Beneath The Skin

ONE

I was in a hurry. Well, I wasn’t in a hurry at all. But I thought if I created an impression of hurry, I might trick myself into getting something done. By the time I realized my mistake, it would be too late. I would be back in control of my life.

I found an old cotton skirt under my bed and pulled that on, with a black sleeveless T-shirt over the top so the chocolate stain was hidden. An overexcited child must have rammed into me holding a Mars bar or something. I glanced at myself in the mirror. My hair looked like a cartoon of a swarm of bees and I still had a smear of face-paint on my cheek.

Coffee. That would be a start. I found a cup and rinsed it out in the bathroom, where I also filled the kettle. The sink in the kitchen was unreachable: a tower of encrusted dishes and pans. When I’d completed my tax return, I’d wash them. That was another good idea. That obnoxious unsanitary pile of dirty crockery would be my way of blackmailing myself into getting things in order.

I took my coffee over to my desk, along with a half a bar of chocolate. I’d also start having breakfasts of muesli and chopped-up fresh fruit. Four servings of vegetables and six servings of fruit. That was what I was meant to have every day. Chocolate came from a bean, didn’t it?

I might as well get this over with. The final demand from the Inland Revenue lay on top of the computer keyboard. It had been sent several weeks ago, but I’d put it in the drawer with all my other unopened letters and tried not to think about it. Max used to say that I should go to see a therapist, just about my inability to open my mail. Sometimes I let it go for weeks. I don’t know why. I know I’m stacking up trouble for myself. And it’s not as if it is all stuff I don’t want, like bills and library fines. I also leave unopened checks, letters from friends, invitations to jobs that I could certainly do with at the moment. Later, I tell myself. I’ll do it later. When the drawer’s full up.

This was the moment when later had arrived. I swept a packet of biscuits and a straw hat off the chair and sat down; turned on the computer and watched the screen glow green. I clicked the mouse on “Accounts,” and then on “Expenses.” It was good. It was very good. I worked for an hour. I rummaged around my desk, behind the desk, in pockets of jackets. I opened envelopes. I unscrewed old receipts and invoices. My life was taking shape. I decided to print it out to be on the safe side. A small window appeared: “Unknown error, type 18.” What did that mean? I clicked again, but the cursor didn’t move. Everything was frozen. I jabbed at the keys furiously, really hard, as if I could move the cursor by physical force. Nothing happened. Now what? Now what was I supposed to do? My life, my new ordered life, was there somewhere behind the screen, and I couldn’t get at it. I put my head in my hands and cursed and whimpered. I banged the top of the monitor. I stroked it pleadingly.

“Please,” I said. “I’ll be good from now on.”

I needed to look at the manual, but I didn’t have a manual. The computer had been bequeathed to me by a friend of Max’s. Then I remembered the card that had been slid under my windscreen wiper last week. Help with your computer. At the time I had laughed and tossed it aside. But where had I tossed it? I opened the top drawer of my desk: tampons, chewing gum, leaking pens, cellotape, wrapping paper, a travel Scrabble set, a handful of photographs I didn’t even recognize. I tipped out the contents of my shoulder bag: lots of spare change, a scrumpled ball of tissues, an old key, a pack of playing cards, a couple of marbles, one earring, several rubber bands, a lipstick and a juggling ball and a few pen tops. I looked through my wallet, among the credit cards, the receipts, the foreign bank notes and the photo-booth snap of Max. I threw away the photo. No card.

Nor was it under the sofa cushions, or in the chipped teapot I use to store odd things, or in my jewelry drawer, or in the pile of papers on the kitchen table. I’d probably used it as a bookmark. I went in the bedroom and leafed through the books I’d read or looked at recently. I found a dried four-leaf clover in Jane Eyre, and a flyer for takeaway pizzas in a guide to Amsterdam.

Or had I stuffed it contemptuously in my pocket? What had I been wearing that day? I started riffling through my jackets, trousers, shorts, all the clothes that were lying about my bedroom and bathroom, waiting for wash day. I discovered it inside a suede boot under an armchair. It must have landed there like a fallen leaf when I had tossed it aside. I straightened it out and looked at the writing: COMPUTER TROUBLE? it read in bold type. BIG OR SMALL, CALL ME AND I’LL SORT YOU. In smaller type was the phone number, which I immediately dialed.

