surely there was an operator you could contact? And a sat-phone operator wouldn't need to pretend to be calling from a hotel on Skye. Nothing made sense, and all Charlie's instincts told her that when nothing made sense, something was going on that shouldn't be.

'I know this is maybe going to sound like a strange question. But apart from the phone call, was there anything about what happened that day that seemed unusual to you?'

Eric frowned and munched another biscuit while he thought about it. Calum chewed on a fingernail. 'No,' Eric said at last. 'They were just really, really unlucky.'

'Except one thing was lucky,' Calum said.

'What do you mean?' Eric said. 'It was a perfect storm. All the crap came at them together. I don't see how you can say they got lucky.'

'I didn't say that. I said one thing was lucky.'

Charlie decided it was time to step in. 'What was that, Calum?'

'It was lucky the knife wasn't in the backpack, wasn't it?'

5

Sunday

Sunday morning was infinitely better than the one before. Thanks to some deft footwork, Charlie had avoided Lisa until last thing in the evening. Maria had returned to the hotel at lunchtime, bubbling with delight at the beauty of the landscape. Meanwhile, Charlie had managed to book a table for dinner at another hotel whose restaurant was said to be in the top twenty in Scotland. After lunch, they went for a walk up Glen Brittle, following in the footsteps of Jay and Kathy ten years before. Even though they barely climbed a few hundred feet, they had a sense of the challenge and the grandeur of the Cuillin ridge. 'I can see how people want to come back again and again,' Maria said. 'Places like this, they get under your skin.'

'We'll come back another time,' Charlie promised. 'When all this is behind us and I'm practising again. We'll rent a cottage and walk in the mountains and eat fabulous meals and sleep like babies.'

Maria laughed. 'And they say romance is dead. I was thinking we could make mad passionate love in front of a roaring fire.'

Charlie put an arm round her and hugged her. 'That too.' She wished she could have spoken without ambivalence, but until she could resolve her feelings for the two women in her life, Charlie would have to resign herself to that.

When they got back to their hotel room, Charlie sprawled on the chaise longue and revealed her plans for the evening. 'It's quite near so we don't have to set off for an hour or so.'

'We could go down to the bar for a drink.'

Again, that ambivalence. Charlie longed to see Lisa, but the stress of being in the same room with her and Maria was impossible to negotiate with equanimity. The bar for a drink was the last thing she wanted, with the prospect of Lisa and Nadia returning at any minute. 'No, I'll be driving and I want to save myself for some really good wine with the meal. Besides…' Charlie stretched to reach her backpack. 'For some reason, I've been avoiding this. But I think I've got to the point where I have to deal with it.' She pulled a book from her bag and waggled it at Maria. 'Unrepentant, by Jay Macallan Stewart.'

Maria pulled off her sweater and began to undo her trousers. 'I know why you've been avoiding it,' she said.

'Why? And by the way, I meant it. I need to read, Maria. And you're distracting me.'

Maria poked her tongue out at Charlie. 'This is not for your benefit. If you're going to read, I'm going to soak my weary muscles in the bath. The reason you've not buckled down to Jay's book is very simple.'

'I thought I was the psychiatrist round here? What's the reason?'

Maria slipped out of her trousers. 'You're scared you'll like her.'

'You think?'

'I do. Because if she charms you with her misery memoir, you're going to struggle to carry out Corinna's mission to split up her and Magda. You know it's true.'

Charlie, who hadn't really considered why she was finding lots of excuses not to read Jay's book, couldn't fault Maria's reasoning. It was reassuring to be known so well. 'You could be right,' she said.

By the time Maria emerged from the bathroom, Charlie was midway through Jay's early years, notable for the quantity of drugs that seemed to have flowed through the bodies of her mother and a succession of hopeless boyfriends. It was a disturbing narrative of a downward spiral seen through the uncomprehending eyes of a child. Jay's mother Jenna had started off as a nice middle-class girl who had been carried away by the spirit of the sixties. The Isle of Wight festival in 1968 had changed the path of her life, swinging her out of the gravitational field of Home Counties suburbia into the orbit of musicians, artists and writers.

It had probably been quite cool to begin with, Charlie thought. But the drugs became more important to Jenna than anything else, and gradually, the quality of her company diminished. The rock stars and published poets and exhibited artists had moved onwards and upwards and she'd fluttered downwards. By the time Jay had been born in 1974, Jenna had been living in a squat and working on a stall in the fledgling Camden Market.

They'd moved from place to place, from city to country and back again. From the few photos, it was clear that Jenna had been a beauty, even ravaged by the drugs. Jay's childhood milestones had been the succession of different men and different places to live. She'd never been enrolled in school but nobody ever came looking for her because Jenna had never registered her birth. Jay recounted one conversation she'd overheard in which the latest boyfriend had been berating Jenna because she didn't get child benefit like the other mothers in the caravan of travellers they were with at that point. 'That's a small price to pay for freedom,' Jenna had said. 'My child can float free in the world. She has no shackles to the state.'

Because nothing was ever constant, because drugs are unpredictable, because Jenna would do almost anything for the next fix, Jay saw more than any child should. She knew about going to bed hungry. She knew about watching her mother being beaten by men. She knew about women being forced into sexual activity they had not consented to. And somehow, in the middle of all that, she taught herself to read. She learned not just how to survive but also how to protect herself. She knew kids who were sexually abused. She watched the predators single them out. And somehow, Jay learned how not to be the one who was chosen.

Charlie found it all too credible. There were moments where her professional experience kicked in and she understood that Jay was ascribing to herself judgements that could only have been made in hindsight. Like claiming to have recognised at the age of only seven that what she had was not freedom but a prison of ignorance.

I spied on other children. Sometimes it was easier than others. We lived for a while in a caravan on the edge of a wood somewhere in Somerset. Jenna's boyfriend was called Barry and he worked sometimes in the pub in a village nearby. I followed him one evening when he was walking through the wood to work so I learned the way to the village. Because the wood came right up to the edge of the houses, spying was easy.

Their lives were obviously very different from mine. They wore the same clothes every day to go to school. I couldn't understand that. Sometimes I wore the same clothes for a few days at a time, but not every single day. And other kids called me names for it.

Whenever these children came home, someone gave them a drink and something nice to eat. They didn't have to scavenge or settle for whatever they could find. And they looked like they just took it for granted, as if there was no question about that being how it should be.

They got to sit and watch TV by themselves, which meant they got to choose what they wanted to see. Sometimes there were two or more rooms with TVs in. I was used to having to put up with whatever Jenna and the boyfriend wanted to watch. And sometimes their choices were incomprehensible to me. Especially the porn, which none of the kids I spied on ever watched.

I should remind readers that, back in the seventies, porn was a very different experience. For a start, adults had pubic hair. You never really saw an erect penis either. There was a lot of soft focus, terrible muzak and acting that even I recognised was desperately bad. Compared to what you can see on terrestrial TV now, never mind the internet, it was pretty innocuous. Still, I probably shouldn't have been watching it.

It was fascinating stuff, Charlie thought. Literally fascinating. You couldn't stop reading because you wanted to know where Jay was going to take you. She had the knack of pinning her extraordinary experiences to the stuff of ordinary life. There were enough of these tangents to make the reader feel that this peculiar life could almost have happened to them. The counterpoint to that was the way she constantly contrasted her life with mainstream middle-class experience. It had the flavour of Craig Raine's famous poem about the Martian writing a letter home. The reader clearly understood that Jay had spent a lot of her early life trying to make sense of things that had no correspondence in her own world.

'How is it?' Maria had asked.

'I'm not sure whether I like her, but it's impossible not to admire her. The squalor and chaos of her early years make you want to weep for her. She didn't just survive, she's built a life that would have been unimaginable to her as a child. I can't wait to get on to the transformation.'

'You mean when she went to Oxford?' Maria said, throwing her towel over a chair and strutting naked across the room to put on fresh clothes.

'No. That's where it ends. I'm talking about before that. Her mother went from hapless junkie hippie to born-again Christian. And not just any old Christian. She plunged head first into one of the more repressive sects of evangelicals. Clearly someone who was hopelessly addicted to addiction. Heroin or Jesus, didn't seem to matter much.'

'Woo-hoo. That must have been some transition. If you want, I'll do the lion's share of the drive tomorrow, then you can carry on reading.'

'I could read it aloud if you like,' Charlie offered, marking her place with a hotel postcard and putting the book away. Maria did an impression of Munch's The Scream. 'OK, I was only joking. You can have Joan Osborne and Patty Griffin all the way to Fort William.'

The restaurant had lived up to its online reviews. They both chose a stew of local seafood to start with and exclaimed over its richness and the depth of its flavours. Venison followed with spiced beetroot and lemon thyme mash. When she tasted the meat, Charlie actually groaned aloud. They finished with cheese and Maria kept making small moaning noises as she savoured each morsel. 'I wish I was still hungry so I could eat it all over again,' Charlie said.

They'd planned to go straight to their room when they returned to the hotel but that was when Charlie's luck ran out again. As they walked in the door, Lisa emerged from the ladies' toilets. A radiant smile lit up her face. 'How lovely to see you both. We thought we'd missed you. We're in the bar. Come and have a drink?'

Charlie said, 'No, thanks,' as Maria said, 'That sounds nice.' They looked at each other and laughed.

'Seven years and we're still two minds with but a single thought,' Maria joked.

'I'm really tired,' Charlie said. 'I just want to go horizontal. Sorry.'

'That's OK,' Maria said. 'I want a brandy, though. Why don't you go on up and I'll get myself a drink and join you?'

Charlie, with visions of Lisa snagging Maria and drawing her into late-night conversation, said, 'It's OK, I'll wait for you, we can go up together.'

'I'll keep you company while Maria's getting served,' Lisa said quickly.

'What about Nadia? Won't she be wondering where you are?'

'I'll tell her,' Maria said over her shoulder as she headed for the bar.

'You look delicious this evening,' Lisa said. 'Good enough to eat.'

'Don't,' Charlie sighed. 'I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. I can't cope with having both of you under one roof.'

'I'm sorry. I thought you might enjoy the frisson of knowing I was near.' Lisa looked contrite. 'I see now I misjudged things. But I'm not sorry that I've had the chance to see you.'

Charlie gave her a beseeching look. 'Please. I can't do this now.'

Lisa gave Charlie a sad-eyed look, the kind of up-and-under that Princess Diana always used to such effect. 'I understand. Believe me, I know how hard it is to resist.' She flashed a smile. 'So how did your pursuit of the mountain rescue team go? Did you manage to uncover new evidence that eluded the police and the coroner all those years ago?'

Charlie made a wry face. 'Much safer ground. Actually, they don't have coroners in Scotland. And as it happens, I did find out one or two things that seem suggestive.'

'Really?' Lisa said, with the appearance of genuine interest. 'You found the smoking gun?'

'If I was Sherlock Holmes and you were Watson, I would say something like, "There was the curious incident of the phone call to the rescue services from the hotel." And you would say, "What about the phone call to the rescue services from the hotel?" and I would say, "There was no phone call to the rescue services from the hotel."'

Now Lisa looked bemused. 'I'm sorry, you've lost me.'

'There was something odd about the phone call that set off the rescue alert for Jay and Kathy. The source wasn't what it purported to be.'

Lisa's mouth quirked in dismissal. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'I don't know. Then there's the convenient matter of the knife.'

'Do you have to be so cryptic?'

Charlie laughed. 'Yes, I do have to be so cryptic because it's fun. But then, you know that. You are the queen of cryptic. The knife is significant because when Jay dropped her backpack, she lost every single piece of equipment that might be useful, including her sat-phone. All except her knife, which luckily was in her jacket pocket.'

Lisa laughed and wagged a finger at Charlie. 'Talk about grasping at straws. All sorts of people carry a Swiss Army knife or something similar in their pocket when they go out walking. It's hardly suspicious.'

'I never said it was suspicious. I said it was suggestive. It's what you would do if you were planning to stage an accident.'

Lisa shook her head indulgently. 'I'm beginning to wonder if playing detective has loosened you from your moorings.'

Charlie gave a sad little smile. 'You were the one who did that, Lisa.'

Lisa put a hand on her arm. 'And you know that's not a one-way street, Charlie. You know that.' Her voice was soft and seductive and in spite of her determination to stay cool, Charlie's flesh tingled. What saved her was the sight of Maria emerging from the bar with a crystal brandy bowl in her hand. Lisa let her hand fall away without any fuss and stepped back.

'I told Nadia you were just coming,' Maria said, slipping her free arm through Charlie's and steering her towards the lift. 'Good night, Lisa.'

As the lift doors closed, Maria giggled. 'Nadia's got a face like thunder. She's not keen on being left sitting alone in a busy bar, not when she thinks she's the trophy girlfriend.'

'She really thinks that?' Charlie couldn't stifle a laugh.

'I reckon so. Oh, what it is to be young and full of illusions. She'd better watch her step, that one.'

'Nadia? Why?'

'That Lisa. She's not somebody you'd want to mess with.'

Clever Maria, Charlie thought. Maybe we should do a job swap. 'Well, chances are we'll never have to see them again.'

And so the evening had ended. They'd fallen into bed, still too full for anything but sleep. Waking with a clear head, the prospect of finishing Jay's book ahead of her, Charlie finally began to see how things might be made to come together.

6

They were on the road by ten. As if to make the leaving easier, the weather had changed. Mist and rain covered the landscape in a grey veil, turning the Cuillins into a vague looming presence in the distance. 'Nick's in court tomorrow. I think I should go down to London and talk to him,' Charlie said gloomily as they crossed the ocean back to the mainland. 'We need to make a decision about how much further we can pursue this. And what we do with our pitiful findings. Not a lot, I suspect.'

'It's not all been wasted,' Maria said. 'You've re-established contact with Corinna and Magda. And we've had a glorious weekend in Skye.' She took a hand off the wheel to pat Charlie's thigh. 'And it's taken your mind off the other shit. This has been the first time in a while when you seem to have let go of what's hanging over you.'

'Maybe I should start offering it as an alternative therapy,' Charlie said drily. 'Immerse yourself in a wild-goose chase. Perfect for taking your mind off what's oppressing you. Now, put your foot down and drive. I'm going to immerse myself even deeper.' She pulled Unrepentant from her jacket pocket and found her place.

Afterwards, when I asked my mother why we'd gone to see Blair Andreson in the big tent at Sunderland, the only possible answer was the one she always gave: because God called us. That's probably as far from the truth as it's possible to get.

By the time the American evangelist Blair Andreson launched his 1984 crusade to the UK, our lives had dipped to an all-time low. We were living in a squalid caravan encampment on the outskirts of one of the big towns in Teesside. I'm not even sure which one. The police and the local residents waged a constant war of attrition against us. I can't say I blame them. I'd probably do the same myself. We were not a romantic New Age camp of people who believed in beautiful things. We were scum. My mother was selling sex to keep herself in drugs. I was running wild with a bunch of other kids, stealing food and money whenever I got the chance.

We went to the conversion service at Andreson's big top with a couple of other women from the site. I suspect our intentions were criminal. They must have seen a way to make money out of the service, picking pockets or stealing collection plates. I don't know for sure because nobody confided in me. It was a cool afternoon in July but the tent was packed, the air heavy with the smell of too many bodies crammed together. My mother and I were sitting towards the back of the steeply banked seats, letting Andreson's hysterical rhetoric wash over us. At least, I thought that was what was going on. I was completely unmoved by the oratory. I'd far rather have had a lamb kebab than be washed in the blood of the lamb.

But something happened to my mother that afternoon. All she would ever say was that she was touched by the hand of God. I wanted to know what it had felt like. Whether it was a sudden, blinding revelation or a gradual, creeping realisation that there was a very different path open to her. But she would never go into detail. 'Filled with the spirit'was another of her meaningless phrases that was meant to make clear to me what had happened to her.

From where I was sitting it was more like demonic possession. When Andreson called upon people to come forward to be received by God, my mother stood up like an automaton and walked to the stage like she was sleep-walking. I assumed it was part of a scam, so I just sat there. Waiting for it to be over.

She looked very frail up there beside Andreson, who had the bristly pink sheen of a prize pig. She knelt before him and he placed his hands on her head, giving her a full measure of the mumbo jumbo. Then she was led away by two of his acolytes, taken off through the curtains at the back of the stage. At that point, I was just bored. I was barely ten years old and watching a bunch of weirdos being born again was not my idea of a good time.

After what felt like half a lifetime, we all had to pray together, then we got to sing a rousing hymn, something about God walking beside us on the hard road of life. And then it was time to leave. An army of clean-cut young men in suits lined the exits with buckets for our donations. I was impressed with the amount of money they were scamming. Whatever Jenna and her pals had in mind, they'd picked a target that had plenty to go round. And weren't they supposed to be all about sharing in Christ's bounty, after all?

I hung around outside the tent but after the audience had emptied out, I didn't know where to go. In the end, I went up to one of the lads with the collecting buckets. 'My mum went up to the stage,' I said. 'And she hasn't come out.'

He nodded, as if this wasn't an unusual occurrence. 'Coming to the Lord can be an overwhelming experience,' he said, trying to sound important and portentous. 'If you think about it, being born the first time is a pretty traumatic happening. The second time isn't any less momentous.'

Even at ten, I wanted to slap him. 'But where's my mum?' I said instead.

'Come with me,' he said, leading me round the back of the main tent to a smaller enclosure. Inside, small knots of people were kneeling together. Blair Andreson was moving from group to group, laying his hands on whoever was at the heart of the group. After the bright lights and noise of the circus tent, this place felt very peaceful and cocooned. It took me a few moments to spot my mother, but at last I saw her in the far corner, being tended to by three other women. I had no idea what she was up to. Most of our scams were simple and quick. I didn't know what was going on here or why it was taking so long.

I started weaving my way towards Jenna, but I'd hardly taken a step when Blair Andreson himself blocked my path. 'Now, who do we have here?' he said in the deep rich voice that seemed to fill whatever space he occupied.

'You've got my mum over there,' I said. 'I want to go to her.'

'Your mom's having a pretty intense encounter with her Heavenly Father right now,' he said, taking a firm grip of my shoulder and steering me towards the entrance. 'Howsabout I get somebody to get you something to eat, then when your mom's done here, we'll come get you?'

It wasn't a suggestion. I thought about running for it but there was nowhere to run to. I didn't know where the other women from the camp had got to and I had no idea how to find my way back. So I pretended to be meek and mild and let one of the young men take me to another tent that was set up like a buffet. There were long tables of sandwiches and salads. And piles of muffins, which I had never seen before. I'd seen other kids tuck into home baking before — fairy cakes and butterfly buns — but never anything on this scale. So it wasn't much of a hardship, waiting there among the born again. I will give them credit for leaving me alone and not trying to cram Jesus down my throat along with the grub.

Eventually, somebody came for me and took me back to the tent. Jenna looked dazed, like she sometimes did when she'd smoked heroin, but when I appeared, she smiled and pulled me to her. I was surprised. She wasn't usually that demonstrative. 'Something wonderful's happened, Jennifer,' she said, stroking my hair, which was probably a mass of greasy rats' tails. 'I've accepted Jesus into my life.'

If you've ever seen The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you'll have an idea of how I felt right then. I just wanted to get Jenna away from there and back into our scrappy shitty life where at least I knew what was what. 'When are we going home?' I asked her.

She smiled then, one of those radiant, peaceful smiles you get from people with a poor connection to reality. 'We're going to live in a new home, Jennifer,' she said. 'In a proper house. We're part of the Christian family now.'

And that was how I learned my life was being turned inside out.

Charlie looked up from the book. 'I tell you, she knows how to keep you reading. She gives you enough to latch on to but not so much detail that you get bogged down. And I suspect she uses a trick that comes up a lot with psychopathic personalities. And politicians. Not that I'm suggesting there's anything in common between those two groups.'

'What's that?' Maria turned down the volume on the CD player.

'Managing to give the appearance of candour without actually revealing anything she doesn't want you to know.'

'We all do that, don't we? We always want to give a good impression of ourselves.'

'Yes, but with most of us, it's not a consciously constructed process. And it ends up being a bit hit and miss. Sometimes we end up saying or doing something that can give away rather more than we intended. But with this narrative, it's all perfectly calibrated. The charm never slips. Every bad thing Jay has a hand in is somehow transformed into a scenario where she is the heroic victim.'

'Isn't that a contradiction in terms? Heroic victim?'

'Not the way Jay writes it. And she's far from alone in that. I've come across a lot of them over the years.'