“Hello.”

“Are you the computer thing?”

“Yeah.”

He sounded young, friendly, highly intelligent.

“Thank the Lord. My computer is paralyzed. Everything’s there. My whole life.”

“Where do you live?”

I felt my spirits lift. Great. I had pictured myself carrying it across London.

“Camden, quite near the tube station.”

“How about this evening?”

“How about now? Please. Trust me. I wouldn’t ask unless it wasn’t a major emergency.”

He laughed. It was a nice laugh, boyish. Reassuring. Like a doctor.

“I’ll see what I can do. Are you in during the day?”

“Always. That would be great.” I quickly gave him my address and phone number before he could make an excuse. Then I added: “By the way, my flat’s a complete tip.” I looked around. “I mean, really a tip. And my name’s Nadia, Nadia Blake.”

“See you later.”

TWO

Less than half an hour later, he knocked on the door. It was almost insanely convenient. He was like one of those handymen my dad’s always going on about, who used to exist in the great old days of lamplighters and chimney sweeps. He was the sort of person who comes straight around to your house and fixes something. Even better, he wasn’t really from the old days. He wasn’t one of these middle-aged men in a uniform who calls you madam and has a clipboard and a van with the name of his company written on the side and then gives you an invoice at the end for an amount that makes you realize it would have been cheaper to replace the toilet rather than have it unblocked.

He was just one of us, except a bit younger. A bit younger than me, anyway. He was tall, casually dressed in sneakers, gray trousers, a T-shirt, and a battered jacket that must have been hot in this tropical weather. He had pale skin, long dark hair that reached his shoulders. All-right-looking, and not actually tongue-tied at all, like computer nerds are supposed to be.

“Hello,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Morris Burnside. The repairman.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “Fantastic. I’m Nadia.”

I showed him inside.

“Burglars?” he said, looking around.

“No, I told you on the phone it was a tip. Doing a cleanup is at the top of my priority list.”

“Can’t you take a joke? I think it’s nice. Lovely big doors leading out into the garden.”

“Yes, very horticultural. The garden is also on the list. A bit lower down.”

“Where’s the patient?”

“Through here.” The offending machine was in my bedroom. You actually have to sit on the bed to operate it. “Do you want some tea?”

“Coffee. Milk, no sugar.”

But I hung around, waiting for his response to my problem. In a perverse way, it was like going to the doctor with some small ache. If it turns out to be something reasonably serious, you feel quite proud, as if you’ve offered the doctor something worthy of his attention. On the other hand, if you turn out to be almost not ill at all, you feel rather ashamed. I wanted to have a healthy computer and yet at the same time I wanted to have something that provided a challenge for Morris the Nerd and made his journey worthwhile. It wasn’t to be.

He took off his jacket and tossed it on the bed. I was surprised. I expected thin, stringy arms, but they were muscled and sinewed. He had a large chest. This was a man who worked out. With my five-foot-nothing height and general wispiness, I felt puny next to him.

“Space Buddy,” I said.

“What?” he said, and then looked down and smiled. “My shirt? I don’t know who makes these slogans up. I reckon it’s a computer in Japan where somebody joined up the wrong wires.”

“So,” I said. “As you can see, it’s just frozen. Usually I can just tap on the keyboard and in the end something will happen, but I’ve bashed and bashed and nothing has any effect.” He sat on the bed and looked at the screen. “I mean, it says that there’s a type-eighteen error, as if that means anything to anybody. I was wondering whether it would just be best to pull the plug out and try to restart it. But maybe that would damage it.”

Morris leaned forward slowly. With his left hand he held down several of the larger keys on the left of the keyboard, then with his right hand he pressed the Return key. The screen went black and then the computer relaunched itself.

“Is that it?” I asked.

He stood up and grabbed his jacket.

“If it happens again, press these three keys together and the Return. If that doesn’t work, there should be a little hole at the back of this unit.” He picked it up and blew some dust away. “Here. Push a matchstick in. That will almost always work. If all else fails, pull the plug out.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said breathlessly. “I’m just hopeless with this stuff, I feel very bad about it. One day I’ll learn. I’ll go on a course.”

“Don’t bother,” he said. “Women aren’t meant to know how to operate computers. That’s what men were invented for.”

I was in a bit of a rush because I had to get my stuff together, but I didn’t feel I could just push him out the door.

“I’ll get you the coffee,” I said. “If I can find it.”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

“Yes, it’s through there. Can I apologize in advance for it?”

“How much do I owe you?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” Morris said. “I wouldn’t take your money for what I did.”

“That’s ridiculous, you must have a call-out fee.”

He smiled. “The coffee will be fine.”

“How are you going to make a living if you go around doing things for nothing? Are you some kind of mahatma?”

“No, no, I do lots of computer stuff, software stuff, some schools, whatever. This is just a hobby.” There was a pause. “What do you do?”

I always had a sinking feeling when I had to launch into this particular explanation.

“It’s not exactly a job, and I wouldn’t portray it as a career, but just at the moment I’m working as a sort of entertainer. Children’s parties.”

“What?”

“That’s it. Me and my partner, Zach-I mean my business partner-we go to parties and do a few tricks, let them stroke a gerbil, tie some balloons into shapes, do a puppet show.”

“That’s amazing,” said Morris.

“It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s more or less a living. Hence the need for keeping accounts, et cetera, et cetera. And I really am sorry, Morris; I don’t feel good wasting your time like this. I don’t expect you to be amused by my impersonation of a helpless female.”

“Couldn’t your boyfriend fix it for you?”

“What makes you think I’ve got a boyfriend?” I said with a slightly sly expression.

Morris went red.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said. “I just saw the shaving foam in the bathroom. Extra toothbrush, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, that. Max-i.e., this person I’ve been involved with-left some stuff behind when he scarpered a couple of weeks ago. When I get around to my clear-up, all that will be right at the bottom of the bin bag.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I didn’t want to get into all that.

“So my computer is fully functional,” I said brightly, finishing my mug of coffee.

“What is it? Three years old?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It used to belong to a friend of a friend.”

“I don’t know how you can use it. Isn’t it like walking through a swamp wrapped in cotton wool?” Morris said. He looked at it with narrowed eyes. “You need some memory. Faster hamsters. That’s what it’s all about.”

“I beg your pardon? Faster hamsters. What are they?”

He grinned. “Sorry. An expression.”

“I had a hamster when I was a girl. It wasn’t at all fast.”

“All I mean is that your machine is a Stone Age implement, anyway.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“For a grand you could have a machine that was a thousand times more powerful. You could be on-line. You could have your own Web site. There’s a spreadsheet that could handle all your own accounts. I could set it up for you if you like. You could see me being a grown-up computer consultant.”

I started to feel a little dizzy.

“That’s fantastically nice of you, Morris, but I think you may have got me mixed up with a woman who can cope with the world.”

“No, Nadia, you’re wrong. A proper system will make everything easier for you. It will put you in control.”

“Stop,” I said firmly. “I don’t want a computer that can do more; I want one that can do less. I don’t want a Web site. I’ve got six months’ ironing to do.”

Morris looked disappointed. He put his coffee mug down on the table.

“If you change your mind,” he said. “Then you’ve got my card.”

“I certainly have.”

“And maybe, we could, you know, maybe we could meet for a drink sometime.”

There was a ring on the front doorbell. Zach. Thank God. It is a statistical fact that seventy-nine percent of male people I meet ask me out. Why don’t I intimidate men more? I looked at him. The harps were not playing. No.

“That’s my partner,” I said. “I’m afraid we’re going to rush out. And…” I gave a sensitive pause. “I’m feeling a bit wobbly at the moment. I’m not quite ready. I’m sorry.”

“Of course,” Morris said, not meeting my eyes. “I completely understand.”

That was nice of him. He followed me to the door. I introduced Morris to Zach as they passed in the doorway.

“This is a man,” I said, “who comes and fixes computers for nothing.”

“Really?” said Zach, looking interested. “I’m totally baffled by mine. Any chance of taking a look?”

“Sorry,” said Morris. “It was a once-only offer. Never to be repeated.”

“That’s what I always seem to find,” said Zach bleakly.

Morris nodded at me pleasantly and was gone.