'You think she's a psychopath?'

'I'm not sure. But I do think she has some degree of personality dysfunction. It's not surprising, given her early life. And what I sense is about to unfold now.' Charlie turned back to the book and read on. Jay and her mother were taken to live with a couple attached to the Andreson crusade, the inappropriately named Blythes. Mrs Blythe took Jenna back to the camp the next day to fetch their belongings. Jay was shocked by how little they brought back. Most of her clothes and books had been abandoned. Apparently they were 'inappropriate'.

Life became a tight little tunnel of school, church, Bible study and bed. The Blythes, it turned out, were members of a Pentecostal sect so restrictive and narrow that they made Andreson's evangelicals look positively liberal. Jay was like a caged animal at first, raging against the constraints and fighting against every curb on her freedom. But it was useless. The more she struggled, the tighter the rules became. And Jenna was no help. She'd found her new drug of choice and she couldn't get enough. The threat that ultimately brought Jay to heel was that she would be sent away to a Christian boarding school where she would be forbidden to have contact with her mother. Jay was tough, but the prospect of losing the only constant in her life was too much. So she buckled down, hating her life with a rage whose fires were never banked down.

The thought I clung to was that it couldn't last for long. Nothing in my life ever had. Men came and went, friends came and went, the rooms where I fell asleep changed so often I seldom knew my address. Jenna would get bored, or someone would come along with better drugs or a better pitch and it would be all change again. So I believed all I had to do was wait it out.

It never occurred to me that it could get worse. We'd been with the Blythes about eight months when a new man joined our prayer circle. Picture an ascetic saint in a medieval Italian painting and you'll get a sense of Howard Calder. Only Howard made those holy hermits look like party animals. Pleasure was an invention of the Devil, Howard believed. We were put on earth to dedicate our lives to the greater glory of God. Living among the ungodly was the Lord's way of testing us. I thought he was a royal pain in the arse from the first.

But Jenna didn't. Like any addict, she was after the pure stuff. And Howard Calder was definitely pure. I didn't cotton on to what was happening at first. My experience of Jenna and courtship was that it generally took a few hours plus some drugs and alcohol. From first shag to him being a fixture was often only a matter of days. So it didn't register that Howard coming round and being polite to my mother was the trailer for the main feature — marriage. When she told me they were getting wed, I didn't believe her at first. When it dawned on me that it was for real, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

I had thought nothing could be more joyless than the Blythes' house. That was before I saw inside Howard's two-up and two-down terrace in Roker. It was like walking into a black-and-white film — no colour anywhere. White walls, beige carpets, beige three-piece suite, white kitchen, white bathroom. Nothing on the walls except Bible texts. I swear the most visually exciting moment was when he turned on the gas fire and flames of blue and red and yellow licked at the discoloured ceramic element. 'This will be your new home,' he announced. 'You will address me as Mr Calder. I'm not your father and I won't have people thinking I am.'

'Bugger that,' I said.

I'd never been hit so hard in my life. He punched the side of my head so fast and so brutally that I bit my tongue. I stood there, dazed, my ears ringing and my mouth filling with blood. I'd been smacked before, I'd been in plenty of fights and ended up on the wrong end of bigger kids. But I'd never been assaulted by an adult with such ferocity. And Jenna let him do it without a word.

'That child has the Devil in her,' he said. 'She needs to be brought to the Lord.'

And my mother, by now in complete thrall to Jesus and his Heavenly Father, agreed. My mother, who had had the occasional violent man in her life, but who had never tolerated anyone who even threatened to raise a hand to me. My mother, who even in her most drug-addled state had told me I had the right to be my own person, stood back and let this fascist bully punch me in the head.

I'm a quick learner. I decided I wasn't going to give Howard Calder the excuse to do that to me again. I had better self-preservation skills at ten than most people acquire after a lifetime. And I was still, against all odds, convinced that one day Jenna was going to wake up and go 'What the fuck?' and spirit the pair of us out of there. So I did what I was told. I went to church and didn't laugh at their preposterous pronouncements. I did Bible study till my eyes smarted. I learned to pray and sing their stupid bloody happy-clappy songs.

My secret refuge was the fiction section of the public library. I was pretty safe there, because the members of the Bethany Pentecostal Church of Jesus Christ the Saviour thought the reading of fiction was like opening the door and inviting the Devil in for tea. There was an alcove at the far end of the fiction shelves with a couple of chairs. I'd sneak down there for half an hour after school and read.The irony was that by the time I went to secondary school I wasn't even reading fiction any more.

Because I had had so little formal schooling and such an off-kilter experience of life, I was curious about how people lived. So I gravitated to history and sociology, to philosophy and politics. I've always been interested in how things worked and to me there was no real difference between stripping down a VW Beetle engine and figuring out the order of battle at Waterloo. These days it was all forbidden knowledge — all the more appealing because it was an act of defiance.

As the weeks and the months and the years passed, I could not make sense of my mother's behaviour. Why were we still here? Why was her life revolving round this vile man? What did she do all day? There was only so much time you could devote to cleaning and cooking and washing and ironing. She said she was studying the Bible, but part of me was still sure that this was all part of some complicated scam that was going to leave us sitting pretty for the rest of our lives. I just couldn't see what it was. I fantasised that she was going to kill her husband with some undetectable poison and that we would then get our hands on his secret millions and go and live in Florida.

It didn't happen. My life remained screwed down tighter than a coffin lid. But just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, my mother dropped a bombshell.

Charlie snapped the book shut. 'Phew,' she said. 'Another cliffhanger. I've read thrillers with fewer twists than this.'

'Why are you stopping?'

'Because it's nearly Fort William and we need to eat. I'll drive after that, if you like.'

Maria laughed. 'What? And be on tenterhooks all the way to Glasgow? No, that would be cruel. Besides, I'm enjoying it. You can have the boring bit on the motorway. So are you liking her yet?'

'Let me put it this way. I'm conscious of being manipulated. But if I'd come to this with no preconceptions, I think I'd like her a lot. I do hope Magda hasn't read this.' Charlie shook her head. 'If she has, Corinna's going to need a hammer and chisel to separate them.'

7

Once she got stuck in again after lunch, Charlie reckoned it had been fair to describe what faced Jay as a bombshell. Her sixteenth birthday fast approaching, Jay had finally accepted her life was not an extended scam. This was how it was and it was up to her if it was going to change. So she'd started to carve out an escape route. In spite of having had no formal education until she was ten, she'd made a success of school. She was bright, she picked things up quickly and she had a good memory. Her teachers encouraged her, so in spite of the complete indifference of Jenna and her husband, Jay was doing well. There were hints she should be thinking of Oxbridge in a year or two.

Jay knew better than to talk about this at home. She kept her head down and produced school reports that even Howard Calder couldn't find fault with. There were other things she knew better than to talk about, at home and at school. Once she'd made her escape, it would be different. But for now, she'd batten down the hatches about those feelings, just as she rammed everything else well below the surface.

And then one night, it all went to hell in a handcart.

I was in my bedroom, doing my maths homework, when Jenna came in. She didn't knock. Neither of them ever did. Well, why would they? There was nothing I was allowed to do that shouldn't be seen by either of them. I was supposed to be modest, to dress and undress either in the bathroom or under the bedclothes, for example. I, of course, always had to knock before entering a room where they were. Even if I was only coming to eat my tea with them in the living room. Just one of the many petty rules that hedged my life round and allowed my stepfather to exert his authority.

So, there was my mother, standing over me and looking nervous. I was surprised because usually her husband was the only one who ever made her nervous. 'Howard and I have been praying with the congregation for guidance about you.'

'About me? Why? What am I supposed to have done?'

'About your future. And we've decided, once you turn sixteen, we'll be arranging for you to meet a suitable young man and get married.'

I couldn't take it in at first. I felt like I'd fallen through a wormhole in time and landed in a Victorian novel. 'I'm not getting married,' I said. 'And certainly not to somebody Howard thinks is suitable.'

'You're my daughter and you'll do what you're told,' Jenna said. 'I know you didn't have the benefit of a Christian upbringing from the start, but we can make up for that.'

'I'm going to university,' I howled. 'I've got plans.'

That was when my stepfather appeared in the doorway. 'There'll be no university for you,' he said. 'What use is a university education to a wife and mother? You'll be married in the church and devote your life to God and your family.'

'You can't make me,' I shouted.

'I think you'll find we can,' he said. 'Come your birthday, you won't have to go to school. We'll keep you here at home till you see sense. I'm amazed at you, Jennifer. You talk about loving your mother and yet here you are, setting out your stall to break her heart.'

'I'm too young to get married.'

'Nothing of the sort,' he said. 'You'll do as you're told. You'll either do it the easy way or the hard way. But you'll do it.'

'You can't force me. I'll shout my head off at the wedding service, you won't get away with it.'

His smile was evil. 'Pastor Green understands the importance of women being brought under discipline. You'll find dissent cuts no ice with him. Come now, Jenna. Best if we leave Jennifer alone to digest the good news.'

I watched them go, speechless for once. I didn't know what the hell to do. I'd been surviving them having all the power only because I knew there would come a point where I would be able to walk away and make my own life. But I wanted the life I chose. I wanted my A-levels and my university place. I'd spent too long living on the fringes with Jenna to have any romantic notions about running away from home. I knew that if I did that, Oxbridge would never happen. I'd be one more messed-up street kid. Nothing I dreamed of would ever happen. My life would just be a different shade of shit.

There wasn't even anyone I could talk to. I didn't really have friends because I wasn't allowed to do anything except church things. And the other teenagers in the church made me want to slit my throat.

The only thing I could hang on to was that I still had almost three months to go till my birthday. It was a tactical error on my stepfather's part. In his shoes, I'd have waited till the morning after my sixteenth birthday. I'd have stopped me going to school and locked me in the cellar till I saw sense.

I sometimes wonder if I learned my business ruthlessness from him.

Charlie gave a low whistle. 'Listen to this,' she said, reading the last couple of paragraphs to Maria. 'She doesn't pull her punches, does she? I think that's one of the standout sentences in the book so far. It's more honest than almost anything else. We can't help ourselves. Even when we're on the alert, the truth slips through.'

'You think that's a clue to murder?' Maria said, incredulous.

'Not on its own, no. Obviously. But it's indicative of her response to being challenged and put in a corner. Not only is she thinking of her escape route. She's considering how much better she'd have delivered the threat in the first place. That's someone who relishes working out how to get her own way. And who does not let the world put her in a box.' Charlie turned the page. 'Well, let me rephrase that. This is someone who only lets the world put her in a box so she can have some peace and quiet to figure out how to fuck the lot of them over.'

'You don't like her now, do you?' Maria teased.

'Not one bit,' Charlie said. 'But I think she's fascinating. And I can't put this down.'

Things were pretty strained at home after Jenna's big announcement. I mostly stayed in my room when I wasn't at school. I refused to go to church, which meant I got locked in my room. I can't say I was bothered. I knew there was no point in trying to change my stepfather's mind, but I had a faint hope that a small corner of my mother's heart and mind might have escaped the brainwashing.

That faint hope grew stronger as the week went by. Jenna's mind was definitely not quite as single track as usual. She burned the breakfast toast on Wednesday and forgot the cabbage for the gammon-and-mash dinner on Thursday. A couple of times I walked in on her standing in the kitchen staring out at nothing when normally she'd be washing dishes or wiping worktops. I had to speak to her more than once to get her attention. She was miles away. I couldn't help believing she was having second thoughts about my stepfather's plans for me.

I needed to talk to her, I decided. But not in the house or anywhere connected to the church. I wanted it to be somewhere that might even remind her of our old life together. Sure, she'd mostly ignored me, but it had been a benign neglect. Or so it seemed to me then. I racked my brains and then it came to me.

One of the few things Jenna had stood up to her husband about was food shopping. She was one of the first people I knew who stood out against the onward march of the supermarkets, refusing to buy her fresh food from them. Her husband complained that she was extravagant, that it was cheaper to go to the local ASDA than to drive up to Grainger Market in Newcastle once a week. But my mother was adamant. So on Fridays, he had to take the bus to his job at the local council offices and my mother took the car to the big city.

I remembered markets from my early childhood. Jenna had worked on markets and she'd loved wandering round as a customer too. I liked them because they were easy to steal food from. If I could find a way to talk to her there, maybe the atmosphere would waken her independence from its long sleep.

I never had any money, which complicated things. So on Thursday night, I forced myself to stay awake then crept downstairs. There was a collecting box for the church in the kitchen. My stepfather emptied his loose change into it every night when he came home. I prised open the bottom with a knife and painstakingly counted out enough money for my fares, plus a bit over for emergencies.

Next morning, I left at the usual time but instead of going to school, I caught a bus into Sunderland then took the Metro into Newcastle. Luckily it was cold, so I was wearing my winter coat which covered up my telltale school uniform. It was scary, because I'd only ever been to Newcastle a few times for church things. But it was also exciting to emerge from the Metro in Central Station. The place was bustling with people, all looking like they knew where they were going.

I looked round at the station staff and picked a middle-aged woman who looked like most of the lines on her face had come from laughing. It turned out Grainger Market was only a few minutes' walk from the station. I checked my watch. Jenna would barely have set off from Roker by now. I reckoned it would be at least half an hour before she got there. Plenty of time to check out the market, to see where the best place would be to be sure of catching her.

It was a bit bewildering when I got there — lots of different entrances, and a huge number of stalls selling a vast range of stuff. Everything from knicker elastic to lambs' sweetbreads. There was nowhere I could really set up an observation point, so I decided just to walk around, keeping my eyes peeled for her.

Almost an hour went by without any luck, and by then I was bursting for the loo. When I came out, I glanced around to see if I could spot her. And I nearly fell through the floor. There was no doubt in my mind, even though I hadn't seen Jenna in make-up for six years. Sitting at a cafe table, wearing lipstick and eyeshadow and mascara and blusher was my mother. Her hair was loose around her shoulders instead of done up in a chignon like usual. She was smoking a cigarette. And she was with a man who was very definitely not Howard bloody Calder.

He looked a bit like Morrissey, only broad and muscled where Morrissey was willowy. At first I thought that was why he looked familiar. I edged along the outside wall and crossed to a second-hand bookstall, where I was more or less concealed behind a rack of romances.Their heads were close together; they were talking and laughing like people who know each other well.

Then he threw his head back to laugh and I saw the snake tattoo that curled from behind his ear down his neck and into the V of his open shirt collar. And I remembered him. He was Dutch. Rinks, that was his name. I used to call him Ice. At eight or so I thought I was hilarious. We'd lived with him on a boat in Norfolk for a summer season, then he'd gone back to Holland. He'd paid more attention to me than most of Jenna's men. When he came home with a quarter of dope, he'd always have a bar of chocolate or a comic for me.

So, fine. I'd slotted this man into my memory. But what on earth was Jenna doing with him in Grainger Market when she was supposed to be shopping for her husband's dinners for the week? And then I remembered how she'd been distracted the last couple of days. Like her mind had derailed from the tram tracks the church had laid down for her. Were the two things connected?

I wondered if I should confront her, threaten to tell her husband about the make-up and the assignation if she didn't change her mind about the marriage. But I didn't want to be the kind of person who would use emotional blackmail against my mother. I wanted her to support me because she wanted to support me, because it was the right thing to do. Maybe it would be better to say nothing, to hope that she would carry on seeing Rinks and finally come to her senses. She might leave Howard Calder for Rinks and take me with her. And then everything would be all right.

You think like that at fifteen.

So I carried on watching them. They drank their coffee then spent an hour shopping for meat and fish and fruit and vegetables. Rinks carried the heavy bags and I followed them back to the Eldon Square car park.They put the shopping in the car then they walked back down by the Earl Grey monument. Rinks had his arm round Jenna's shoulder, and she leaned into him. They went into Waterstone's and I watched through the window as they browsed the shelves. By the cookery books, he kissed her. Lightly, not a proper snog. But on the lips all the same. It was like watching someone come back to life, seeing the way my mother lit up with him.

I followed them down the hill towards the station then they went into a pub. Obviously I couldn't follow them in. I was only fifteen, so I would have been illegal. I thought people would know just by looking at me. More importantly, I didn't have much money and I didn't know how much a soft drink would cost in a pub. Only that it was probably more than I had. I thought it probably wasn't like a sweet-shop where you could go in and ask what they had for 35p.

It was like a thriller, Charlie thought again. Twists and turns and suspense. She glanced out of the window and was relieved to see they were still in empty Highland scenery. Maria could drive to Glasgow at thirty miles an hour for all she cared. She wanted to know the ending.

The next section dealt with Jay taking on the role of spy in her mother's life. Within a few days of the Grainger Market encounter, Jenna was slipping away from the house every morning after the coast was clear and driving off with Rinks. Jay was convinced they were going to be spotted by a fellow member of the church, but they seemed to lead a charmed existence.

Then one evening a couple of weeks later, Jenna announced over dinner that she had signed up to take part in a charity project to refurbish the homes of a group of old people in a block of flats in the town. Howard had clearly not wanted her to do it, but she'd held her ground, talking about the need for practical Christian charity as well as spirituality. It had been hard to argue against.

Jay had turned up at the charity project the next day during her school lunch hour and wasn't in the least surprised to find Rinks was the project leader. She pretended she had no idea who he was and her mother didn't introduce them. She'd hugged her secret knowledge to herself and tried to work out what she could do to make it work to her advantage.

Being Jay, she got there eventually. But before she could put her plan into action, she was overtaken by events. Charlie didn't think that had happened very often.

I'd finally plucked up the courage to tell Jenna and Rinks that I knew what was going on. I wanted to encourage them to get back together properly, for Jenna to leave her husband and set up home with Rinks and me. It was my route to salvation and I knew I couldn't wait indefinitely. My birthday was getting closer and I didn't want to take any chances.

I knew the project was getting close to the end, so I chose a Friday. That way, we could get ourselves organised while my stepfather was at work. We could pack up and be gone before he got home.Then we'd have the weekend to get sorted out and I could be back at school on Monday as if nothing had happened.

I know it sounds very simplistic, looking back at it now. But I had no understanding of the complexities of adult relationships. How could I? I'd never had the chance to see how most people connected. As far as I was concerned, it was obvious what had to happen.

I turned up at the project on the Friday morning but there was nobody around. All the volunteers were gone and the flats were locked up. I managed to find the warden and to my dismay he told me all the work had been finished the day before, a week ahead of schedule. Most of the residents would be back by the end of next week, all but three who had decided they wanted to go into residential care. He just kept talking at me as if I should be interested. All I was interested in was that my plan had just fallen to bits.

'What about Rinks?' I asked.

'The Dutch lad? He's very pleased with himself because he's got a week off now before his next project, down in York. He said he was going back to Holland to see his folks.'

Suddenly, I felt excited.They must have decided to go off together after all. Jenna would be back at the house, packing her bags and waiting for me to get home from school so the three of us could leave for Holland. The fact that they'd made the decision for themselves rather than me having to persuade them was even better.

I hurried home, imagining my new life. We'd have a tall canal house. Or live on a boat, like we had in Norfolk. I would cycle to school and see real Van Gogh paintings. I was practically skipping down the street. We'd be a happy family in Holland and I'd never see Howard bloody Calder again.

I couldn't have been more wrong. The person I would never see again was my mother.

'Oh my God,' Charlie said, letting out her breath with a whoosh. 'I didn't see that coming. I mean, I sort of knew that her mother walked out on her and the stepfather, but the way she tells it — my God, you really feel it like a punch in the guts.'

'What happened?'

'The mother hooked up with an old boyfriend from the days before she found Jesus. And they took off, leaving Jay behind. She says she never saw her mother again.'

'Is that it? The end of the book? The mother walks out, never to be seen again?'

Charlie flicked forward. 'Not quite. There's a short after-word. Like when you get those little precis things at the end of movies. You know. "Jimmy Brown moved to Buffalo and opened a tattoo parlour. Jane Brown gave up her work with disabled parakeets and married an albino rabbi."'

'You have a very bizarre imagination,' Maria said. 'So what happened to them all?'

Charlie turned the page. 'You want me to read it out to you?'

'Yeah, it's not like I'm going to read it.'

'"Jenna Calder left her husband and child with a single suitcase whose contents included a framed photograph of her daughter, aged six. In spite of police missing person inquiries, nobody has heard from her or seen her since.

'"Rinks van Leer returned from Amsterdam after a week's holiday to run a renovation project in York. He claimed to have no idea where Jenna was. He has gone on to run major projects in Central America and sub-Saharan Africa.