I have found her. My perfect third. She is small, like the others, but strong, full of energy. She glows with it. Skin like honey, glossy chestnut hair, but all in a tangle, green-brown eyes the color of a walnut, copper-colored freckles scattered over her nose and cheeks. Autumn colors for the end of the summer. Firm chin. White teeth. She smiles easily, tips her head back a bit when she laughs, gestures when she speaks. Not shy, this one, but at ease with herself. Like a cat by the fire. Her skin looks warm. Her hand was warm and dry when I shook it. I knew as soon as I saw her that she was right for me. My challenge. My sweetheart. Nadia.

THREE

“We ought to have another trick or something.” Zach frowned at me over his frothy pink milk shake. “Something new, anyway.”

“Why?”

“If we get invited back to a house.”

I have two magic tricks (three if you count the wand that collapses into segments when I depress a little lever at the base, amazing to anyone under the age of four). The first one involves putting a white silk scarf into an empty bag-the children know that it is empty because several of them have put their grubby little hands in it before I start-and then, hey presto, when I pull it out it’s turned a tie-dyed pink and purple. In the second, I make balls disappear and reappear. They’re basic tricks. Extremely basic. Rudimentary. But I’ve perfected them over the years. The point is to make the audience look in the wrong direction. Then if they gasp, resist the temptation to repeat it. And don’t tell anybody-even curious parents-how they’re done. I once told Max. I did the balls and he was amazed. And curious. How d’ye do it? How d’ye do it? He went on and on. So I showed him and I watched his face fall in disappointment. Was that all? What did he expect? I shouted at him. It’s a fucking trick.

I can juggle, too. Only with three balls, like everybody else. Nothing hard. But I don’t use just multicolored beanbags; I can juggle with bananas and shoes and mugs and teddy bears and umbrellas. Kids love it when I break eggs juggling. They assume that I do it on purpose, that I’m just clowning around.

Zach is much better at the puppet shows than I am. I can only do two different voices and they sound exactly the same. Sometimes we do cook-a-meal parties-you come along with all the ingredients and teach a group of children how to make fairy cakes and sticky icing and hamburgers and how to cut circular ham sandwiches with pastry cutters. Then they eat everything while you clear up the mess. And if you’re lucky the mother makes you a cup of tea.

I’m the clown, the jester, noisy and bright and chaotic and falling over my own feet. Zach’s the glum, serious sidekick. We’d just been to the party of a five-year-old called Tamsin-a roomful of tyrannical little girls in dresses that looked like meringues-and I was sweaty and exhausted after all my animated screeching. I wanted to go home, have a nap, read a newspaper in the bath.

“Insects,” Zach said suddenly. “I heard of a guy who takes bugs and reptiles to children’s parties and the children just touch them. That’s all there is to it.”

“I’m not keeping insects and reptiles in my flat.”

He slurped his milk shake and looked wistful.

“We could get some sort of insect that would bite the children. No, that wouldn’t work. We’d be prosecuted. What would be better would be one that passed on a serious disease to the children, so that they got very ill, but only much later.”

“Sounds good.”

“Don’t you hate ‘Happy Birthday’?” he said.

“Hate it.”

We grinned at each other.

“And you were terrible at juggling today.”

“I know. I’m out of practice. They’ll never invite us back. But that’s fine, because Tamsin’s dad put his arm around me.” I stood up to go. “Do you want to share a cab?”

“No, it’s okay.”

We kissed each other and wandered off in our separate directions.

Going back to the flat has been strange for the past few weeks, since Max left. I had only just got used to him being there: the toilet seat up instead of down, the wardrobe full of his suits and shirts, freshly squeezed orange juice and bacon in the fridge, another body in the bed-at night telling me I was beautiful, and in the morning telling me to get the fuck up because I was late again-someone to make meals for, someone to make meals for me and rub my back and order me to eat breakfast. Someone to make plans with and alter my life for. I had occasionally resented it, the limiting of my freedom. He’d nagged at me to be neater, more organized in my life. He thought I was a slob. He thought I was too dreamy. The things he had once found charming about me had begun to irritate him. But now I found that I missed sharing my life. I needed to learn to live alone once more. The delights of selfishness: I could eat chocolate in bed again, and make porridge for supper, and see The Sound of Music on video, and blue-tack notes to the wall, and be in a bad mood without worrying about it. I could meet someone new and begin the whole dizzying, delicious, dismaying round again.

All around me, friends were beginning to settle down. They were in the jobs that they had trained for, with pensions and prospects. They had mortgages, washing machines, office hours. Lots were married, several even had babies. Maybe that was why Max and I had separated. It had become obvious that we weren’t going to open a joint bank account and have children with his hair and my eyes.

I was beginning to make convoluted scary calculations about how much of my life I had already lived, and how much time I had left; what I’ve done and will do. I am twenty-eight. I don’t smoke, or hardly ever, and I eat lots of fruit and vegetables. I walk up stairs instead of taking the lift, and I have been known to go running. I reckon I’ve got at least fifty years to go, maybe sixty. That’s enough time to learn how to develop my own films, to go whitewater rafting and see the northern lights, to meet the man of my dreams. Or the men of my dreams, more like. Last week I read a newspaper story about how women will soon be able to have babies when they’re in their sixties, and I caught myself feeling relieved.

Probably, I thought, Max would be at the party I was going to tonight. I promised myself, as I went home through the clogged traffic, that I was going to make myself look lovely. I would wash my hair and wear my red dress and laugh and flirt and dance and he’d see what he had walked out on, and he would see that I didn’t give a damn. I am not lonely without him.

I did wash my hair. I ironed my dress. I lay in a bath full of oils, with candles all round the edge, although it was still bright daylight outside. Then I ate two pieces of toast and Marmite and a cool, gleaming nectarine.

In the end, Max wasn’t even there, and after a bit I stopped looking round for him every time someone new walked through the door. I met a man called Robert, who was a lawyer with thick eyebrows, and a man called Terence, who was a pain. I danced rather wildly with my old mate Gordon, who had introduced me to Max all those months ago. I talked for a bit with Lucy, whose thirtieth birthday party this was, and her new boyfriend, who was about seven feet high with bleached hair. He had to lean right down to me; it made me feel like a dwarf, or a child. And at half past eleven, I left and went out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant with my old friends Cathy and Mel and got mildly drunk, but in the nicest way possible. Spare ribs and slimy noodles and cheap red wine, until I started feeling cold in my thin red dress. Cold and tired and I wanted suddenly to go home and climb into my large bed.

It was past one when I came back to the flat. Camden Town comes alive after midnight. The pavements were crawling with strange people, some languorous and some rather frenzied. A man in a green ponytail tried to grab me, but shrugged and grinned when I told him to piss off. A beautiful girl, wearing almost nothing, was twirling round and round on the pavement near my road, like a spinning top. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of her.

I stumbled in through the front door and turned on the hall light. There was a letter on the doormat. I picked it up and looked at the handwriting. I didn’t recognize it. Neat black italics: Ms. Nadia Blake. I slid my finger under the gummed flap and slid out the letter.

FOUR

“Did he ransack the flat as well?”

“What’s that?”

Links gestured at the mess, the cushions on the floor, the papers piled up on the carpet.

“No,” I said. “It’s just me. I’ve been a bit busy. I’m going to deal with it.”

The detective looked nonplussed for a moment, as if he had just woken up and wasn’t exactly sure where he was.

“Er, Miss er…”

“Blake.”

“Yes, Miss Blake. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead.”

I rummaged around and found an ashtray, carved, as it happened, in the shape of the island of Ibiza. I suddenly started worrying about possible drug connotations, but Detective Chief Inspector Links apparently had more urgent things on his mind. He didn’t look a well man. I’ve got an uncle who’s had three heart attacks and still smokes, even though he has difficulty exerting enough suction to keep the cigarette alight. And a friend of Max’s is recovering from a major nervous breakdown that involved him being institutionalized. That was a year ago but he still talks in the quavery voice of somebody trying not to cry. Links reminded me of both of them. Watching him light his cigarette was an exercise in suspense. His fingers shook so much that he could barely get the match together with the end of the cigarette, and then only for an inadequate microsecond. He looked as if he were trying to light it in the crow’s nest of a North Sea trawler rather than in my relatively draft-free living room.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Can I get you something? Would you like some tea?”

Links started to speak but was seized with a fit of bronchitic coughing that sounded very painful. All he could do was shake his head.

“Some honey and lemon?”