'"Howard Calder burned the clothes and possessions Jenna left behind and refused to speak her name. He still lives in the family home in Roker. He has never divorced or remarried.

'"Jay Stewart was taken in by her history teacher and his wife. She lived with them while she sat her A-levels and her Oxford entrance exam. She matriculated at St Scholastika's College, Oxford in Michaelmas Term 1992." And that's it. After all that rollercoaster of emotion, all that pain and struggle, it ends with the mother walking away. No wonder Jay's got issues,' Charlie said.

'It's a pretty blunt ending.'

'I think that's deliberate. She's trying to reflect how stark it felt to her. She's skipping home, thinking that after all this shit, she's about to see a turnaround. And that's what she does get. It's just the opposite of the one she was expecting.'

Maria slowed down as they approached a roundabout. 'Glasgow coming up,' she said. 'Do you want to take over? I'm feeling pretty tired now, if I'm honest.'

'Sure. Pull over the next place we can get a cup of coffee.'

'So, given what you've read, are you more or less inclined to think Jay Stewart could be a cold-blooded killer?'

Charlie chuckled. 'I wish it was that easy. What I do think is that this was a key event in shaping her future behaviour. Chances are, she'll do pretty much whatever it takes to avoid putting herself in a position where someone else has the power to undermine what she wants. In business, in love, in friendship. But the other side of the coin is her need. Her early years were divided between chaos and regimentation. The one constant was her mother. Even though she was a pretty crap mother, Jay knew she could trust her to be there. And she still needs somewhere to put that trust. Right now, I suspect she's putting it on Magda.'

'So coming between her and Magda would be a seriously bad thing to do?'

Charlie nodded. 'Trouble is, I think that's exactly what I'm going to have to do.'

8

Monday

Jay breezed through the office in the best of tempers. She stopped by her PA's desk and delivered her best Monday-morning smile. 'Anne, I need you to find me a company that will pack up Magda's personal stuff from her flat,' she said.

'Congratulations,' Anne said with a wry smile. 'Good to see you haven't lost your silver-tongued winning ways.'

'Thank you. Sooner the better. And can you chase up Tromso for me? We were caught on the hop with that northern lights documentary last year. I hear it's going to be repeated in a couple of weeks, I don't want us scrabbling at the last minute again.' Jay stopped by the coffee machine and fixed herself a skinny latte. She turned and spoke loud enough to attract the attention of the half-dozen people in. 'Monday meeting at noon, I've booked the back room at Chung's.'

Jay carried on into her office and closed the door behind her, a signal that she wasn't available for non-urgent communication. She settled behind her desk and leaned back in her chair, feet up on the wastepaper bin. She was feeling very pleased with herself. Magda had finally agreed that it was time they acted on their decision to move in together. Jay's house was more than big enough for both of them, so the logical thing was to rent out Magda's flat. It meant a longer commute than her present short walk, but apparently that was a price she was ready to pay.

The thought of Henry's apoplectic reaction was enough to bring a sly smile. Sooner or later, there would have to be a family truce within the Newsams' camp. But she didn't mind the idea of Corinna and Henry suffering a bit of heartburn along the way.

She woke the computer from its hibernation but before she could check her messages, her iPhone rang. Recognising the number, she gave a short, sharp sigh, but answered it anyway. 'Hello,' she said.

'Greetings. Still in love?' The voice was ironic.

'Even if I wasn't, you know how it is. It wouldn't make any difference. What can I do for you?'

'It's what I can do for you.'

Jay experienced a familiar sinking feeling. 'I've told you. You don't owe me anything.'

'I know that. But I like to help the people I care about when I can. I thought I should tell you that you're being… what's the best word here? Investigated?'

'I don't know what you mean. Who's investigating me? And why?' In spite of herself, Jay wanted answers.

'Ultimately, Corinna Newsam. She's got somebody digging into your past. Looking, I believe, for dirt.'

Jay couldn't quite believe it. 'Corinna's what? Hired a private eye?'

'No, she's strictly amateur hour. She's another one of Corinna's former pupils. A psychiatrist. Dr Charlotte Flint. Charlie to her friends.' The voice was amused now, enjoying a private joke that Jay didn't understand.

'I remember Charlie Flint. She was in the news last year. She was involved in that serial killer case. What on earth is she doing working for Corinna? And how do you know this?'

'Not everyone is immune to my charms, Jay. Would you like to know where she spent the weekend?'

Jay straightened up in her chair. 'This isn't a game. Just tell me what you know, never mind dangling stuff in front of me. What the hell's going on here?'

A soft gurgle of laughter. 'Calm down, Jay. I'll tell you what you want to know. Charlie Flint spent the weekend on the Isle of Skye. She interviewed two guys from the mountain rescue. She's also been looking at a couple of other incidents in your past. Jess Edwards, and Ulf Ingemarsson. Oh, and the husband.'

'Tell me this is your idea of a joke,' Jay said, her voice dark with anger.

'Don't shoot the messenger, dear heart. I'm not the one who thinks you're a serial killer. That's your beloved's mother. And all because she saw somebody who looked like you in the meadow on the morning Jess Edwards died.'

Jay's chest constricted. After all these years, her banishment suddenly made a terrible kind of sense. 'Corinna was in the meadow?'

'Apparently. Who knew?'

'I don't understand. She saw someone in the meadow that she thought was me and she said nothing?'

'Amazing, isn't it? I imagine she thought she was too closely linked with you in people's minds to give you up.'

'Or she cared too much about Schollie's.'

'Well, if she did, she's stopped caring now. Corinna's determined to bring you down.'

Jay couldn't believe what she was hearing. The fear that had squatted for years in the back of her mind was becoming a reality. Nothing was more calculated to destroy the comfort and happiness of her new life. And that was something she couldn't allow to happen. 'How the hell has this happened? Jesus!'

'It's OK. Be calm.'

'Calm? How can I be calm?'

'Because there's nothing to find, is there? These deaths were all investigated at the time. If there was any evidence of you being involved with a murder, the police would have been all over you. There's nothing to find, so there's nothing to worry about.'

Jay clenched her fist, her nails biting into her palm. The urge to violence was as strong as it had ever been. How had she let things come to this? 'So why are you calling me? If there's nothing to worry about, nothing to find, why are you winding me up with this?' Her words emerged in staccato choppiness, as if she was biting them off one by one.

'Because I thought you should know. I didn't want you to be blindsided. She's coming after you, Jay. It's better to be forewarned, don't you think?'

'So now I'm forewarned.' Jay rubbed her forehead so hard her fingers left red streaks on her skin. 'Thank you.'

'You know you're always welcome. I'm looking out for you, Jay. Always looking out for you. Always have been.' The voice was soft and seductive. 'But you know that. Right?'

'Right.' She could feel a headache starting at the base of her skull. Not for the first time, she wished she could wind back the years and undo one single evening. 'And I appreciate it,' she said in a monotone.

'Good. Let's meet up soon.'

'Let's. I'm sorry, I have to go, I have a staff meeting to prepare. '

'Good to talk to you. As always.'

'And you.' Jay terminated the call and sat staring unseeing at her computer screen. Of course there was nothing to find. How could there be, after all this time?

But all the same…

Charlie found Nick sitting outside the courtroom where the case he was involved in was being heard. Dressed for court, he was smarter than she'd ever seen him. A well-fitting black suit, a pale blue shirt, a dark blue tie and well-polished shoes were an ensemble she'd never have imagined he owned, never mind one that he'd actually wear. He'd shaved and his hair, if not actually neat, had been brushed. He gave her a wan smile. 'Hey, Charlie.'

'How was the weekend?' she asked, parking herself beside him.

'Work, work and then some more work on the side. We had a strong tip but it needed a stake-out. So that was my weekend flushed down the toilet. I was hoping to sit in on a session last night in Kilburn, but I didn't get home till gone midnight.' He sighed. 'Still, it's money in the bank when it comes to building a case against these scumbags. What about you?'

'We went to Skye.'

'Speed bonny boat, and all that?'

'Not any more, there's a bridge. There's also some very helpful mountain rescue guys.' Charlie told him what she'd learned from Eric and Calum. 'So, the knife being in her pocket was apparently fortunate but not remarkable,' she concluded.

'That was a waste of time then,' Nick sighed.

'Not entirely. There's the question of the phone call to the emergency services. The caller was a woman who said she was phoning from the hotel because Jay and Kathy hadn't come back. But nobody from the hotel had made the call. It's not a big place, Nick. They don't have huge numbers of staff running round the place. Especially in February, I imagine. It's odd, that's all.'

'But odd isn't enough to make a case. Oh, by the way, I meant to tell you. I had a bit of luck with Stratosphone. They got taken over by MXP Communications in 2005, and it just so happens that we've got warrants out with MXP on this trafficking case. I had a word with the officer who's been dealing with them, asked her if she'd put in a word for me. Obviously, I didn't tell her what it was about, just said it was a tangential thing, might come to something or not. Anyway, she's making some inquiries with MXP for us.'

'That's great. Thanks for coming through on that, Nick. But the funny phone call isn't the only thing I've managed to find out. I called Magda the other night, when Jay was out of town. I wanted to see what she might tell me. And you'll never believe what just landed in her lap.'

'Try me.'

'Eight hundred thousand euros. In untraceable bearer bonds.'

'Fuck,' he said. 'I mean, what the fuck?'

Charlie brought him up to speed, enjoying his astonishment. 'So it turns out Philip was an even bigger crook than either of his colleagues,' she said.

Nick frowned. 'But that doesn't make sense. Why would he grass them up if he was at it too? Why risk an investigation that might screw him even more than them?'

'I wondered about that too. On the face of it, it makes no sense. But maybe he thought they were being careless, exposing them all to unnecessary risks, and this was how he wanted to put a stop to it. Of course, that would be a pretty dangerous strategy. However…' She paused and sighed. 'On the train coming down this morning, I had a thought. The letters are the motive for the murder, right?'

'That's right. Without the threat of Philip shopping them, Barker and Sanderson had no reason to kill him. They were his mates, the company was successful, they were all on board the gravy train.'

'So what if Philip didn't write the letters?'

A long pause while Nick worked his way through the implications of that. 'But who else would have had access to the information?'

'Magda, obviously. She was the one who "discovered" the back-up drive. We've no way of knowing how long she had it before she handed it over to the police.'

'But she's got no motive for fitting up Barker and Sanderson, ' Nick protested.

Charlie pulled a face. 'Well, she has and she hasn't. I'll come back to that. But here's the thing. I don't think Magda understands a balance sheet or a financial statement well enough to unravel complex stuff like insider trading. But I think her girlfriend does. I think Jay went through all Philip's financial data, looking for something she could use to frame Barker and Sanderson.'

Nick stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles, then folded his arms across his chest. 'I know I'm being really dim here, but why would she do that? From what I've been able to find out, until those letters turned up, the local boys were struggling to find motive or opportunity, never mind any forensics. Why not leave it as an unsolved? Why take a flyer on trying to fit somebody up?'

'Because Magda saw them leave the wedding party at around the right time. In her head at least they were prime suspects for having killed Philip. And Jay's in love with Magda. She wants to bind Magda to her more tightly. She wants to impress her. What better way to do that than deliver her husband's killers to justice? Especially if she's the one who really killed him. No better way of getting herself off the hook for ever.'

Nick threw his head back and laughed in delight. 'That is so beautiful,' he said. 'You have an evil, devious twisted mind. That is so sick. But it fits with what we know about Jay. Indirect, cunning and untraceable.'

'That's the trouble. The "untraceable" bit.' Charlie sounded as glum as she felt. 'All this poking about and we haven't got anything remotely solid. Nothing that would induce your colleagues to open an investigation of any of those old cases. I hate to say it, but I think we've got to admit defeat.'

Nick scratched his head. 'It irritates the shit out of me to admit it, but I think you're right.'

Charlie slumped, head in hands. 'This is just like Bill Hopton all over again. I feel like such a failure, Nick.'

'You're not a failure, Charlie. I don't see what anybody else could have done in the circumstances.' Nick put his arm round her shoulders. 'You're going to be exonerated, you know. You'll be back doing what you do best.'

Charlie made a noise like a half-choked snort. 'Instead of pretending to be some half-arsed detective?' She butted her head against his chest. 'Stop trying to make me feel better. It's a waste of time.'

'I don't suppose you'd entertain an alternative explanation? '

'I'd love one. Why? Do you have one?'

Nick took a deep breath and let it out noisily. 'Well… It's all a bit "what if?" And seriously lacking in motive or evidence. But then, we've got bugger all on Jay, so we might as well have bugger all on other suspects, right?'

Charlie eased out from his arm and twisted round to face him. 'What are you talking about?'

'When I get stuck on a case, I try to figure out another way of looking at the evidence. When I was sitting on my stake-out, I started playing around with some other ideas. Take Jess Edwards' murder, for example. What's the one thing we do know about that? We know Corinna was in the meadow.' He stopped, expectantly.

After a long pause, Charlie said, 'You're suggesting Corinna might have killed Jess?'

'Why not? She put herself at the scene of the crime — if there was a crime — which is a good way of diverting suspicion.'

'But what possible motive could she have had?'

Nick shrugged. 'I've no idea. But I bet we could come up with a handful if we sat down and brainstormed it.'

'It's very thin,' Charlie complained.

'So's the case against Jay,' Nick said wearily.

'What about the other murders?'

He pulled a face. 'Well, I wondered about her PA, Anne Perkins. They've worked together a long time, and Anne was very defensive of Jay. And very quick to produce the alibi evidence. Which, incidentally, meant I also got sight of her diary for the week. It looks like she was working alone most of the time. Nobody to vouch for her.'

Charlie chuckled. 'And on that basis, you think she slipped off to Spain, murdered Ulf Ingemarsson and brought his work back to Jay like a dog with a newspaper? Jeez, Nick, this Anne Perkins must have made some impression on you.'

Nick gave a self-deprecating grin. 'Hey, I know it's a stretch, but Jay does seem to provoke strong reactions. For everybody who thinks she's somebody you wouldn't want your daughter to marry, there's someone with big loyalty to her. She's worked at close quarters with Vinny Fitzgerald and Anne Perkins for the best part of a decade. People don't stick around in that kind of job unless they're devoted to each other.'

Charlie shook her head, unwilling to believe him. 'And Philip?'

'Maybe it was Sanderson and Barker after all. I generally like the instincts of juries, Charlie.'

'And all these killers just happen to cluster around Jay Stewart?' She shook her head again. 'Far too many coincidences, Nick. You're playing devil's advocate here. You don't really believe all that. But I might be able to use your ideas to throw a bit of sand in Corinna's eyes.' She stood up. 'I need to go and see her now. Tell her there's nothing I can do for her.'

'I'm sorry,' Nick said. 'Really. And you're right. I was just trying to cheer you up with my crazy notions. For what it's worth, I think Corinna might be right. There's too much stacked against Jay Macallan Stewart to write off as bad luck. A bloke who lost four wives in incidents like these would be sitting in an interview room. But nobody suspected her at the time, which means nobody looked for the evidence to tie her in.'

'Don't,' Charlie said, bitterness in her voice. 'Don't go there, Nick.'

'Why? What have I said?'

'It's what you didn't say. It's the implication. We can't get her for the crimes in the past. If we want to nail her, we have to wait till she does it again.' Her voice shook and tears spilled from her eyes. 'Can't you see? It's just an interesting variation on Bill bloody Hopton.'

9

Charlie sat on the same hard chair she'd occupied twenty years before. Back then, she'd been waiting for her first tutorial with Corinna Newsam. Now she was waiting for some other undergraduate to finish her business so Charlie could find a way to divert Corinna from a disastrous course. For the duration of the train journey from London to Oxford, she'd been trying to figure out what to say.

This was one occasion when the truth wasn't an option. It didn't matter that Charlie actually agreed with Corinna. In fact, that was the most dangerous position for her to adopt in any conversation with her former tutor. While Charlie couldn't quite believe that Corinna was capable of killing Jay, there were some things you couldn't take a chance on. Either Charlie had to present Corinna with enough evidence to go to the police — which she didn't have — or else she had to make the case for Jay's innocence. Since there wasn't enough evidence, Charlie had no choice. She would have to protect Jay. And that meant lies.

By the time Corinna had finished teaching, Charlie was as rehearsed as she was ever going to be. She took the chair opposite her former tutor, noticing that Corinna seemed to have lost weight in the nine days since she'd seen her last. Fear for your child would do that to a woman, Charlie thought.

There was no time wasted in small talk. Corinna came straight to the point. 'You've news for me?'

Charlie nodded. 'I've covered a lot of ground in the last week. Talked to a lot of people and found out a lot of things. It's been an interesting experience.'

'I'm sure it has. I suspect you have a gift for finding the interesting, Charlie. But have you managed to find enough evidence to convince Magda?' Corinna leaned forward in her seat, hands clasped tight in her lap. The last person Charlie had seen that tightly wound was a paedophile priest waiting for the heavens to fall on his head.

'All the evidence I have points firmly in one direction. You're not going to like this, Corinna. Jay Macallan Stewart is not a serial killer.'

Corinna touched one side of her face, as though she wasn't convinced she could trust her hearing. 'You're mistaken,' she said. 'You can't have checked properly. Death follows her around like a pet dog. It defies logic to suggest that every time someone stands between Jay Stewart and what she wants, they simply happen to die.' Her voice was firm, her attitude the one that Charlie remembered from her student days — the teacher who had a solid grasp of her subject, who would welcome argument but seldom concede her point. Charlie knew her only recourse was coherent and substantial argument.

'I know,' she said. 'But that's how it is. Sometimes the world runs counter-intuitive. Look, I'm not asking you just to take my word for it. For a start, I've not been working alone. A friend of mine who is a detective with the Met has been helping me with information that it's hard for a civilian to access. He's also got the skills I lack. He's been able to suggest how I should proceed when I've not known what to do for the best.'

'Very enterprising of you,' Corinna said crisply. 'And I do appreciate it. I was right in thinking you were the person for the job. The sort of woman who has resources.'

'And I'm also a scientist. That means I believe what the evidence tells me even when it runs against my theory of what was the case. Let me run through the deaths you told me about. First, Jess Edwards. Now, you say you saw Jay in the meadow very early on the morning of Jess's death. You were convinced at the time, even though it was still dark and she was some distance away.' Corinna made to speak but Charlie held up her hand. 'Please, Corinna, let me finish.' Let me lie to you and see if I can get you to fall for it. 'I tracked down Jay's girlfriend at the time, Louise Proctor.'

'How did you manage that? The alumnae office has no current records for her. She severed all her ties with the college after she left. And no wonder. A vulnerable girl preyed on by Jay Stewart, preyed on to the extent that she tried to kill herself. '

Charlie was pretty sure that hadn't been quite the way it was, but she was on pretty shaky ground since she knew next to nothing about Jay's early love life. 'That's the advantage of having a policeman in your corner. Law-abiding people aren't that hard to trace when you have access to official records. So, I spoke to Louise. She doesn't have any loyalty towards Jay. As you suggest, she holds Jay responsible for one of the more miserable episodes of her life. So there's no reason why she should lie for her. Agreed?'

Corinna dipped her chin in a grudging nod. 'I suppose not.'

'According to Louise, on the morning Jess died, Jay was in bed with her until after seven o'clock. By that time, the rowers were down at the boathouse and Jess's body had been discovered. '

'That's impossible. How can she be sure? How can she remember one morning in particular so clearly?'

Charlie assembled her thoughts. This was not the time to be talking about anomalies. 'Because it was the morning Jess Edwards died. And because they'd been lying awake since just after six. Jay was raging about Jess and the JCR election. When she went down to breakfast and found out about Jess, Louise remembers thinking how awful it was that Jay had been so mean about Jess right when the poor girl was drowning. So she has an alibi.'

Corinna looked disgusted. 'How truly ironic,' she said.

'What do you mean?'

Her lip curled in contempt. 'If Jay had produced that as an alibi at the time, nobody would have believed it. They'd all have said Louise was lying for her out of love. But now Louise has every reason to hate her. And only now she comes out with it.' Corinna shook her head. 'I have to take your word for it, but it's hard to believe I was wrong. I know what I saw.'

'I don't want to seem patronising, Corinna, but eyewitness reports are notoriously inaccurate. And there's a perfectly respectable psychological mechanism behind it. Our brains look for patterns. We seek resemblances. So we overlay what we actually see with what we expect to see based on visual clues. And as time goes by, we reinforce the memory with more details that come not from what we saw but from what our brain tells us we must have seen. You saw a figure who for some reason reminded you of Jay. You saw them in an area where you might reasonably expect to see Jay herself. And your brain filled in the gaps.' Charlie spread her arms wide and shrugged. 'We all do it all the time. You've nothing to reproach yourself with.'