He carried on shaking. He took a dirty-looking handkerchief from his side pocket and wiped his eyes. When he spoke it was in quite a low voice, so I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying.

“It’s a matter of…” He paused for a moment. He kept losing the thread of what he was saying. “Of establishing access. That is, who has access.”

“Yes,” I said wearily. “You already said that. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to over one sick letter. It’ll be a big job. I have people to stay quite often. My boyfriend was here a lot. There are people in and out all the time. I was just away for a couple of months and a girlfriend of mine stayed here. Apparently it was virtually open house while she was here.”

“Where is she now?” Links asked in what was not much more than a miserable gasp.

“I think she’s in Prague. She was doing some work there on her way back to Perth.”

Links looked round at his colleague. The other policeman, Detective Inspector Stadler, looked a better insurance risk than Links. A bit wasted maybe, in an oddly attractive way. He was just completely impassive. He had straight hair combed back over his head, prominent cheekbones, and dark eyes, which he kept focused on me every second as if I were very very interesting but in a slightly odd way-I felt more like a car crash than a woman. Now he spoke for the first time:

“Have you any idea who the note may have come from? Have you had anything similar? Any threatening calls? Any strange encounters with people?”

“Oh, endless strange encounters,” I said. Links perked up and looked very slightly less like one of the undead. “My job involves going into different houses every week. I should explain that I’m not a burglar.” They didn’t smile at all. Not remotely. “Me and my partner, we entertain at children’s parties. The people you meet-honestly, you wouldn’t believe it. I can tell you that being hit on by the father of the five-year-old you’ve just done a show for while the mother is in the kitchen lighting the candles on the cake-well, it lowers your view of human nature.”

Links stubbed out his cigarette, which he’d only just half smoked, and lit another.

“Miss, erm…” He looked down at his notebook. “Miss, erm.” He seemed to be having trouble reading his notes. “Erm, Blake. We have, erm, reason to believe that, currently, or as of the more recent, er, months, there may have been, er, other women also targeted by this person.” He kept darting glances toward Stadler, as if in search of moral support. “So one aim of our inquiries will be to establish, or, that is, to attempt to establish, possible connections between them.”

“Who are they?”

Links coughed again. Stadler made no attempt to fill in for him. He just sat and stared at me.

“Well,” he said finally, “it may not be appropriate, as of this stage of the inquiry, to, erm, furnish precise details. It may hinder aspects of the investigation.”

“Are you worried I might try to get in touch with them?”

Links took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. I looked across at Stadler. For the first time he wasn’t looking back. He seemed to be finding something of great interest in a notebook.

“We’ll keep you as in touch with our progress as we can,” Links said.

“Investigation?” I said. “It’s just a letter.”

“It’s important to take these matters seriously. Also, we have a psychologist, a Dr. Grace Schilling, who is an expert on, er… She should be here”-he looked at his watch-“at any minute, really.”

There was a silence.

“Look,” I said. “I’m not stupid. I had a break-in about a year ago-well, nothing was taken. I think I disturbed them. But it took the police about a day to get here and they did sod-all about it. Now I get a single nasty letter and it’s a major operation. What’s going on? Don’t you have real grown-up crimes to solve?”

Stadler snapped his notebook shut and put it in his pocket.

“We’ve been accused of not being sufficiently sensitive to offenses targeted against women,” he said. “We take threats of this kind very seriously.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “That’s good, I suppose.”

Dr. Schilling was the kind of woman I rather envied. She’d obviously done really well at school, got fantastic grades, and still looked rather intelligent. She dressed pretty elegantly as well, but even that was in an intelligent sort of way. She had this long blond hair that looked great but that she’d obviously pinned up in about three and a half seconds to show that she didn’t take it all too seriously. She certainly wasn’t the sort of person you’d catch standing on her head in front of a group of screaming tots. If I’d known she was coming I really would have tidied up the flat. The only thing that irritated me was that she had this air of extremely serious, almost sad, concern when she addressed me, as if she were presenting a religious TV program.

“I understand you’ve been in a relationship which ended,” she said.

“I can tell you that that letter wasn’t written by Max. For all sorts of reasons, including the fact that he would have trouble composing a letter to the milkman. Anyway, he was the one that walked out.”