'I still believe my own eyes.' The stubborn set of Corinna's jaw didn't bode well for the success of Charlie's plan. But there was nothing to do but press on.

'Fine. But you have to ask yourself who Magda's going to accept — you with a figure glimpsed through the dark, or Jay with her perfect alibi. At this point, Magda has no reason to distrust Jay. But you? She knows you're violently opposed to her and Jay being together.'

Corinna's look was venomous. 'What else did you find out?' she demanded.

'I checked out the Fatal Accident Inquiry into Kathy Lipson's death. There's no question that Jay cut the rope when Kathy fell off the rock pinnacle they were climbing. But there's also nothing to contradict her version of events. Kathy was the driving force behind the trip to Skye. She'd apparently always wanted to do winter climbing in the Cuillins and you only get a couple of chances every winter. You have to grab it when you can. And sometimes the weather closes in on you, as it did on them.'

'She could have pushed her off and made it look like an accident.'

Charlie nodded. 'She could have. But there's no witnesses. And nothing in the physical evidence to contradict Jay's version. I spoke to two of the mountain rescue guys who brought her off the mountain. They were sorry for her. They understood the stigma she's suffered in climbing circles after cutting the rope. But they also totally supported what she did. It's right to cut the rope when you have the stark choice. You're both going to die unless you cut the rope, in which case one of you might live. It's hard to argue with that, Corinna.'

Corinna glared at her. 'Has she got to you? Is this some kind of lesbian solidarity?'

Charlie felt the blush of anger spread up her neck. 'That is incredibly insulting. I've just spent nine days and a chunk of change trying to prove your crazy theory. Not because I owe you a thing, but because I like your daughter and I think she needs somebody in her corner. But if you think I would cover up evidence of murder just for the sake of sisterhood, you are so far off the scale of sanity that I could probably call a colleague right now and have you sectioned.' She picked up her bag and gathered her coat around her, preparing to leave.

'Wait,' Corinna said urgently. 'Please. I'm sorry, Charlie. I'm truly sorry.' Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. 'You see how this business has thrown me off kilter?' She stood up abruptly and went to a tall mahogany cabinet. She opened it and took out a bottle of red wine. 'I do know you better than that, Charlie. Forgive me. I'm just so bitterly disappointed. Take a drink with me?'

Charlie sat back in the chair, but shook her head. She wanted nothing to blunt her edge for this conversation. She waited while Corinna poured herself a modest glass of wine. 'I looked at Ulf Ingemarsson's murder too. And while it's true that Jay was out of the country when it happened, my friend the detective has seen her schedule for that week. There's no room for a side trip to Spain,' she said earnestly. 'Even if she'd driven through the night, she couldn't have got to Ingemarsson's villa and back to where she was supposed to be next morning.' Another lie, but Charlie was on a roll now. Whatever her suspicions, she had no proof against Jay. The woman was entitled to the presumption of innocence; more importantly, she was entitled not to be the victim of Corinna's notion of justice.

'She could have hired someone,' Corinna said defiantly.

Charlie groaned. 'Sure, she could have hired someone. People in her line of work come across hitmen all the time.' Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. 'Would you know where to start looking for a hired killer? I've been working in the field of abnormal psychology for more than a dozen years. I spend my days with killers and rapists and paedophiles and I have no idea how to find a hitman. It's not like you can Google it.'

'She might have commissioned burglary and got murder,' Corinna insisted.

'Same argument. Where is she going to find herself a burglar for hire? Would you know where to start? It's not like you can ask one of your magistrate pals to recommend a good one, is it? And here's another thing. Speaking purely as a psychiatrist, with all I know about Jay Stewart, I cannot see her putting herself at someone else's mercy. Once you commission a crime, you're vulnerable for ever. It's just not her personality type. She likes being in control too much.'

Corinna drained her glass and put it down. 'You make a good case,' she said, voice and eyes dull. 'You always knew how to frame an argument. I'd hoped you were going to be marshalling that sharp intellect on the other side of the question. ' She sighed and stood up, walking over to the window and staring down at the college garden where Magda's wedding reception had taken place. 'It's funny,' she said. 'That day started so perfectly. I'd worried about Magda. She'd always been so focused on her job, I thought she was missing out on love and friendship and the possibility of the kind of life I've been privileged to enjoy.'

Charlie bit her tongue, thinking of the inescapable Catholic misery of being married to Henry; of juggling the demands of four children, a big house and a constant stream of students with their intellectual challenges; of those six a.m. shifts at her college desk trying to achieve the publications that would make it impossible for the college not to offer her a fellowship; of the succession of bright young undergraduates who were needy enough to be grateful to Corinna for friendship and biddable enough to be cheap and reliable babysitters. And she was glad beyond words that Magda had a different prospect ahead of her.

'But then Philip came along,' Corinna continued. 'What I liked about him was something you don't find a lot in young men. He was kind. He wasn't pushy or aggressive. You could see he was ambitious, but not ruthless. We figured he'd take good care of our girl. That morning, I felt like everything had fallen into place. Magda marrying a good man, the wedding here at my own college.'

Charlie was finding Corinna's melodramatic monologue hard to take. 'But by nightfall, it had all gone to shit,' she said drily.

Corinna winced at the language. 'It was tragedy,' she said, turning back to the room. 'If Philip had lived, you can't tell me Magda wouldn't be happily married at this moment. We wouldn't have had any of this lesbian nonsense, never mind having to worry about our daughter living with a killer.'

'Excuse me? "Lesbian nonsense"? Are you deliberately trying to be offensive?' Charlie shook her head and reached for the spare glass Corinna had brought for her. She poured herself some wine and took a deep draught. This time, she let her anger flow. 'Your daughter's a lesbian, Corinna. It's not some adolescent phase. If Philip had lived, the marriage would have collapsed when Magda couldn't go on resisting her true nature. Either that or she'd have endured a life half-lived for the sake of respectability and not upsetting you and Henry. Whatever way it had gone, she'd have been bloody miserable. So spare me the fairy-tale romance. Magda's a dyke. Get over it.'

'You don't know that,' Corinna said. 'I've come across a few cases over the years where women have gone back to men after years of lesbian affairs. What is it you call them? Has-bians? Was-bians?'

'Lobotomised,' Charlie said acidly. Seeing Corinna's expression, she added wearily, 'That was a joke, Corinna. I'm finding this all a bit hard to stomach. I haven't had a conversation like this in a dozen years. It's all a bit weird to find myself talking to someone who makes the Daily Mail look tolerant. Especially since you're the one who's been asking me favours.'

'It's hard to abandon a lifetime of principles,' Corinna said.

'One woman's principles are another woman's bigotry, Corinna. Even if you manage to prise Magda out of Jay's arms, she's not going to have a Damascene conversion back to heterosexuality. ' Charlie gave a wicked grin. 'I think she's finally discovered fun.'

'I'd like to be able to cross that bridge when we come to it,' Corinna said, making her way back to her chair and refilling her glass. 'So. Was Philip's murder as much of a dead end as the other cases?'

One more lie. 'As far as Jay is concerned, yes. I can't tell you who her alibi is, but I've spoken to the person who was with her that evening and I am convinced that at the time Philip was murdered, she was in another part of the college altogether. '

'Why can't you tell me who she was with?'

'Because I promised not to reveal this person's identity. I could lie to you and say it was a business meeting, that it had to do with commercial confidentiality. But I'm not going to do that. The person Jay was with has good reasons for wanting their meeting to remain secret, and I agreed to honour that.'

Corinna's lip curled in disdain. 'Some married woman, no doubt.'

'Why do you care? Believe me, Jay's alibi for Philip's murder is rock solid. I'll be completely candid with you, Corinna. When we talked about this last week, I came round to your way of thinking. I was more than halfway to being convinced that Jay really was a murderer. But I've had to accept that we were both wrong. What's happened around her has genuinely been coincidence. You made a mistake the morning Jess Edwards died, and it's tainted your opinion of everything that's occurred around Jay ever since. I know it's hard to unpick all those assumptions, but you have to accept that your brain tricked you into a misapprehension. The honest truth is that she didn't deserve to be shown the door all those years ago. And she doesn't deserve it now.' Charlie suddenly realised she was getting carried away with herself. She'd almost fallen for her own assumed sincerity. It was hard not to despise herself for her ability to persuade against what she herself believed had happened.

Corinna stared at her, glassy-eyed. 'I was so sure,' she said. 'And then everything else made sense.'

'I understand,' Charlie said gently. 'But if you take away that first certainty, you can see there's no real reason to hold Jay responsible for any of those other deaths.'

'I've got some thinking to do,' Corinna said, her voice heavy and slow. 'It's hard to hold on to my mental image of Jay as this evil psychopath in the teeth of what you're telling me. But I suppose, for Magda's sake, I should be grateful that she's not what I took her for.'

'You should,' Charlie said, getting to her feet. 'And you need to build some bridges there. Magda clearly values her place in your family. Don't punish her for being who she is.'

Charlie walked back through college, her depression building with every step. She'd saved Corinna from taking some drastic and destructive step, but it had taken its toll on her. She'd had to argue against what she had come to believe, all because Jay Stewart had been smart enough to commit a series of perfect murders. Charlie remembered hearing a radio presenter once asking a crime writer if she knew of anyone having committed a perfect murder. The writer had said, 'The perfect murder is the one nobody suspects is a murder.' Jay hadn't quite managed that every time, but she'd managed to vary her methods enough to keep herself out of the frame.

What Charlie had said to Nick had been right. They would have to wait for the next death before they could have any chance of making Jay pay for her crimes. It was a profoundly depressing thought. She wished there was another explanation for the chain of deaths that circled Jay Stewart, but any other theory would have to embrace an eye-popping amount of coincidence.

Charlie walked out into the North Oxford street, heading towards the University Parks with the force of a habit that hadn't been exercised for seventeen years. The spring afternoon had a distinct chill, the sky as grey as her mood. She had no eyes for the dramatic displays of spring bulbs. All she could see was that she'd reached the end of the road. What had started as a distraction had ended up magnifying the doubt and disappointment that had plagued her since Bill Hopton's second murder trial. She'd take a walk through the park then catch a bus to the station. There was still plenty of time to get back to Manchester.

Enough time for her to make one last detour, a little voice in the back of her head suggested. She wouldn't be back in Oxford any time soon. How could it hurt? 'It could hurt a million ways,' she said out loud, earning an indulgent smile from a passing student.

She cut through the Parks and emerged opposite Keble College, taking a left down towards the Broad. She could cut down Queen's Lane to the High and easily catch a bus to Iffley. To Charlie, like some renegade banker, a million just wasn't enough.

10

This time, Charlie decided she wasn't going to call ahead and give Lisa the chance to prepare herself. If she was busy, so be it. Charlie would walk away, and this time maybe she could manage to make it for good. But the last proper thing that Lisa had said to her was that Charlie's feelings were not a one-way street. Charlie couldn't leave it at that. She realised that the time was approaching when she would have to choose between the life she had with Maria and the possibility of a future with Lisa, but she wanted to be sure it was a real choice. She needed to be clear that if she chose Lisa, there was a genuine offer of a relationship there.

But equally, Charlie knew it would be dishonest to stay with Maria if the only reason she was there was that there was nothing better on offer. Maria deserved so much more than that. If she was brutally honest with herself, Charlie had to admit that her feelings for Lisa had undermined their relationship. Pursuing Jay Stewart had provided her with the perfect excuse for spending time with Lisa and indulging her emotions. But as that investigation drew to a close, so too did the time for vacillation. The first decision was whether to stay with Maria; the second, whether to pursue a relationship with Lisa.

Sometimes Charlie wished she was more like the psychopaths she dealt with professionally. It must in some sense be a relief not to be possessed of insight into one's inner life.

Only Lisa's car was in the drive. Charlie walked up the path and physically gathered herself together, squaring her shoulders and straightening her spine. She reached for the bell and paused for a few seconds. It wasn't too late. She could still turn and walk away, walk back to a life that really should be sufficient for anybody.

But Charlie had to know. Charlie always had to know. And in this matter, not knowing wasn't just a matter of curiosity unsatisfied. This time, not knowing would torture her. It would take on a life of its own in her imagination. Every time she and Maria bickered, she would wonder how things would have been different with Lisa. Inevitably it would assume a gloss that would destroy their relationship. The promise not explored would always be the tantalising prospect of true happiness and fulfilment. Damned if she did, damned if she didn't.

Charlie pressed the bell.

It took Lisa a while to answer. Charlie had almost given up, assuming Lisa had gone somewhere on foot or by taxi. But at last, the door swung open and there she was. She was wearing another shalwar kameez, this time in deep fuchsia. She looked annoyed, but when she saw it was Charlie the frown disappeared and she produced the full-on smile. 'Charlie,' she exclaimed. 'What a delicious surprise. But you should have called, I could have postponed my next meeting.' She glanced at her watch. 'We've only got twenty minutes to ourselves. Come in, come in.'

Charlie was taken aback by the effusiveness of the welcome. Under the full glare of Lisa's charisma, she had no defence. 'I think we've got unfinished business,' she said, following Lisa down the hall to the sitting room. A single floor lamp turned the afternoon gloom to intimacy. There was a smell of spice in the air: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice. Charlie wanted to lie down and make the world go away.

Lisa settled on one of the sofas, legs tucked under so she looked like a startling blossom on the cream fabric. 'Come and sit beside me,' she said, patting the sofa next to her. 'Take your coat off.'

Charlie obeyed, sitting beside Lisa but not quite touching. 'I didn't want to leave things between us the way they were,' she said.

'Of course not,' Lisa said. 'It's important that we recognise the power of the connection between us. We may not be able to do anything about it, but we'll always know there is that deep bond that draws us together.'

'I was wondering whether that's enough to get it out of our path and move forward,' Charlie said, her throat dry. She couldn't help wishing they could get past the abstractions to physical abandon.

Lisa shifted so that she was leaning into Charlie. Charlie was conscious of every point where their bodies touched. 'It's so tempting, isn't it? Just to fall into each other, to lose ourselves and forget everything else? There's nothing I'd like more than for us to be lovers, Charlie. But this isn't the right time. It's too combustible. You need to be past Maria before you can open yourself to me. And me? Well, I'm still trying to free my spirit of the deep past. I won't give you the second best I can spend on the likes of Nadia. I wouldn't insult you.'

Charlie gave a wry smile. 'I've got a pretty thick skin, Lisa. I could live with an insult like that.'

Lisa didn't echo the smile. 'See, Charlie, I think that's precisely where you're wrong. I think you couldn't live with the insult. I think it would eat away at you and in the end it would poison everything between us. I've seen it happen to other people and I don't want it to happen to us. This isn't the time, Charlie. You need to be patient.'

It was an answer, though not the one she'd wanted to hear. Somehow, Charlie understood that whatever decision she made concerning Maria, there would always be a reason why Lisa wouldn't be able to commit. She drew away from her. 'In that case, better we don't touch at all.'

'Don't be offended. Be the opposite of offended. Be proud that we have enough care for each other not to fall into something tawdry.'

'So what was your appearance at the weekend really about? Was I supposed to compare and contrast? Was that meant to be some kind of watershed?'

Lisa stretched her arms above her head, a move that emphasised the beauty of her breasts. 'I told you,' she said. 'I wanted to see the Charlie who emerges when you're not with me. When you're with Maria. It was purely selfish and I'm sorry if it put you off your stride.'

'I did what I went there to do,' Charlie said. 'It just didn't work out quite the way I thought it would.'

Lisa smiled sadly. 'Poor Charlie. I told you this was a waste of time. Jay might have the killer instinct in business, but not when it comes to people.'

'You sound like you know her well,' Charlie said. 'I thought you said your paths had barely crossed when you were undergraduates? '

Lisa gave her an assessing look. 'That's right. But I've always been good at taking the measure of people. You of all people should know that. I knew you were special the moment I first heard you speak, after all. But Jay? I saw enough of her back then to understand the sort of woman she was. And I've heard nothing since to change my mind.'

'Well, on the face of it, it looks as if you were right. There's no evidence that would make the police look at Jay for more than a nanosecond.'

'I told you so. But you had to chase the chimera yourself.' She pouted. 'But then, that's one of the things I admire in you. Take nothing on trust.'

'I'd be a pretty crap psychiatrist if I took everyone at face value. But I didn't say Jay hadn't killed those people. I said there was no evidence that would stand up in court.' Somehow, realising there was no future for a relationship with Lisa had loosened Charlie's tongue where her investigation was concerned. If there was no point in talking about their relationship, she had to find something else to fill the space. 'That's the worst outcome for me. I'm fairly convinced Jay killed those people, but I have to live with the knowledge that she's not going to be brought to justice. And now I have a quandary. The only chance of making her pay the price for her actions is to wait till she kills someone else. On the other hand, if I warn her that any deaths in her immediate vicinity will be scrutinised minutely to see if there's any trace of her hand in them, if she's got any sense she won't kill again. And there will never be any prospect of her paying the price for her actions. So I have to weigh the possibility of justice against the possibility of saving a life.'

Lisa's eyebrows rose. 'No contest, I would have thought. She might not take kindly to the accusation, but at least you'll have cleared your conscience. Justice isn't such a big deal, Charlie. It's a pretty moveable feast, in my estimation. Let the dead bury their dead, and let's all move forward.'

'I wish it was that easy,' Charlie said. 'Did you ever read her book? Unrepentant?'

'I did. I thought it made very interesting reading. Such a violent dissonance at the heart of her childhood — that would make you wary of trusting anyone. She reveals much more vulnerability than she realises, I believe. Her overreaching in business is a compensation for her inability to defend herself in childhood and adolescence against the forces ranged opposite her. Wouldn't you say?' Lisa smiled. 'You are the professional analyst, after all.'

'I don't know that I would have put it quite like that. I think she's all about constructing defences. But you're the vulnerability expert.'

Lisa inclined her head, acknowledging Charlie's riposte. 'Jenna is the key, isn't she? A woman of extremes. Total libertinism then total repression. It makes me wonder what on earth was going on in the mother's background for those two outer limits to be the attractive options. What exactly was she rebelling against or pulling towards?'

'And yet Jenna is quite a shadowy figure in some respects. What Jay gives us is very much the child's-eye view of a parent. The child is oblivious to a lot of what's going on because it's over her head. As we're reading, we don't notice because it's such a pacy narrative. But thinking about it, I feel like I've been shortchanged on Jenna.'

Lisa compressed her lips briefly. 'Maybe that's deliberate. Maybe Jay's afraid she'll give away too much about herself if she reveals Jenna more fully. I don't have to tell you how often it all comes back to the mother.'

The sensation inside Charlie's brain was almost physical. Lisa's words dislodged something in her head, like the stone that shifts and precipitates the avalanche. '"Nobody has heard from her or seen her since." That's what the book says.'

'A terrible, ultimate abandonment,' Lisa said. 'Some people think it's OK to leave your children by the time they're adolescents and can fend for themselves. But in many ways, that's their most vulnerable period.'

'It wasn't such a terrible abandonment for Jay. More of a result, really. She didn't get married off to some happy clappy. She got to go to Oxford and get away from the stifling repression of life in the Bethany Pentecostal Church of Christ the Saviour. Her mother disappearing was the making of her,' Charlie said slowly, looking from all angles at the thought that had hit her, seeing if it really made the sense she thought it did.

'I'm not certain I would put it like that,' Lisa said, looking at Charlie as if she wasn't quite sure of her any more. 'I think Jay overcame a terrible trauma remarkably well.'

Charlie got to her feet just as the doorbell rang. 'I need to go to Roker,' she said.

Lisa looked startled. 'Where?'

'Where Jay came from. I need to check out what happened to her mother.'

'We know what happened to her mother. She ran off with the Dutch boyfriend.'

'Who denied having run off with her.' Charlie started to head for the door.

'Wait,' Lisa said. 'What are you saying?'

'I need to check out what happened to her mother,' Charlie repeated, sounding dazed. 'There's somebody at your door,' she added as the bell rang again.

Lisa jumped off the sofa and caught up with her in the hallway. She put a hand on Charlie's arm. 'I thought you'd given up this crazy quest?'

Charlie turned and smiled. 'Not while there's still something to chase down.' Gently she picked Lisa's hand off her arm. 'Somebody else for you, Lisa,' she said, aware of the ambiguity and happy with it.

There was a new energy in Charlie's step as she strode back to the bus stop. According to the timetable, she only had ten minutes to wait for a bus that would take her close to the train station. She'd be back in Manchester this evening and in the morning she could make straight for the North East. Maybe she could short-circuit the trawl through local newspaper archives with a little help from Nick.

She pulled out her phone and called his mobile. It went straight to voicemail, as she'd half-expected. 'Hi, Nick. It's Charlie,' she said. 'I've just been talking to Lisa Kent, she's a pal of mine who used to know Jay a bit. And she said something about Jay's mother that just set something off in my head. What if Jess Edwards wasn't the first? What if she started even earlier? What if Jenna was her first victim? I know it sounds crazy, and this is going to cut me off — Oh, bugger,' Charlie said as the voicemail ended. She called back immediately. 'Me again. 1990, Jenna Calder was her married name. She was reported as a missing person. Roker in Sunderland. I'm going up there first thing in the morning to see what I can dig up. It would be brilliant if you could get one of the local boys to open the file to me. Call me in the morning, I'll explain better. Thanks, Nick.' This time she beat the beep. Then remembered she still had a more immediate message for Nick. For the third time she called his number. 'Me again. Just to tell you I think I persuaded Corinna that Jay's innocent. At least planted enough doubt to stop her doing something stupid. I'm going back to Manc now. I promise to leave you alone.'

Charlie put her phone away. She wondered what she would find at Roker. It seemed an unlikely location for redemption.

11

The morning phone call had taken the gloss off Jay's day, but by the end of the afternoon, she'd almost recovered herself. The prospect of seeing Magda generally had that effect on her. But her feelings were more complicated than usual. Clearly she couldn't ignore Corinna's investigation of her history. Inevitably, that meant Magda would be confronted with awkward details from the past. Theoretically Jay could wait till she was forced to defend herself, but reaction was never as powerful as revelation. Better that what Magda heard first was Jay's version rather than Corinna's. But she wanted to pick her moment. A romantic setting, good food and wine, nothing to get up for in the morning. That was the way to do it.

But the luxury of choice was stripped from her just as she was preparing to leave the office. Her private phone chimed a text message alert. Expecting it to be Magda, Jay picked the phone up eagerly. Instead, it was the last name she wanted to see on the screen. Beneath that dreaded name, the opening words of the text: Charlie Flint's not giving up. Tomorrow she's going…Impatient, Jay summoned the full message: Tomorrow she's going to Roker. And we both know what's there to be found, don't we? Time to take care of business?

Jay stared at the screen as if the power of her gaze could transform the words into something innocuous. It was too late now for careful plans. It would have to be tonight. There would be no champagne to celebrate the booking of the removal team, no cheerful negotiation of wardrobe space and bookshelf allocation. No matter how carefully Jay constructed the version of her life she was going to deliver to Magda, it was going to alter their relationship profoundly. If she didn't hit the right note, tomorrow morning could easily find her cancelling the removal team Anne had just organised. The truth, certainly. But not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That would be terminal.

Jay pressed the intercom and spoke to her PA. 'Anne, I need dinner delivered to the house. Get me my usual deli order, with extra artichoke hearts and a baguette instead of ciabattas. I'm leaving now but I need to walk, so any time after six is fine.' Magda wouldn't be home before seven; having dinner delivered would free Jay to plan what she was going to say.

She took the long way home, making a detour down to the river so she could let the rhythm of the water calm her anxiety. The low grey sky and congested air seemed to flatten the surface, giving the river a reptilian appearance, its deep hypnotic swells the forward motion of a giant slow-worm. It seemed inevitable, inexorable yet strangely relaxing. By the time she arrived home, Jay's restless agitation had passed, leaving her determined that the evening would unfold in her choice of direction.

Back home, she leaned on the balcony with a glass of red wine till the delivery arrived. Then she carefully arranged the food on the granite breakfast bar, making the array of meat, cheese and vegetables as attractive as possible. It was the kind of task Jay enjoyed; to an observer, it appeared she was giving it her full care and attention, but in truth, it left enough of her mind clear to untangle the thorniest of problems. Once she was satisfied with the look of the collation, she lay face down on the floor and did a series of McKenzie stretches to keep her lower back supple and free from pain. Too much tension, she knew from experience, would exact its price in pain later unless she took steps to prevent it. The last thing she wanted was for Magda to start thinking she'd hooked up with an old crock.

It was just after seven when Magda returned. 'Please tell me there's a bottle open,' she groaned as she walked into the kitchen.

'Open, aerated and at the perfect temperature,' Jay said, pouring her a glass. Magda hugged her from behind, nuzzling her neck, then reached round her for the wine.

'Perfect,' she said, taking a sip. 'And what a glorious spread. All I've had since breakfast is a slice of an eight-year-old's birthday cake.' She stretched for the olives. 'Mmm. You are the woman of my dreams.' She nibbled a black olive and jumped on to the stool next to Jay. 'How was your day?'

'This is the best part of it,' Jay said, passing Magda a plate. She went to the fridge for a bowl of salad leaves then tossed them in olive oil from a bottle that had cost more than vintage champagne.

'The salad or me?' Magda teased.

Jay took a baby beetroot leaf from the bowl and savoured it, frowning. 'Definitely the salad.'

Magda laughed. 'You do have good taste.'

'Anne booked the removal firm for next Tuesday,' Jay said, sitting down again and piling food on her plate. 'They'll pack clothes, books, CDs, toiletries, all the personal stuff basically. Anything you don't want left for tenants, like good glassware or art, sort it out before then and they'll bring that too.'

Magda leaned over and kissed Jay's ear. 'You make everything so easy.'

'Money makes everything so easy,' Jay said wryly. 'There's not much in the practical realm that can't be sorted with the application of a wedge of cash.'

'It's not that simple,' Magda said. 'Thanks to Philip, I can afford all sorts of things — and I hope you're going to give me the bill for this, by the way — but what you do is the organising, which is the really hard bit.'

'Thanks. But arranging things for you makes me happy. Truly.' She stroked Magda's hair, letting her fingers stray down to the tender skin beneath her ear. Magda shivered with pleasure. 'Now eat. You need to keep your strength up.'

Magda giggled. 'No kidding.' For a while they concentrated on eating, their conversation focused on the delights of their food; the intensity of a sundried tomato, the subtlety of a grilled artichoke heart, the nuttiness of a prosciutto and the pungency of a cheese. For both women, the sharing of food had quickly taken a place at the heart of their life together. Each had an appetite for the sensual pleasure of good food; both would rather go without than eat rubbish. 'I'll happily eat food that's inexpensive,' Jay had once told an interviewer. 'But I won't eat food that's cheap. It ends up costing a lot more than money.'

Finally Magda polished off the last sliver of chargrilled red pepper and sighed. 'That was bliss. Let me sort out the leftovers and the dishwasher, you go and relax. Monday night, University Challenge, right?'

Another excuse to delay, Jay thought. And then there would be something else, she was sure. Before she knew it, it would be too late to begin tonight. And if Charlie Flint managed to find what nobody else ever had in Roker, it would be too late for ever. 'I need to talk to you,' she said, ignoring Magda's attempts to shoo her away from the clearing up.

Magda stopped scraping leftover salad into the bin and gave Jay a worried look. 'What's wrong?'

'Let's finish in here, then we'll sit down.'

'That sounds ominous,' Magda said.

Jay knew a push when she heard it, but she wasn't about to yield. They'd do this her way. 'We'll be done here in no time,' she said, loading dirty crockery into the dishwasher. People sometimes wondered why a woman as wealthy as she was did her own kitchen chores. For Jay, it was a tiny trade-off in return for the privacy she retained. She couldn't imagine having the conversation she was about to have with her lover if there was another living soul under her roof.

They cleared up in record time and Jay sat back down at the breakfast bar, this time gesturing to Magda to sit opposite. 'This is a hard thing for me to talk to you about,' Jay said, folding her hands together and meeting Magda's worried eyes.

'There's nothing you can't tell me,' Magda said, her words more certain than her voice.

If only. Jay spoke softly, her voice sorrowful, her face serious. 'I think I've found out why your mother banished me all those years ago. And why she is so hostile to the idea of us being together. And it's nothing to do with me being gay.'

Surprise widened Magda's eyes and straightened her back. 'What do you mean? What else could it be?'

Jay gave a twisted smile, her eyebrows steepled in apology. 'This is not a joke, OK? This is really what she thinks.' She waited. Magda frowned in puzzlement. 'Your mother thinks I'm a murderer.'

Magda's mouth fell open in incredulity. 'A murderer?'

'Better still, she thinks I've done it more than once. She thinks I'm kind of a serial killer.' Jay smiled and shrugged, spreading her hands in a gesture of baffled innocence.

Magda stuttered and spluttered, finally managing to get coherent words out. 'A serial killer? You? This is crazy. Why are you saying this? How can you think that?'

'I'm not the problem here, sweetheart. Corinna's the one who's got the crazy notions, not me.'

Magda shook her head as if to dislodge something unpleasant. She ran her hands over her face and through her hair. 'I've never heard anything so… so… so ridiculous. Where has this come from, this mad, stupid idea?'

Jay sighed. 'Let me try and tell it from the beginning.'

'You think that'll make any more sense of it? Jay, I feel like I've fallen down a rabbit hole and everything's gone Alice in Wonderland.'

'It's not exactly been easy for me either. I'm the one who's supposed to be the psychopathic multiple murderer, after all.'

'Of course, I'm sorry, it's just so mad. I'm listening, I'm listening. ' Magda shook her head, disbelieving.

Jay poured them both some more wine. 'This all goes back to when I was running for JCR President. My main opponent was a rower called Jess Edwards. Just before the election, she had an accident. Early in the morning, she was at the boathouse on her own. She hit her head on the jetty and fell in the water and drowned. It was an accident, pure and simple. There was an inquest, accidental death. It never occurred to me that anyone would think anything different.' Jay rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. 'What I never knew at the time was that Corinna saw someone in the meadow around the time Jess died. In the dark and the morning mist, she thought it was me.' She gave a dry laugh that was more like a cough. 'She thought I'd killed Jess Edwards so I would get to be JCR President.'

Magda's face was screwed up in an expression of bewildered incredulity. 'She thought you're the kind of person who could kill somebody? And for something so pathetic?'

'That's the hard part to believe. That it was so easy for her to think so badly of me.' Jay bit her lip and looked downcast.

'That's the hard part? Jay, I'm struggling to find the easy part here. You're saying my mother thought you'd killed somebody. But she didn't say anything about it? She didn't call the police? Surely… I mean, why would you think that and not do anything about it?'

'It's insane, isn't it? But you've got to remember this was seventeen years ago, and I'm only just hearing about it for the first time. So all I've got to go on is what I've been told. Which isn't much. I don't know why she didn't go to the police, but what she did instead was cut me out of her life. And by extension, your life.'

'I can't believe I'm hearing this. The whole thing is completely mad. It's like a parallel universe. You say this is the first you've heard about this. Who told you? Did Corinna accuse you? Or what?'

Jay shook her head wearily. 'No. I wish she had. To tell you the truth, I wish she'd gone to the police.' She spoke with a vehemence it would be hard to doubt. 'Then this could all have been cleared up years ago. Whoever she saw, it wasn't me. She punished me for a crime I didn't commit.'

'So if it wasn't Corinna, who did tell you?'

'I had a phone call today from someone I used to know. This old friend knows a psychiatrist called Charlie Flint.'

'Charlie Flint? She was at my mother's house last Saturday. Remember? I told you about her. She's a dyke, she was really kind to me.'

Jay gave a mirthless smile. It took all the warmth from her face, turning it into a dangerous, sardonic mask. 'Exactly. She was really kind to you because she's the person your mother has asked to investigate me.'

Magda clamped her hands to the side of her head and pressed her fingers into her scalp. 'This just gets worse. You're saying Charlie was kind to me because she's spying on us?'

'Not us. Me. According to my source, your mother wants to split us up. So she's set Charlie the task of digging into my past and proving I'm a serial killer. So when she reveals the awful truth, you'll run a mile.'

Magda laughed, an off-kilter sound that had nothing to do with joy. 'So who the fuck are you supposed to have killed? Apart from this rower?'

Jay ticked them off on her fingers. 'First, Jess. Then Kathy. My former business partner. I told you about that.'

'The climbing accident? But you had no choice. That wasn't murder. You told me, the judge said you did the only thing you could to save yourself. No way was it murder.'

'I know. But Charlie Flint spent the weekend on Skye, apparently trying to prove otherwise.' Jay drank some wine and shuddered. 'It's horrible, the idea that I could kill Kathy deliberately. She was my friend, for God's sake. I know we didn't always see eye to eye in business, but you don't throw someone off a bloody mountain for that.' She made a derisive sound. 'Besides, it's not exactly a reliable way of killing someone. People sometimes live to tell the tale when they come off a mountain. If I was the killing kind, I'd like to think I've got the brains to pick a better way of doing it.' She rubbed her eyes with one hand, as if brushing a tear away. 'Kathy. Unbelievable.'

'That's horrible,' Magda said, reaching out for Jay's free hand and squeezing it tight.

'And then there's Ulf Ingemarsson,' Jay said. 'At least he was actually murdered. Though not by me, obviously.'

'Who's that? I've never heard of him. Or her.'

'Ulf Ingemarsson was a Swedish programmer who had an idea very similar to 24/7. Back before we launched, we talked to him about licensing the software he was developing. It would have worked well with what we had in mind. But we couldn't agree terms. A bit later, he was murdered in the course of a burglary in the Spanish villa where he was on holiday. That's what the Spanish police say.' As anger seeped into her voice, Jay's narrative gained momentum. 'They couldn't pinpoint the exact day he died, but my diary was crammed with appointments all that week. Like I said, this was back before we launched and I was desperately trying to get all my ducks in a row. I didn't have time to nip off to some mountain village in Spain and knock off the so-called opposition. Who wasn't actually opposition because he didn't have the business nous or the travel contacts to make it work.' Jay threw up her hands in exasperation.

Magda frowned. 'So how did you get dragged in? If the police said it was a burglary?'

'Ingemarsson had a girlfriend who's developed an obsession about 24/7. She thinks either I killed him or I had him killed for his programs. Because Kathy was the IT brain behind doitnow.com and she wasn't around any more. So obviously I was going to have to steal the expertise,' she said sarcastically. 'Like Vinny Fitz couldn't write code or something. Bloody ridiculous. So the girlfriend keeps trying to get a prosecution or a civil case off the ground against me, but she's never got past the first hurdle. It's a nonsense from start to finish.'

'I don't understand. How would my mother get this crazy stuff into her head?'

Jay took another bottle of red from the wine store and opened it as she spoke. 'None of this is secret. On the face of it, it looks as if people who come between me and what I want have a nasty habit of dying. Of course, that doesn't take into account all the people who have thwarted me and lived to tell the tale.' Her smile was crooked, her eyes narrowed. 'I didn't kill anybody, Magda, but there have been rumours. Especially about Kathy and Ulf Ingemarsson. Dig deep enough on the internet and you'll always find conspiracy theories about all sorts of shit. Given that she already believed I'd killed Jess, I guess Corinna felt motivated to do the digging.'

Magda groaned. 'I can't believe this is my mother we're talking about. If she's got an issue with my lover, I'm the person she should be talking to, not some virtual stranger. I don't understand what's going on here.'

Jay drank some wine and closed her eyes. 'I imagine she's scared for you.' She opened her eyes and fixed Magda with a stare. 'Because there's one more death she's trying to pin on me.'

She saw dread dawn on Magda's face. 'Oh no. No. That would be…' She looked as if she would burst into tears. 'Not Philip. Tell me she doesn't think you killed Philip.'

Jay nodded. 'I'm afraid so. Ironic, isn't it? He was almost certainly killed when we were together. You're my alibi. Though it wouldn't carry much weight these days, not now you're sleeping with me. Thank God the court believed Paul and Joanna were guilty. Otherwise your bloody, bloody mother would probably be down the police station demanding they arrest me.' The sudden overspill of bitterness caught Jay by surprise. She'd managed to keep the lid nailed down on her rage thus far, but it was threatening to break free now. And she couldn't afford that. Exposing Magda to the full flood of her fulminating fury would only scare her. Maybe even make her wonder whether there was a kernel of truth in what her mother was suggesting.

Magda jumped to her feet. 'I'm going to call her right now. She's got to put a stop to this. It's outrageous. It's slander, for fuck's sake.'

Quick on her feet, Jay intercepted her, grabbing her wrists in a hold that was strong but not rough. 'No,' she said softly. 'No, Magda. It'll just make things worse. I'm not trying to start a war between you and your family.'

'She's the one starting a war. I'm not having this, Jay. I won't have somebody sneaking around trying to smear your reputation.' Magda tried to pull free, but Jay held firm.

'Please, Magda. Leave it. What I told you, it wasn't intended to make you take sides. I know you love me. It's because I trust you that I was able to tell you all this.' She released one wrist and pulled Magda close. She could feel their hearts beating in counterpoint. Her body earthed the tension in Magda; she could feel her body soften. 'The only reason I've told you is so you know the truth. Corinna's going to find nothing against me because there's nothing to find because I didn't murder anybody.'

'But, Jay-'

'Ssh. She'll let it lie if she's got any sense.' Jay smooched half a dozen tiny kisses against Magda's mouth. Reassurance. 'But if she doesn't… well, you already know the truth. It's not going to come as a shock to you.' Better to feel betrayed by Corinna than me. 'I know this has been a horrible shock for you. But we're OK, you and me. Charlie Flint can look where she likes, talk to whoever she fancies talking to. But she can't hurt us.'

'But what if…' Magda leaned into Jay, who released her other wrist. They stood tight together, arms wrapped around each other, heat to heat.

'What if nothing. I told you, there's nothing to find.'

Magda pulled back so she could look into Jay's face. 'There was nothing to find against Joanna and Paul either. Till you made something.'

It was a terrible, chilling moment. Until that point, it hadn't actually occurred to Jay that Corinna Newsam might be as ruthless as she was. Jay could feel her face freeze. For a moment, she could think of nothing to say. 'Corinna wouldn't do that,' she said at last. 'She wouldn't know where to start.'

Magda's eyes were wide with fear. 'She wouldn't, you're right. But Charlie Flint might.'

12

Tuesday

By the time Charlie set off that morning, only a little of her optimism had been knocked out of her. To her surprise, when she'd returned the night before, Maria had been less than enthusiastic about her trip to the North East. 'I think you should wait a day or two,' she'd said when Charlie had fallen into bed beside her. 'Look at you. You're exhausted. All that driving at the weekend and today you've been to London and Oxford. There's no rush, Charlie. Whatever happened in Roker happened twenty years ago. A couple of days is not going to make any difference.'

'I know that, but I don't want to lose momentum,' Charlie said, snuggling up to Maria, taking comfort in the familiar curves and angles of her body.

'If taking a two-day break means you lose momentum, it doesn't say much for your enthusiasm,' Maria said drily.

'Besides, there's always the risk that Corinna's going to sleep on it and decide she's not as convinced as she thought she was. If she confronts Magda and Jay finds out what's been going on, she might head up to the North East herself to make sure I don't find anything she doesn't want found.'

Maria jerked away from her and pushed herself upright, horror on her face. 'She'd come after you?'

'That's not what I said. And it's not what I meant.' The last thing she needed was Maria choosing now to become overprotective. Charlie rolled her eyes. 'I just meant she'd make sure there was nothing to be found. That's all.'

'This is the woman that you and Nick think is a killer. According to you, she kills people who get in her way. And getting in her way is exactly what you're doing. Christ, Charlie, how can you even think about going up there if there's the slightest chance of her coming after you?'

'She's not going to be coming after me, Maria. For a start, too many people know that I've been looking into the deaths in her past. Only a complete fool would think they could bump me off and not be at the heart of a massive and highly focused investigation. And Jay Stewart is nobody's fool.' Charlie put her arm around Maria and gave her a squeeze. 'You worry too much.'

'No,' Maria said, cross now. 'I don't worry too much. I don't worry nearly enough about you. If there's even a chance of Jay Stewart turning up in the North East, I don't want you going there. Death seems to follow her around. Even if she's not coming after you, knowing my luck you'd get swept away by a tsunami or something.'

'You don't get tsunamis in Tyne and Wear,' Charlie said, laughing at the thought. 'Nothing bad is going to happen, I promise.'

'You're determined, aren't you? There's nothing I can say that will make you change your mind?'

Charlie shook her head. 'I'm afraid not. I've got this under my skin. I need to follow it through to the end.'

'So why not wait till the weekend and I can go with you? Jay's not going to come after you if there's someone else around, is she?'

Charlie felt a surge of warmth towards Maria. Right now, the thought of being done with her to make way for Lisa was incomprehensible. If she could stay away from Lisa, if she could refuse to feed the appetite for her, she could get past this, Charlie was convinced. Maria would never know. She'd never have to comprehend the world of hurt Charlie had considered visiting on her. 'You're very sweet,' she said. 'And I love you for it. But I can't wait till the weekend. I don't know yet who I'm going to need to talk to, but chances are there will be places I need to go that won't be open at the weekend. Local paper offices, for example. Look, I'll be fine. You know me, babe. I don't take stupid risks.' She rubbed her head against Maria's chest.

'That's what I always thought,' Maria said. 'But when I hear you talk like this, I'm not so sure.' She stroked Charlie's hair. 'I love you. I don't want anything bad to happen to you.'

'And it won't. You think if it was that dangerous Nick would let me go? He knows what I'm planning and he hasn't tried to stop me.' Well, it was mostly true.

And so Maria had given in. But it had taken the edge off Charlie's pleasure with her brainwave. She was just past York when Nick called. 'Morning, Charlie,' he said cheerily. 'Got your message last night. You sure you don't want to wait till I've got a day off so I can come with you?'

'Nice of you to ask, Nick. But I don't think Corinna's going to rush into confronting Jay. So there's no reason to be worried, as I keep telling Maria. Besides, I'm already on the road.'

Nick chuckled. 'I wasn't thinking of Jay pursuing you like an avenging Fury. I just thought the local lads might be more helpful if you had a man with a warrant card with you.'

'You're probably right. But I'm just crossing the t's and dotting the i's.' Charlie pulled over into the middle lane where the driving was a little less hazardous. Even with hands-free, it wasn't straightforward to multitask when the conversation required concentration. 'I don't really expect to find any fresh evidence in a twenty-year-old missing persons case. All it was-I was talking about Jay with a friend of mine, Lisa Kent. She's a therapist — she runs NV, the self-help seminar company.'

'I've heard of them, yes.'

'Well, she used to know Jay years ago, when they were both undergraduates. Anyway, she said something about Jay's issues all going back to her mother. Nothing revelatory — if I'd thought about it, I'd have said exactly the same thing, it's basic. But in the context of what I'd been thinking about, it just clicked and I thought, "Of course. And if she is a killer, it's entirely possible her supposedly missing mother was the first victim." So I thought I'd take a look.'

'So do many of your clients kick off by murdering their mothers?'

It was Charlie's turn for the dark chuckle. 'I think it happens a lot more than we know about. Anyway, did you manage to find someone for me to talk to?'

'Like you said, it was twenty years ago. But that has an upside as well as the obvious downside that there's not likely to be any senior officers still serving.' He paused expectantly.

Charlie obliged. 'What's the upside?'

'It's been so long, there's not likely to be anything sensitive in there. And since you are an accredited Home Office expert witness-'

'You can't say that. I'm suspended,' Charlie protested.

'Damn, I knew there was something I forgot. It's OK, Charlie, they couldn't give a shit, not over case papers from 1990. If anybody calls you on it, tell them I've got the memory retention of a goldfish. Look, you'll be fine. It's not like you don't know how to behave in a cop shop.'

'So they're expecting me?'

'That's right. Because it's such an old case, the paperwork isn't held at the local office or at HQ. They've got a dedicated storage facility near force headquarters at Ponteland. I'll text you the address and the directions. The woman who runs it is a retired sergeant. Hester Langhope is her name. She wants you to give her an hour's notice. I'll text you her number as well.'

'Thanks, Nick. I owe you a big drink.'

'You do. By the way, how did it go with Corinna?'

'I took an executive decision to bullshit her. I told her there was no evidence because Jay hadn't done anything.'

There was a long pause, then Nick said, 'It's just as well you don't do this for a living. I don't think private investigators are meant to make it up as they go along. I thought we'd decided that she probably had done all of them? We just didn't have enough evidence?'

'We did. But "not proven" isn't a good verdict to deliver to someone who's already said she'd rather take the law into her own hands than sit quietly while her daughter shacks up with a woman she considers the lesbian equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. So until I get anything approaching solid evidence, the sane thing is to keep lying to Corinna.' Charlie slowed to let a white van cut in front of her as the three lanes narrowed to two.

'And you're comfortable with Magda Newsam under Jay's roof?'

'You sound like Corinna. I don't think Magda's at risk. It sounds like they're besotted with each other. Besides, Jay doesn't do crimes of passion. Her murders are strictly functional. They're about getting what she wants. And right now, she's got that. Come on, Nick, you allegedly did a degree in psychology, you should be as sure of this as I am.'

'I suppose,' he said. 'OK. I'm texting you that stuff now. Call me when you've done your digging.'

Charlie quickly understood how Hester Langhope had ended up spending her retirement running the evidence and records-storage facility for Northumbria Police. Within minutes of meeting her, it was obvious that she married terrifying efficiency with the sort of personal warmth that makes people want to sit down and unburden themselves of their woes. Not that she looked motherly. She was tall and rangy with the kind of haircut and make-up that require minimal commitment in the morning. Her jeans were clean and pressed, her Northumbria Police polo shirt spotless and her trainers gleamed in the fluorescent light. Though she was clearly in her late fifties, Langhope still moved like an athlete.

When Charlie arrived, Langhope was at the front counter to greet her. After inspecting her ID, she led Charlie into the bowels of a warehouse crammed with shelving jammed with file boxes. As they walked, Langhope asked about Charlie's journey, with every appearance of genuine interest. She led the way to a bare office at the far side of the warehouse. It contained a table, two chairs, a file box. Langhope opened the box and presented Charlie with the lid. For a moment she was baffled, till she realised that taped to the inside was a log of who had inspected it. 'You'll need to sign for it,' Langhope said. 'You'll see the history of reviews. After the investigation was mothballed, it had an annual review for the first five years. Then every two years for the next six. Now it's every five years. You'll see the last one was 2008.' She tapped it with her biro. 'NFA. No further action.'

'I'm not really expecting to find anything,' Charlie said.

'DS Nicolaides said you're looking for possible victims of a serial offender?'

'That's right. Jenna Stewart fits the profile. I want to see if there are any possible intersections. It's a long shot.'

Langhope smiled. 'But sometimes they're the ones that pay off. I'll leave you to it. I'm sorry, but I have to lock you in for security reasons.' She pointed to a button on the wall by the door. 'If you need anything — coffee, toilet, to go outside for a smoke — just press the bell and someone will come and fetch you.'

Charlie was impressed. Most of the evidence stores she had been in took the view that if you were in the building, you were trustworthy. Experience had shown how empty that confidence had too often been. But nobody was going to walk out the door with Hester Langhope's treasures. Not unless they'd signed for them first. With a sigh, Charlie withdrew the stack of papers that filled the box and set to work.

What it boiled down to was this. Everything had seemed normal in the Calder household on the morning of Friday, 11 October 1990. Howard Calder had left to catch the bus to work as usual at five past eight. Jay — or Jennifer, as she had been then — had dawdled over breakfast, complaining of toothache. Her mother had called the dentist at half past eight, arranging an emergency appointment for twenty past nine. Jenna had written a note for her daughter to hand in at school to account for her lateness, then given her bus fare to make sure she arrived at the dentist on time. That was the last Jay saw of her mother. After the dental appointment, Jay had returned home because she felt dizzy and sick. The house was empty, but she thought nothing of it because her mother had been working as a volunteer with a project doing up a block of old people's flats nearby. She'd gone to bed and slept the day away.

When Howard Calder returned from work, he was surprised to find only Jay at home. Jenna had never failed to be back from her volunteer work in time to prepare the family's evening meal. He and Jay waited till six, then Howard walked over to the restoration project. He found the building locked up and deserted. It took him the best part of an hour to track down the warden of the flats, who told him the work was now complete. Only a handful of volunteers had been there that day, putting the finishing touches to a couple of the flats. He recognised Jenna from Howard's description, but had no recollection of seeing her that day. She'd been working last on flat 4C, and he thought that had been finished the day before.

Howard returned home, but Jenna still hadn't turned up or phoned. He decided to call the police to report her missing. Charlie imagined the officer taking the call. Another wife who'd had enough of a husband who couldn't believe she'd have the cheek to walk out on him. The officer had suggested Howard should check to see if any of his wife's personal items were missing. At that point, it hadn't even occurred to Howard that Jenna might have left him.

It didn't take him long to work out what was missing. A small suitcase, some underwear and a couple of blouses, toothbrush and toiletries, her passport, birth certificate and a framed photograph of Jay, aged six. All you'd need to walk away from a life and start over, Charlie thought. It was amazing how little you could get away with.

The police weren't very interested, and Charlie couldn't blame them. But Howard was persistent. He tracked down the other volunteers at the project and learned that his wife had been friendly with the project manager, a Dutchman called Rinks van Leer. Van Leer had returned to Holland but was due to begin a new restoration scheme in York a week later. Howard went to York, expecting to find Jenna, but she wasn't there and van Leer denied that she had left Roker with him.

So Howard had gone back to the police. This time, they took a little more notice. It was unusual for a woman to abandon a child, even a sixteen-year-old, without a word and without any obvious boyfriend to go to. But their inquiries soon hit a brick wall. They spoke to their counterparts in Holland but there was no evidence that Jenna had ever been there and she'd certainly not been with van Leer, who had been staying with friends in Leyden for most of the week. None of the other volunteers admitted to having seen Jenna on the Friday she'd disappeared. Charlie had the distinct impression that Jenna Calder would soon have drifted off the police radar had it not been for Howard's weekly visits to the station demanding an update. He was adamant that while she might have gone away willingly, she must have been murdered because nothing else could explain her silence. After a year of this, the file noted tersely, 'Mr Calder was advised that the case was no longer a priority and that if there were any developments he would be contacted.' The case reviews had been thorough but routine. There were no developments.

The file also noted tersely that Calder's stepdaughter had moved out two weeks after her mother's departure to lodge with a teacher from her school. It noted Jay's belief that her mother had run away with a boyfriend because her stepfather was 'an oppressive bastard'. She believed her mother's silence arose from a determination not to give Calder the slightest clue as to her whereabouts. An officer had noted, 'Jennifer seems reconciled to the idea. She does not blame her mother and claims she would have done the same thing in her shoes.'

Charlie sat back, digesting what she'd read. From a police perspective, there was nothing suspicious about Jenna Calder's disappearance. Women and men walked out on their families all the time without warning. Books had been written about the impact of a parent or a partner cutting themselves adrift from their previous lives. Charlie had interviewed people on both sides of the divide — the abandoned and the abandoners — and she felt deep sympathy for both groups. It happened more often than most people liked to believe possible. So it wasn't surprising that it had been regarded as a relatively insignificant missing persons case.

But it you looked at it from the perspective of someone investigating Jay Stewart's past for possible murder victims, the case took on a different appearance. Because the one thing that leapt out from the pile of pages was that the version of that Friday morning that appeared in Unrepentant was very different from the one contained in the police records. According to what Charlie had read, Jay had gone to the flats to confront her mother and Rinks. But the building had been locked up and the caretaker had told her the work was finished. She'd gone home, convinced she and her mother would be leaving Roker behind for a new life with Rinks. But she hadn't found Jenna and she'd never seen her again.

Charlie recognised that Jay might have tweaked reality for a more dramatic narrative, though in this instance, it didn't seem to have improved the quality of the story. Relating the visit to the dentist might have slowed the pace, however. And of course, the great advantage of the version in the memoir was that it gave Jay a more dynamic role. Rather than going to the dentist and coming home, where her mother never returned, it inserted her into the narrative, taking her to the very site of her illicit meetings with Rinks.

The crucial point remained that Jay had no alibi for the day her mother disappeared. She'd gone to the dentist, but she hadn't carried on to school. She claimed she'd been in bed all day following her visit to the dentist, but there was no corroboration. Come to that, there was no evidence that she'd actually been to the dentist at all since nobody had thought to check. If you discounted Jay's evidence to the police or to her readership, there was no reason to believe that Jenna had ever left the house.

'Get a grip,' Charlie said aloud as she replaced the paperwork in the box. Even if Jay had killed her mother in the family home, it was beyond belief that a sixteen-year-old could have disposed of the body without a trace before Howard Calder got home from work. Charlie knew from her own experience of dealing with killers that getting rid of a corpse is far from simple, especially in a country as densely populated as the UK. Unless Charlie could come up with another scenario, Jay remained off the hook.

She rang the bell and waited for Hester Langhope to release her. There was only one other person who might have some insight to offer. But Charlie didn't hold out much hope of Howard Calder shedding light on the mysterious disappearance of his wife. If he'd had anything to say, he'd have said it years before to the police. But at least she had an address, thanks to the police files.

As she drove back down the A1 towards Roker, Charlie called Nick. 'Not quite a waste of time,' she told him. 'There's a discrepancy between what she says in her book and the police statement.' She outlined the problem. 'But it's academic, really. Because either way Jay doesn't have an alibi from about ten in the morning till five in the afternoon.'

Nick was straight on to the problem. 'So where's the body? She was a kid. She wouldn't have the strength or the knowledge to get rid of it.'

'My conclusion exactly. But since I'm up here, I might as well pay Howard Calder a visit. You never know, he might have the mythical piece of knowledge whose significance he's never understood.'

Nick laughed. 'You've been reading too many bad novels.'

'Guilty as charged. I know it's a long shot, but any news from the phone company?'

'No joy so far. I'll let you know as soon as I hear anything. Good luck with Howard.'

As she passed the Angel of the North, its massive aircraft wings spread in benediction, Charlie thought it was more than luck she needed.

13

There was nothing prepossessing about the house where Jay Stewart had spent her adolescence. It sat in the middle of a long terraced street of dirty red brick, neither the best nor the worst on view. The black door and white paintwork were grubby, a combination of city grime and tiny grains of sand carried on the wind from the nearby beach. The curtains seemed to droop, as if all the spirit had gone from them, and the light that showed behind the fanlight above the door was the discouraging pale yellow of a bulb whose wattage was too low for the space it had to illuminate. If this was how it had been twenty years ago, Charlie wasn't surprised that Jay had chosen to get out as soon as she could.

She rang the doorbell, which gave a loud angry buzz. As she waited, she looked around. Four o'clock on a cold Tuesday afternoon, and not a soul stirring. No kids playing football in the road, no youths hanging around on a street corner smoking, no knots of pensioners gossiping. No sense at all of the lives being lived behind those doors. It didn't feel like a community, which surprised her. Maybe it was just because she didn't know the area, didn't know how to read the signs.

The door opened behind her and she spun round. The man framed by the door looked irritated, thick grey eyebrows drawn down over deep-set eyes magnified by his steel-rimmed glasses. He seemed to be an assembly of sharp angles — thin face, nose like a blade, skinny shoulders, bony hands — all compressed in a tight, narrow space. He had a full head of grey hair, cropped so close at the sides that Charlie could see the greyish pink flesh of his scalp. His skin was pale and lined, the contours those of a face that seldom smiled. 'Are you the woman from the council?' he demanded, his voice still strong and overbearing.

Charlie smiled. No point in beating about the bush with this man. 'No. I'm Dr Charlotte Flint. I work with the police. I wondered if I might talk to you about the disappearance of your wife.'

His scowl deepened. 'A doctor? From the police? I've never heard anything like that before.'

'I'm what's called an offender profiler. I help them build cases against people suspected of serious offences like rape and murder.'

'Have you found Jenna? Is that what you're trying to say?' His eyebrows lifted and he looked almost happy.

'I'm sorry, Mr Calder. We haven't found your wife. What I'm doing just now is examining some cases where the missing person fits some of the criteria for a known offender to see if we might be able to clear up some outstanding disappearances. ' She gave a quick smile, hoping the lie would stand up to doorstep scrutiny.

Calder frowned. 'What do you mean, criteria? What sort of criteria?'

'I'm sorry, I can't tell you that. It's confidential. Possible contempt of court down the line, you see?' Wrap things up in enough verbiage and people would fall for anything. She hoped.

'I'll need to see some ID before I let you in,' he said, thrusting his jaw out defiantly.

'No problem.' Charlie produced her Home Office ID.

'You've come a long way,' Calder said, opening the door and signalling she should enter. The hallway was as bare and cold as the street outside. Plain varnished floorboards without even a rug to enliven them, walls painted cream too long ago. There was a faint ancient smell of cooked meat. The room he showed her into was short on comfort. There was a wooden-framed three-piece suite that looked like it had been a G-plan copy back in the sixties. The cushions were thin and depressed. Half a dozen hard dining chairs stood against the wall. The only decoration was three elaborately embroidered samplers with biblical texts. Even from a distance, Charlie could see the work was exquisite. 'What beautiful samplers,' she said, stepping closer to one to take a look.

'My mother's work.' Calder spoke abruptly, as if the subject was already closed. He waved Charlie to a chair but didn't sit himself. Instead, he stood in front of the unlit gas fire, hands balled into fists in the pockets of his loose grey cardigan. There was no offer of tea or coffee. 'I must say, I'm glad to see Jenna hasn't been completely forgotten by the police. The locals frankly couldn't care less.'

'It was the local police who suggested this might fit our other cases,' Charlie said. Small white lie, but Northumbria Police had been kind to her. They deserved the return of the compliment. 'I'm familiar with the circumstances of your wife's disappearance, ' she added hastily, having little appetite for another rehearsal of the facts. 'I've seen the files. But you knew your wife better than anyone and I'm interested in your theory of what might have happened. What was your first reaction when you realised she wasn't home when she should be?'

His face twisted through pain to embarrassment. 'I know it sounds silly, but the only thing I could think was that she had been kidnapped.'

'You didn't think she might have been in an accident?'

He shook his head. 'I'd have been informed. Jenna always carried her handbag with her personal details.'

It was a curious thing to be so definite about, Charlie thought. 'But why would anyone kidnap your wife?'

'We belonged-' He caught himself. 'I belong to an evangelical Christian church. We campaign actively against the sin we see in our society. At the time of Jenna's disappearance, we were protesting vigorously against the opening of a homosexual bed and breakfast on the front here at Roker. We were gaining a groundswell of support. I wondered if she'd been kidnapped to make us back down. I thought then — and I still think now — that those creatures are capable of anything.'

Charlie always hated these moments where she couldn't fight back against bigotry because drawing out the information was more important than taking on the prejudiced. Instead, she bit back her measured retort and said, 'But you had to abandon that theory when you discovered your wife had packed a bag?'

Calder chewed the corner of his lower lip. 'It appeared I could have been wrong,' he said.

'So what did you think then?'

He gave a short, sharp sigh. 'I didn't know what to think. As far as I was concerned, our marriage was as strong as it had ever been. I had no indication from Jenna that anything was wrong between us.' He looked up at the far corner of the room. 'But Jenna had not always been in the church. She had left behind her a life of terrible sin before she was born again in the blood of the lamb.'

'You think she went back to that life?'

His eyes slid over Charlie on their way across the room. 'Not from choice. But I've read things about the after-effects of drugs. That people can have flashbacks. Events that alter their perception of reality. I think she must have had something like that. Some sort of mental breakdown.'

'And is that what you think now?'

He folded his arms tightly across his narrow chest. 'I think she's dead. I think she had some kind of breakdown that made her leave us. And then something else happened. Someone killed her. Or the Devil spoke to her and persuaded her to kill herself. So she never had the chance to repent and return. What else makes sense?'

'You don't think she left with another man? To start a new life?' He said nothing, simply shaking his head, his mouth clamped in a thin tight line. 'She'd walked away from the past before, Mr Calder.'

'She wouldn't have left the child. She knew we didn't get along, me and Jennifer. She'd have made other arrangements. She'd have made sure Jennifer was sorted out properly.' He turned away and walked to the window, looking out into the street, fists leaning on the sill.

'I've read Jennifer's book,' Charlie said.

He whirled round, his face animated with scorn. 'That disgusting abomination? She had the gall to send me a copy. I threw it in the bin. I won't have the words of Satan in the house.'

'So you won't be aware that Jennifer's account of that last morning was different from the version in the police files?'

'How could I? I wouldn't sully my eyes with that claptrap. Let me tell you, Dr Flint, I wish I had the money to take her to court. That book is a filthy libel from start to finish. So it doesn't surprise me that you've caught her out in a lie. I've prayed over that girl's soul night and day, and that's how she repaid me. But what can you expect from a pervert?'

'She says you and her mother were trying to arrange a marriage for her. Is that the sort of thing you had in mind when you said Jennifer would have made arrangements?'

'Exactly,' he said, triumphant now. 'We were already making plans. Plans, I might say, that would have saved Jennifer from this life of degradation that she's embarked on now. It wouldn't have been long before she was married. Even supposing Jenna had decided she wanted to go, she could have waited that little bit longer. She wouldn't have just run off on a whim. Not without another explanation. Like a breakdown. It couldn't be another man. That could have waited, you see.'

'Jennifer wasn't at school that day,' Charlie said. 'Did you ever wonder if she knew more than she was letting on?'

Calder shook his head. 'Jenna was gone by the time she got back from the dentist. She took to her bed because she was feeling bad so she never noticed her mother wasn't back till I got home. I left her here while I went to check whether Jenna was still down at the Riverdale flats. But the place was empty and locked up. When I got hold of the warden, he said there had only been a couple of them there that day, finishing some stuff off. And he didn't think Jenna had been one of them. When I came home and told Jennifer, she was distraught. I could tell she was really upset. She wasn't putting it on. She was only sixteen, she wasn't that good an actress. You generally knew what Jennifer was feeling,' he added bitterly. 'She left us in no doubt about that.'

'That discrepancy I mentioned, between Jennifer's book and her statement, it's to do with the trip to the dentist. She never mentions the dentist. She says she went to the flat in the morning, only to find it was locked up and nobody was there. But you just said the caretaker told you there had been a couple of people there, finishing off. Why would there be these two different versions?' Charlie had initially dismissed the diverging stories. Now she wasn't so sure that was right.

'Because she's a little liar.' He looked as if he wanted to spit a bad taste from his mouth. 'Anything to make herself seem important. Trying to put herself in the spotlight. She was ruined by the time she pitched up here. If I'd had her from a baby, it would have been a different story. I don't believe she was at the flats that morning. She was at the dentist. Little liar.'

There didn't seem much point in persisting in the teeth of such vehemence. 'Jennifer seems to think her mother ran off with Rinks van Leer. Her old boyfriend.' Charlie kept her voice even and emotionless.

'She wasn't with him. I checked myself. And so did the police. Jennifer got that wrong. Fantasy and lies, all of it. I don't believe she even knew the man before she joined that project at the Riverdale flats. The other volunteers said as much. They were friendly, but nobody except Jennifer thought there was anything going on. But for whatever perverse reason, Jennifer wanted me to believe this man had come out of Jenna's past and spirited her away. Nonsense. Pernicious nonsense. But I expect nothing else from her. Not a word of gratitude for the years I clothed and fed her and put a roof over her head even though she was another man's child. I know my Christian duty.' He came to an abrupt halt, two spots of pink colour on his cheeks.

'I'm sure you do,' Charlie said, the words sticking in her throat. Unbidden, an old memory of Jay surfaced in her mind, standing on the fringe of some group at a party. Sensing Charlie's eyes on her, she'd glanced up, her face as wary as a strange dog on the edge of a clearing. With hindsight and experience, the circumspection that had always lurked at the back of the charisma made perfect sense. Growing up around this man, it couldn't have been easy to find a way to flourish. How many times had he tried to trample Jay's spirit into the dust? Had Jenna felt torn, or had she abdicated everything to the blood of the lamb? 'Was Jenna a gullible woman, would you say?'

'She had allowed others to have sway over her in the past, when she walked in the ways of sin. But after she accepted Jesus as her saviour, she was wholly a woman of God. Her faith was her rock. So she wouldn't have fallen for something that ran against her beliefs.'

Charlie nodded, pretending she was satisfied. 'Well, Mr Calder, I'm sorry to have wasted your time. It looks to me as if it's very unlikely that your wife was a victim of the man we're interested in.'

He bowed his head. 'Thank God for that. Against all the odds, I still pray that one day she will walk through that door, ready to be forgiven.'

Charlie stood up. 'I do so hope you're right,' she said, wishing with all her heart that Jenna had really run off with Rinks van Leer. Or anybody, really. Unfortunately, she couldn't quite bring herself to believe it. But she was done with Howard Calder. Wherever the answers to her questions lay, it wasn't in this shrivelled excuse for a home.

14

Whatever had happened in Roker twenty years before was buried deep, that much was certain. But having come all this way, Charlie couldn't resist taking a look at the place where Jenna Calder had held her secret trysts with her Dutchman. The Riverdale flats were only a mile from the Calder house, but they were down on the seafront. It felt as if they inhabited another world.

From a distance, Charlie could see a brown brick building with faintly art deco lines. Big windows looked out at the heavy swell of the sea. Not a bad place to see out your final years, she thought. But as she drew closer, she realised the place was less charming than it first appeared. A six-foot hoarding extended round the perimeter, and the ground-floor windows and entrance were boarded up. Charlie parked opposite, noticing a sign plastered across the hoarding: Riverdale. Soon to be a new development of luxury seaview apartments. And above that, an artist's impression of a generic modern block of flats, all glass and steel. If she'd come a few weeks later, this would have been a building site, all trace of the old Riverdale block gone for ever.

Charlie crossed the road and walked round the perimeter of the hoarding. At the back of the site, away from the road, a pair of gates were held together by a padlock and chain. Charlie shook the padlock, but it was properly fastened. There was some give in the gates; if she'd been the skinny type, like Lisa or Jay herself, she'd have maybe managed to squeeze through. But Charlie had too much padding for that sort of adventure. She walked on and to her surprise, as she rounded the corner, she saw that someone had forced the panels of the hoarding apart. They'd been propped against each other, but there was a clearly trodden mud slick that pointed the way to the breach.

Out of curiosity, Charlie separated the boards and stepped inside. A few yards of churned-up grass separated the hoarding from the flats. The back entrance was covered with a sheet of corrugated iron, but it was juddering in the wind. When she got closer, she could see that the nails fastening it to the frame had been pulled out around one corner and halfway up the side. It was possible to get inside by crouching down and pulling the iron sheet back.

Charlie took out her keys. Maria had given her a tiny but powerful torch at Christmas. Charlie hadn't seen the point but she'd fixed it to her keyring to humour Maria. She turned it on, surprised at how much light it delivered. She found herself in a hallway that smelled of damp, cigarettes and urine. A small scurry off ahead brought rats to mind, which made her think twice about going any further. 'Get a grip,' she told herself sternly. 'They're more afraid of you than you are of them.'

There were doors to either side of the hallway; 1D and 1E. She moved forward cautiously, noticing that the door of 1E was ajar. She pushed it open and shone her torch inside. A pile of crumpled beer cans, some strong cider bottles. Cigarette butts and pizza boxes. It looked more like teenagers than anything more sinister.

Round the corner, and there were the stairs. Solid, made of some kind of composite stone. Charlie climbed past the first floor and on up. As she approached the second floor, the stairwell grew appreciably lighter. She realised that only the windows on the first two floors were boarded up; on the second and third floors, light was still penetrating the building. Now she could see all the doors to the flats were open, the area round the locks bearing witness to blows from some kind of heavy hammer. Someone had clearly gone through the place checking if there was anything worth nicking.

The lock on 4C had given way to violence just like the others. Not quite sure why she was bothering with this, Charlie stepped inside the narrow hallway and continued to what had probably been the living room. It had spectacular views of the promenade and the beach, waves pounding now in a white foam. There was no furniture, but the carpet still held ancient indentations, a presumption of chairs, tables and sideboard. There was a gaping hole in the chimney breast where the fireplace had been and pale squares on the walls where pictures had hung. Charlie looked round the ghost of a room and tried to imagine what it had looked like.

It struck her that there was something odd about the proportions of the room. On one side of the chimney breast was a deep alcove lined with shelves. For books or ornaments, presumably. But there was no symmetry. The other side was flush with the chimney breast itself. At the bottom of the shelving, there was a small metal grid in the floor, where presumably the underfloor heating had vented. But there was no corresponding vent on the other side. It was peculiar, particularly for a period of architecture so obsessed with proportion and balance. Intrigued, Charlie walked out of the room and into the next-door room, to see if a previous occupant had made some alterations, perhaps to create a bedroom cupboard or extra space in a bathroom. But the room backing on to the living room was perfectly plain, completely lacking in recesses or cupboards.

Charlie went back and looked at the wall again. It was odd, no doubt about it. You wouldn't notice it once the room was furnished because it was the logical place for the TV. And there were indeed indentations on the carpet to indicate that's what had been there. But now the room was empty, it was definitely strange. She walked out of the flat and crossed the hall to 4D, which ought to be the mirror image of 4C.

And it was. Except that both sides of the chimney breast were occupied with shelves. This was definitely an anomaly.

Back in 4C, Charlie started tapping on the mystery wall. It didn't sound as solid as the other walls, but equally, it didn't sound completely hollow either. Somewhere in between, she thought. She stared at the wall for a long time, considering. The block was about to be demolished. It wasn't like she'd be damaging anything of value. On the other hand, why on earth was she even considering breaking down a false wall in a derelict flat?

Even as she chewed this over, she was walking back out of the room. The bedroom had been empty. The bathroom likewise. Not even a towel rail she could wrestle off the wall. The kitchen had been stripped of appliances, but in an attempt to remove a granite worktop, somebody had screwed up. Weakened by the sink cut-out, a half-metre chunk of granite had broken off. It was a dozen centimetres wide at the narrow end, about thirty-five at the other. A perfect Stone Age club. Charlie lifted it up and hefted it in her hand. Yes, she could take a decent swing with that.

There was something liberating about the thought of physical violence after the frustrations of the past couple of weeks. Charlie took up a two-fisted stance like a baseball hitter, side on to the false wall. Bending her knees, she raised the club and swung at the wall. With her full weight behind it, the granite hit with a soft crunch, splitting the floral wallpaper and making a sharp-edged depression. A second swing, more splitting paper and a bigger dent. Doggedly, Charlie kept swinging. By the fifth blow, it was clear that the wall was simply plasterboard covered in several layers of wallpaper. After eight or nine whacks with the granite, she broke through. The air that drifted out towards her had a stale, sweetish odour, but it wasn't unpleasant. Through the small hole she'd created at shoulder height there was nothing to be seen, so Charlie grasped the edge of the plasterboard and pulled with all her strength. A chunk came away in her hands, revealing a couple of shelves, one at chest height, the other at waist height. They appeared to be empty.

'Why would you do that?' Charlie said aloud. 'Why seal up a perfectly good set of bookshelves?' She gripped the bottom rim of the plasterboard, hands wide apart, and put her back into it. With a loud rip of wallpaper, most of the lower part of the false wall came loose, making Charlie stagger backwards at the sudden release. Steadying herself, she recovered her footing, looking at the gap she'd revealed.

And then she understood why.

15

The only mummies Charlie had ever seen had been in the Manchester Museum. And they'd been in glass cases. But this macabre relic wasn't some sanitised museum exhibit. Its connection to modern life was all too vivid — the faded tatters of contemporary clothing, the carry-on-sized suitcase rammed against the far wall. Charlie tried to concentrate on those superficialities rather than the all too human remains themselves. But the body demanded her attention.

The skin was dark brown, pulled tight over the bones. The soft tissue had desiccated, giving the head the appearance of a bizarre work of Brit Art-a skull covered in paper-thin leather, the teeth a gleaming grin, the eye sockets dark empty horrors, the hair still hanging lank and coarse. The limbs resembled beef jerky, muscles contracted and contorted into a parody of the foetal position.

At first, she couldn't make sense of what she was seeing. Then she remembered the description of what Jenna Calder had been wearing on the day she disappeared. The rotted remains of denim jeans hung around her hips. The pink polyester blouse was almost intact, though discoloured where it had been pressed against the flesh. A brown raincoat was bundled under the mummy, its belt buckle clearly visible. The body might look like something that had been there for centuries, but Charlie was in no doubt that this was Jay Stewart's mother. 'Oh my God,' she said, taking an involuntary step backwards and letting go of the plasterboard she'd been clinging to. Without taking her eyes off her gruesome discovery, she reached into her pocket for her phone.

'I don't think so.'

The voice came from behind her. Recognising it, Charlie spun round, disbelief on her face, wanting her eyes to prove her ears wrong. 'Lisa?'

'Hand over the phone, Charlie.' Lisa came in from the hallway.

Charlie couldn't take in what she was seeing. Lisa Kent, in black jeans and black leather jacket, holding something in her right hand that pointed towards Charlie. 'What are you talking about?' she said, uncomprehending.

'Just hand over the phone.' Lisa gestured with her left hand. 'Come on, Charlie, this is not a game.' She held up her right hand. 'This is pepper. It's very painful as well as disabling. I don't want to use it yet, but I will if I have to. Now, give me the phone.'

Bewildered and baffled, clueless as to what she was dealing with, Charlie chose to cooperate. 'I don't understand,' she said, stretching out to put the phone in Lisa's hand. She noticed that Lisa was wearing tight-fitting latex gloves. 'Are you feeling OK, Lisa? What's going on here?'

Lisa tucked the phone in a jacket pocket. 'I'm feeling absolutely fine, Charlie. You were right about those deaths, you know. They were murders.' She spoke conversationally, as if they were chatting in her living room. 'Step backwards, please. I'm not comfortable with you this close to me. And not for the pitiful reasons you'd wish for,' she added, a cruel edge to her words.

Charlie took a step backwards, caught unawares by the sensation of the world tilting beneath her feet. 'I don't understand, ' she repeated. 'What's all this got to do with you? Why are you here?'

'You're ridiculously easy to follow,' Lisa said, the chatty tone back in place again. 'Do you ever look in your rear-view mirror? I knew you'd turn up at Howard Calder's eventually, and I just stayed on your tail. I hoped you wouldn't find anything to pursue. But I came prepared to deal with it if you did.'

'But why? What has any of this got to do with you?'

'You really don't get it, do you? All those bodies, those people who stood between Jay and happiness — it wasn't Jay who killed them. I told you: she hasn't got it in her to kill. She needed me to do that for her.' There was no hint of madness in Lisa's sweet smile, which was all the more unnerving.

'Jay got you to kill for her?' Charlie couldn't make sense of this at all.

'No, no. I did it willingly. I did it because it was the only way I could show her how much I love her.' There was something almost radiant about Lisa now. 'She needs to be looked after. But the love between us is so strong, so combustible that she's afraid of us being together. I have to keep proving how much she needs me.'

'You said you hardly knew her. That your paths had crossed at Oxford, but that was all.' The one thing Charlie could cling to in the shifting kaleidoscope around her was her professional skill. Keep her talking, she told herself. If Lisa was talking, she wasn't acting.

Lisa gave a rueful smile and a half-shrug. 'I lied. We were lovers. I was her first. And she was mine. It was so strong, so amazing. Completely transforming.'

A chill ran through Charlie. How in God's name could she have missed this madness? She resisted the urge to shudder. 'I've read the interviews, Lisa. She doesn't mention you. Her first girlfriend was called Louise.'

Lisa's eyelids fluttered in a series of blinks. 'That's right. I was Louise then. But Jay transformed me. And now I'm Lisa. We don't talk about that transformation, you see. Here's the thing, Charlie. Some things are too powerful to share with the world,' she said quickly. 'To know something like the electricity there was between Jay and me is to transcend normal reality. It's impossible to explain to people who have only a mundane experience of the world.'

'People like me, you mean?'

Lisa laughed merrily. 'Exactly, Charlie. Now you're beginning to understand how I couldn't have a relationship with you.'

'As opposed to Nadia,' Charlie said tartly. 'I tell you, Lisa, I am so over you.' As she said it, Charlie knew it was nothing less than the truth. Being threatened and held hostage had a way of putting relationships in a whole new perspective.

Lisa looked momentarily cross. 'That's really of no account to me, Charlie. And I told you already, Nadia was about sex. The satisfaction of a physical urge. There was in no sense a relationship between us. How could there be?'

'I suppose not. But I don't entirely understand how you went from being Jay's lover to being her avenging angel. Presumably she dumped you?' Careful, Charlie, she told herself. Don't make her too angry. Just enough to unsettle her.

'We separated because we couldn't handle the extreme forces between us. My life since then has been about waiting for her to be ready. And taking care of her so she can have the best possible life until that time arrives.'

'And that means killing people who stand in her way?'

Again that brilliant smile. 'Why not? It's not like they were on the same plane as Jay and me.'

'Does she know about this?' Charlie tried to sound conversational too, to hide her intention to understand the pathology of what she was confronted with.

Lisa nodded. 'Naturally. It's important that she understands I'm still as committed to her as I ever was. We remain the keeper of each other's secrets.'

'Each other's secrets?' The echo question. Always a powerful tool. Even with those who had crossed the line.

'She knows I kill for her when it's necessary. And I always knew about this.' Lisa waved vaguely at the alcove and its contents.

'You knew she'd killed her mother?'

Lisa reared back, an expression of outrage on her face. 'Killed her mother? Don't be ridiculous. It was Howard who killed her mother. He'd found out about Rinks van Leer and he followed Jenna here that last morning. He was determined she should die rather than violate his mad Christian principles. By the time Jay arrived to talk to her mother, Jenna was dead. He'd whacked her on the back of the head with his cricket bat. Which he then left lying on the floor beside her.' Lisa rolled her eyes. 'Well, duh. So Jay arrives on the scene in time to see him legging it up the prom. She's scared he's come to put a stop to her escape plans so she runs up to the flat here. And she sees her life falling apart before her eyes. Mother dead, stepfather about to be arrested for murder. What's going to happen to her? The sky's going to fall on her head. The police, the church, the media. She's not going to be sitting her A-levels and going to Oxford in the middle of all that, is she? The lesser of two evils is a runaway mother, right? Am I right?' She paused, waiting for a response.

'Absolutely,' Charlie said. This wasn't the time to try and pick holes in what felt like the authentic version. 'So she hid the body?'

'Exactly.' Lisa sounded as if she were congratulating a particularly slow pupil. 'There were still leftover building materials all over the place. Jay had spent enough of her life in a makeshift existence to know the basics of construction. She took out the bottom shelves and walled up Jenna's body with her suitcase.' Lisa peered round Charlie. 'I don't think she expected to turn her into a mummy, though.' She frowned. 'When she told me about it, it sounded as if she'd sealed Jenna in some airtight environment. But those heating vents, and the chimney — they must have dried out the corpse and carried away any smells up into the roof space.' She wrinkled her nose. 'Old people smell anyway, don't they? You wouldn't think twice about a bit of stink in an old person's flat.'

'She told you about it?'

Lisa nodded eagerly. 'That's how special our relationship is. She's never told anyone else, but one night when we were in bed together, she told me. I had to find a way to repay that trust. So when Jess Edwards threatened her, I did what had to be done.' Again, that smile, so normal it was recalibrating Charlie's measure of crazy. 'The same with that Swedish programmer. I can't even remember his name now.' She shook her head, frowning. 'How odd.' She shrugged. 'Anyway, that was a real help to Jay because I got my hands on all his work too. She told me I'd proved my point, that I didn't have to do this any more. But when I saw her that afternoon last summer in Oxford at Schollie's and she told me about running into Magda and how that had made her feel, I could see she wasn't going to be happy unless she had her sweet little bride to play with for a while. And I can't stand to see her unhappy.'

'You killed Philip Carling? It was you?' This time, Charlie couldn't hide her shock.

'Of course. I was at the same conference as Jay that weekend. We had a drink together right after she'd bumped into Magda. She was on another planet. I did what anybody who really loved her would do. I made her happy.'

There was a long silence. 'You're telling me this because you're planning to kill me, right?'

Lisa's reply was forestalled by the ringing of Charlie's phone. Lisa pulled it out of her pocket and looked at the screen. 'Nick Nicolaides,' she said. 'Who's he?'

'Just a friend,' Charlie said, trying for casual.

'A friend? Really? Well, let's see what your friend has got to say to your voicemail.' She waited, holding the phone in front of her so she could keep Charlie in her eyeline. Before long, the voicemail chime rang out. Lisa pressed the icon to put it on speaker and listened intently, her expression darkening as the significance of the message dawned on her.

'Charlie, it's Nick. Amazing, but the telecom people got back to us. Jay made one call from the mountain. She was on the line for twelve minutes. The number she called is the landline for Lisa Kent. Isn't that the woman you were talking to about Jay? I think you might need to cover your back here. Call me when you get this.'

It could hardly have been worse, Charlie thought. Absolutely no prospect of talking her way out of this with a promise of silence now.

Lisa's top lip drew back in a sneer. 'Oh, Charlie, you couldn't leave well alone, could you?'

'What did you say to her, Lisa? Did you talk her into cutting the rope? Was that what the call was about?' Time to go on the attack, Charlie thought. Passivity wasn't going to get her anywhere now.

'She called me because it was on last number redial. She wanted me to alert the mountain rescue because she didn't have a number for them and her battery was low. I persuaded her that if they weren't there within two hours, she should cut the rope and save herself. Then I went shopping.' She grinned. 'It took me at least two hours to get round to calling them. Which was a good thing, because Kathy was being very difficult about the sale of doitnow.com.'

'I don't think cutting the rope made Jay very happy.'

Lisa shrugged. 'Temporarily, no. But it was best in the long run.'

There was no doubt in Charlie's mind that she was dealing with one of the most disordered personalities she'd ever encountered. That she had allowed herself to become besotted with her was deeply shaming. But then the sophistication and consistency of Lisa's delusion and her capacity for concealing it were remarkable. The problem now was that in order to maintain the integrity of her beliefs, Lisa would have to kill Charlie. It was time to start trying to save herself the only way she knew how. 'Killing me's a really bad idea,' Charlie said.

'I don't think so.'

'Lots of people know I've been investigating Jay. Nick Nicolaides. Maria. Corinna Newsam. If I turn up dead here, with Jenna's body, it points straight to Jay. You'd be putting her right in the firing line.'

Lisa laughed. It didn't sound in the least mad; more like an ordinary person who's heard a good joke. 'Good try, Charlie. But not good enough. You see, when Jay hid the body, she also took the murder weapon back home. Wiped it down and put it back where it belonged, in the shed in Howard Calder's yard. It's been there ever since.' She took a couple of steps back into the hallway and reached down with her left hand, never taking her eyes off Charlie. She reappeared, a cricket bat in her hand. 'Until this morning. And look, here, on the top of the flat side. Burned into the wood. H. Calder. It's probably still got traces of Jenna's DNA on it. Soon to be joined by your DNA.'

'Why would Howard kill me?'

'Obviously, because you found out he'd killed Jenna.'

Charlie shook her head, bemused. 'Why would Howard keep the murder weapon? As far as he was concerned, he left it at the scene of the crime. How would he deal with it turning up in his shed?'

'Good question. Jay reckons he thought the whole after-math of the crime was God doing him a favour. He must have been baffled by the disappearance of the body and the reappearance of the cricket bat. She always thought that's why he made such a big deal of hassling the police about Jenna's disappearance. He thought he was bombproof because God was on his side. He'd done God's work, getting rid of the sinner. Completely nuts, if you ask me.'

He wasn't the only one, Charlie thought. 'Nick knows about you,' she said. 'He's a police officer. He's going to ask some questions.'

'He'll be a voice in the wilderness. I'll get away with this, Charlie. Just like I always do.' She leaned the bat against the door jamb and took a step forward, raising the pepper spray. 'Goodbye, Charlie.'

'No, Lisa.' The voice came from the hallway. Lisa froze, a look of happy amazement spreading across her face. She half-turned as Jay Stewart walked into the room, the spray still pointing at Charlie but her eyes swivelling towards the door.

It was a half-chance for Charlie, but she didn't dare take it. She had no idea whose side Jay was on. Was she here to help Lisa or to save Charlie? Or something else entirely?

Jay looked beyond Charlie to the ruins of the wall she'd built nineteen years before and shuddered. 'Jesus,' she said, her face twisted in pain. 'I never imagined…' Her voice trailed off and she dashed a hand roughly across her eyes. Then somehow she pulled herself together. Charlie saw her shoulders square and her jaw set. 'It's time for this to stop, Lisa. This isn't helping me. I don't want any more deaths on my conscience.'

Lisa's smile was strained for the first time. 'They shouldn't be on your conscience. They're not worth bothering about.'

Jay shook her head. 'We always end up on the opposite side on this one, Lisa,' she said sadly. 'We're not a superior species, you and me. We're human, just like the people you've killed. I want it to stop. That's what it's going to take for me to be happy.' She moved back towards the door, so Lisa couldn't watch both her and Charlie at the same time.

Lisa's head swivelled between them like a spectator at a table tennis game. 'You don't know what's best for you, Jay. You never have. That's always been the trouble.' She pounded on her chest with her free hand. 'I'm the one who knows. All over the world, people accept I'm the one who knows what's best. They come to my seminars, they buy my books. Because I understand, because I know what's best.'

Jay shook her head. 'I'm not arguing, Lisa. I'm done with this.' She held out her hand. 'Give me the spray.'

Lisa looked as if she was going to cry. The conflict between what she wanted to do and what Jay was asking of her was ripping her up. 'I can't do that,' she cried. 'You've got to trust me, Jay. Go, now. Just go. You don't have to be part of this. I'll deal with it. Like I always do.'

'I'm not going.' Jay took a step closer to Lisa, closing the angle and making it harder for Lisa to keep both women in her sights.

Suddenly Lisa pushed Jay in the chest, shoving her hard against the wall. 'I'm doing this for your sake,' she screamed, whirling round to face Charlie.

Charlie squeezed her eyes tight shut and threw herself at the floor. But instead of the aerosol hiss she expected, she heard a scuffle of feet, a thud and the clatter of something metallic hitting the wall. Then a voice shouting, 'No, Lisa.' A scream and the sound of bodies moving.

Charlie scuttled backwards till she hit the chimney breast then opened her eyes to see Lisa on the floor, struggling with Jay. 'Let go of me,' Lisa screamed. 'I'm doing this for you.'

Jay wrestled against her, grunting as Lisa elbowed her in the ribs. 'For fuck's sake, help me here,' she shouted.

Charlie hadn't been in a fight since she'd turned six, but the odds were decent and it was her life that was on the line, she reminded herself as she threw her body over Lisa's thrashing legs. She turned her head in time to see Jay land a punch that rocked Lisa's head back to hit the floor. Dazed, Lisa tried to swing her fist at Jay, but Charlie was able to grab her wrist.

And then it was all over. Lisa went limp, all fight gone from her. Without getting off her, Jay pulled the belt from her jeans. 'Tie her ankles up,' she ordered Charlie.

Feeling foolish, like a character in a bad TV show, Charlie did as she was told, then stood up. Warily, Jay eased herself up and away from Lisa, who turned her face away and hugged herself tightly. Her jaw was already red and swollen, a bruise in the making. 'I'm sorry,' Jay said, rearranging her clothes and running a hand through her hair.

'It's a bit late for that,' Charlie said. 'Four people dead because you didn't put a stop to her before now? Sorry doesn't begin to cover it.'

'So what happens next? You're going to wreck some more lives? And for what? Some crazy idea of justice? I know all about your relationship with justice, Dr Flint. There's four dead women whose families know all about it too.'

All the rage that Charlie had been keeping in check suddenly surfaced. 'Putting Lisa Kent behind bars will save lives. Mine, for example.'

'You know that's not necessarily true. Surely it's clear to you that she's mad as a box of frogs? You must have a colleague who'd agree with you that she needs to be sectioned. For her own safety. Look at her.' She pointed to Lisa, who was mumbling incomprehensibly into the carpet. 'If that's how she reacts to the small matter of me turning against her, I think it's safe to say you can demonstrate she's completely off her chops.'

Charlie shook her head. 'Her delusions are too organised. She'll get herself together and convince the powers that be that she's as sane as anyone can reasonably be expected to be. Then she'll be out, and who knows what she'll think is necessary then? There's no way round this, Jay. We need to call the police.'

'You'll be putting Howard Calder behind bars too.'

'It's where he should be. He killed your mother. Don't you care about that?'

Jay sighed and stared out of the window. 'I think Howard's inhabited his own personal hell for twenty years. Prison, punishment, pain — that would be a relief for him. So no, I don't want the law to extract its pathetic price from Howard. I'm happy for things to stay just the way they are.'

'You don't have the right to make that choice. There's a price we pay for being part of society. You don't get to make rules that apply only to you. I don't care how much money you have or how clever a businesswoman you are. The law isn't always fair. Nobody knows that better than me right now. But it's the best we've got. Now give me your phone.'

Jay shook her head. 'I can't do that, Charlie. I can't go to jail. It would kill me. Never mind what it would do to Magda. Who is the real innocent in all of this. When Corinna set you on this path, do you really think she wanted you to destroy her daughter's life? Because that's what you'll be doing.'

'Magda has the right to know the sort of woman she's living with.'

'Jesus,' Jay exploded. 'All I did was cover other people's backs. I never did anybody any harm. Except Kathy, and I tried to save her, I truly did. I'm not the bad person here.' She lashed out with her foot at Lisa's prone body. 'She's the killer, not me.'

'You could have stopped her. You could have saved lives.'

'You could have stopped Bill Hopton. You could have saved lives,' Jay shouted. 'Nobody's sending you to jail though, are they?'

'I couldn't stop him legally,' Charlie said, furious now. 'Because at that point Bill Hopton hadn't killed anybody. Unlike Lisa.'

Jay cast a quick look around, as if seeking inspiration. She turned to Charlie and gave her the full wattage of her charm. 'Look, here's a deal. Give me a head start. Twenty-four hours. Enough time to get out to somewhere we don't have extradition with. Somewhere decent, where Magda can join me.' Jay spread her hands wide. 'I'm not a criminal. Nobody's going to die because of me if Lisa's out of the way.'

Something inside Charlie's head snapped. She was fed up of being fucked around with. She'd had enough of being a scapegoat. She was tired of being dismissed as irrelevant and insufficient. She'd had more than enough of people who thought their desires were the only thing that mattered.

She let the slim metal canister she'd picked off the floor slide down into her hand, unnoticed by Jay, who had walked over to the window. 'You think you deserve that chance?' Charlie said, her voice tight and hard. As Jay turned to face her, she raised her hand and sprayed her with pepper.

Screaming and coughing, Jay collapsed on the floor, her hands over her face. 'You fucking bitch,' she spluttered.

'I'll do it again if I have to.' Charlie backed away from her and stepped over Lisa. She crouched beside her and said, 'You'll get the same if you try anything.' But it was an empty precaution. Right now, Lisa was too far inside her own head to hear. Charlie fished her phone out of Lisa's jacket pocket and moved into the hallway out of the way of any drifting pepper. A sudden tide of exhaustion rose through her, making her legs weak and her head swim. But there was something she had to do first. Wearily she dialled 112. 'I want to speak to the police,' she said. 'I want to report a murder.'

Eight months later

The three people at the table had converged on the Turkish restaurant from very different places. Detective Sergeant Nick Nicolaides had come from the Foreign Office, where he'd been briefed by a civil servant in the Spanish section. Maria Garside had come by taxi from Euston Station; the swift and regular Virgin Pendolino service from Manchester meant she could conduct most of an afternoon surgery and still make it to the capital in time for dinner. Dr Charlie Flint had come from a meeting in Holborn with the providers of her professional indemnity insurance.

'So, is it to be champagne?' asked Maria, first to arrive and impatient for a drink. 'I already ordered a running selection of mezze.'

Nick, who had bumped into Charlie in the doorway, raised an interrogative eyebrow. 'My meeting was just a confirmation of what we'd already heard. Which is definitely worth champagne. But I'm not drinking fizz unless Charlie got a result too.'

Maria gave Charlie a measured stare. 'Eight years on and she still thinks she can keep her secrets.' She grinned. 'I think it's a bottle of Bolly. Am I right?'

Charlie leaned back in her seat and let out a long breath. 'In the light of the GMC's decision that I acted throughout the Bill Hopton case with professional propriety, my insurers have agreed to settle all outstanding claims from the families of his victims. So yes, Nick, a result. And yes, Maria, definitely worth the Bolly.'

The smile that lit up Maria's face was even more welcome than the news had been. Only when the General Medical Council had dismissed the complaint against Charlie had she fully grasped how much stress her partner had been under. That Maria had asked so little for herself during their time in purgatory was a salutary reminder to Charlie of how lucky she was still to have her.

'Thank God,' Maria said as Nick waved to the waiter.

Once the champagne was on its way, they sat beaming at each other, enjoying the sensation of an ordeal survived. 'So what did the Foreign Office have to say?' Charlie asked.

'Lisa's lawyers tried to have her declared unfit to plead but the court wasn't having it.'

'That's not as surprising as it might seem,' Charlie said. 'When she's not actually rolling around on the floor gibbering, she's capable of simulating a high level of normality. There are very few situations in which she couldn't pass for acceptably normal.'

Nick pulled a face. 'Your idea of normal and mine are clearly not even close.'

'You never saw her at her most convincingly charming,' Maria said. 'You'd have totally fallen under her spell. Like her thousands of NV acolytes.'

'I'll have to take your word for it. Anyway, since the Spaniards were determined to go to trial, her legal team persuaded her to plead guilty. There really was no arguing with the forensics. Her DNA was all over the villa where Ingemarsson was killed. They had records of her ferry crossing and the hotel she stayed in near Santander. There was always a mountain of evidence. But they never had a suspect to test it against.'

'I can't believe she was so careless,' Maria said. 'It's as if she wanted to be caught.'

'Some killers do. But I don't think she was one of them.' Charlie paused as the waiter poured the champagne. They toasted each other, then she continued. 'I think Lisa believed that she was invincible. That her cause was so patently right that she couldn't be stopped. It's a kind of magical thinking that some grandiose personalities indulge in. She was just lucky.'

'Bloody lucky,' Nick said bitterly. 'I still can't believe the bloody CPS, deciding there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute her for the shit she pulled over here.'

Charlie shrugged. 'By that stage, they knew the Spanish would do their dirty work for them. So, how long did she get?'

Nick looked sombre. 'Thirty years. Not much fun in a Spanish jail.'

'That's why her lawyer's already working on trying to get her transferred to a UK prison. And if he succeeds, I bet you a pound to a gold watch she'll do her time in a secure mental hospital rather than a prison.'

'How come you know what her lawyer's up to?' Nick demanded.

Charlie looked faintly embarrassed. 'Because I'm helping to build the case,' she said.

Nick looked astonished. 'She tried to kill you, Charlie.'

'I know. But she's ill.' Charlie fiddled with the stem of her glass. 'She can't be held responsible. The person who should be held to account and who never will be is Jay. That's why I've been making her sit down and take me through the history.'

'You've been sitting down with Jay Stewart?' Nick's voice rose an octave.

Charlie shrugged. 'Why not? She's got nothing better to do with her days right now. She might only have got a suspended sentence for concealment of a body, but it's made her persona non grata with the 24/7 shareholders. They kicked her off the board and she's having to lie low and lick her wounds. She might as well be talking to me.'

Nick shook his head in wonderment. 'You never cease to amaze me, Charlie. So what's she saying?'

'I finally got the back story. Lisa Kent wasn't always Lisa Kent. She started out as Louise Proctor. She and Jay fell in love at Schollie's and had one of those totally consuming affairs. Jay made the fatal mistake of telling her about Jenna's murder and how she'd hid the body. She says it put her in Lisa's power, but of course, there's an element of bullshit in that. She must have known that the penalties for what she did were negligible compared to what Lisa was doing.' Charlie saw her anger and disgust mirrored in the faces of her companions. 'Even then, it was clear Lisa was completely obsessive and when Jess Edwards started her campaign against Jay, she decided it was her job to protect her lover. So she killed Jess. It was Louise that Corinna saw in the meadow that morning, not Jay.'

There was a moment's silence round the table while they all contemplated the consequences of that misidentification. 'Of course, committing a murder put her under tremendous stress even though she was convinced of her absolute right to defend Jay in any way that was necessary. But then her family freaked when they found out she was in the thick of a lesbian affair so they whisked her off to some extreme Catholic retreat where she promptly tried to kill herself, twice. She had a complete breakdown. She took a year out, then came back to Oxford, but not to Schollie's. She transferred to Univ, changed her name and remade herself. She even tried to turn herself into a nice heterosexual girl.'

'The perfect recipe for mental health,' Maria said drily.

'Well, it worked on a superficial level. She was functioning well enough to synthesise all the therapeutic avenues she'd gone down into a self-help programme that slowly started to take off.' Charlie sighed. 'It would be nice to think that she might have made it if she'd never encountered Jay again. The reality is she'd probably have found someone else to act as an outlet for her delusional fantasies.'

'But presumably she did run into Jay again?' Maria asked.

Before Charlie could reply, the food started to arrive. A relay of waiters spread a dozen dishes before them and there was a brief pause while they started on the food. 'How did they meet up again?' Nick asked after he'd devoured an entire pitta bread slathered with aubergine caviar.

'According to Jay, Lisa read an article about her when doitnow.com started to take off. Jay arrived at the office one morning to find the place filled with flowers. There was a card with them that had the name of a bar and a time. Jay figured a public place would be safe enough so she went along. And there was Lisa.'

'I bet that totally did her head in,' Nick said. 'She must have thought she was free and clear after all that time.'

'According to Jay, she tried not to get sucked back in. But Lisa's very persuasive. And very good at passing for a normal, sane, sympathetic person. And then there was the small matter of Jess's murder. Jay was well aware that she was the person with the motive and no alibi. She claims she was scared of what Lisa might do if she refused all contact. Instead, she took a leaf out of Lisa's own book and did this big song and dance about how they were destined to be together but not yet. There would be tests and challenges before they would be worthy of each other.'

'Jeez,' Maria said. 'Remind me again, which one's the nutter?'

'Obviously not Jay,' Nick said. 'She's the one who's walked away from all of this with nothing more severe than a suspended sentence. Her stepfather's doing life for murdering her mother, her ex is doing thirty years in a Spanish jail and Corinna Newsam's had to resign her fellowship because she kept quiet about seeing someone in the meadow. But Jay still has her shares in 24/7 and her big house in Chelsea and her lovely life.'

'Not quite so lovely now,' Charlie pointed out. 'She doesn't have Magda.'

'She doesn't? That's news to me,' Nick said.

'Did I not tell you? Magda dumped her right after she found out it was Lisa who killed Philip. She realised Jay must have known that all along and the whole thing about Joanna and Paul was just a stunt to make it look like Jay was totally devoted to her. She was devastated that they'd been put through a murder trial just to make Jay look good.'

'Even though they did do the insider trading that they're still in prison for,' Maria said, less than charitably.

'Poor Magda. Another fucked-up life, thanks to Jay and Lisa,' Nick said.

'Not entirely,' Maria said. 'Tell him, Charlie.'

'Corinna's furious. Magda's hooked up with a lesbian theatre director who's trying to get pregnant via donor insemination. We're all hoping Henry will die of apoplexy when she finally succeeds.'

'So Magda got a bit of a happy ending,' Maria said. 'And she gave all Philip's insider trading money to the oncology department where she works. We took her out to dinner a couple of weeks ago and she told us all about their lovely new facilities.'

Before he could respond, a cascade of acoustic finger-picking emerged from Nick's jacket. He snatched at his phone, swearing under his breath. 'I'm sorry, I've got to take this,' he said, jumping to his feet and heading for the door. 'Work. Sorry.'

Charlie watched him go, an affectionate smile on her face. Then she turned back to Maria. 'I'm glad the trial's over. I know there's still work to be done to get Lisa back to a proper facility in the UK, but this feels like some sort of closure.'

Maria put her fork down and gave Charlie a long level stare. 'You were in love with her, weren't you?'

Charlie felt as if a gaping pit had opened beneath her feet. 'Sorry?' she blurted out.

Maria's smile was edged with sadness. 'It's OK, Charlie. I know it's over.'

'I never-'

Maria leaned forward and put a finger to Charlie's lips. 'Sssh. You don't need to explain. I think she was your demon lover, like in folk tales. The one you have no resistance to. I'll be honest, Charlie. I was scared I was going to lose you. When I saw the way you didn't look at her in Skye, I was sure you were going to choose her over me.'

'I couldn't leave you,' Charlie said, her voice cracking under the strain.

'I know that now. But I didn't then. I'm glad you fell back to earth.'

Charlie swallowed hard. 'Me too.' As she spoke, Nick strode back into the restaurant, a relieved smile on his face.

Maria spoke quickly, determined to say her piece before he reached them. 'And if you ever think about betraying me again, you'll wish Jay hadn't stopped Lisa adding another scalp to her tally.' She gave a grim smile. 'And that's a guarantee.'