“All the same, that might mean you were in a vulnerable state.”

“Well, a pissed-off state, maybe.”

“How tall are you, Nadia?”

“Don’t rub it in. I try not to think about it. Just a little over five foot. An emotionally vulnerable dwarf. Is that the point you’re trying to make? You should be all right, then.”

She didn’t even smile.

“Should I be worried?” I asked.

Now there was a very long pause. When Dr. Schilling spoke, it was with great precision.

“I don’t think it would be… well, productive, to get alarmed. But I think you should behave as if you were worried, just to be on the safe side. You have been threatened. You should act as if the threat means what it says.”

“Do you really think somebody just wants to kill me for no reason?”

She looked thoughtful.

“No reason?” she said. “Maybe. There are a lot of men who feel they have very good reasons for attacking or killing women. They may not be reasons that would convince you or me. But that isn’t much comfort, is it?”

“It’s not much comfort to me,” I said.

“No,” said Dr. Schilling, almost inaudibly, as if she were talking to somebody else, somebody I couldn’t see.

FIVE

They stayed and stayed. After a couple of hours Links received a message and shambled away, but Stadler and Dr. Schilling remained. While Schilling talked to me, Stadler went out and came back with sandwiches, cartons of drink, milk, fruit. Then, while he took me through the flat examining my security arrangements (to be substantially upgraded), she retreated into my kitchen area, made some tea. I even heard the rattle and clink and splashing of washing-up being done. She returned clutching mugs. Stadler took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

“There’s tuna and cucumber, salmon and cucumber, chicken salad, ham and mustard,” he announced.

I took the ham, Dr. Schilling took the tuna, which made me think the tuna must be vastly healthier and that there was something slightly squalid and frivolous about my choice.

“Are you some kind of medical policewoman?” I asked.

Her mouth was full, so she could only shake her head while laboriously attempting to swallow her sandwich. I felt a moment of triumph. I’d caught her looking undignified.

“No, no,” she said, as if I’d insulted her. “I do consulting work for them,” she said.

“What’s your real job?” I asked.

“I work at the Welbeck Clinic,” she said.

“What as?”

“Grace is being too modest,” Stadler said. “She is eminent in her field. You’re lucky to have her on your side.”

Schilling looked sharply round at him, and went red, almost in anger or distress, I thought, rather than embarrassment. All these looks and whispered asides. I felt like an intruder into a group of old friends who had their own special catchphrases, jargon, their shared happy history of working together.

“What I really meant,” I was saying, “is that I’m a children’s party entertainer. I often don’t have much pressure on my time during the weekdays when everybody else is in their offices. But you, Dr. Schilling…”

“Please, Nadia, call me Grace,” she murmured.

“All right, Grace. I know that doctors are incredibly busy people, which I’ve discovered every time I’ve wanted to see one. I freely confess that this is very pleasant sitting here and chatting, and I’m extremely willing to talk about my life in whatever detail you want. But I was just thinking why a grand psychiatrist like you is sitting here on the floor of a crappy bedsit in Camden Town eating a tuna sandwich. You’re not looking at your watch, you’re not receiving calls on your mobile. It seems strange to me.”

“It’s not strange,” Stadler said, wiping his mouth. He’d had the salmon. I bet the ham sandwich was the cheapest as well as being the most unhealthy. “What we want to do is to make a plan of how to proceed. We want to give you informal protection, and the purpose of this meeting is to decide what kind. As for Dr. Schilling, she is an authority on harassment of this kind and she has two objectives. Most important, of course, is to help us to find the person who has sent you this threat. To do that she needs to look at you and your life, to get a sense of what has attracted this madman.”

“It’s my responsibility, is it?” I said. “I’ve led him on?”

“It’s not your responsibility in any way,” Grace said urgently. “But he chose you.”

“I think you’re being daft,” I said. “This is a guy who gets off on sending rude letters to women because he’s scared of them. What’s the big deal?”

“You’re not right,” Grace said. “A letter like that is a violent act. A man who sends a letter like that has-well, he may have-crossed a boundary. He must be considered dangerous.”

I looked at her, puzzled.

“Do you think I’m not getting frightened enough?”

She drained her mug of tea. She almost looked as if she were playing for time.

“I may advise you what you should do,” she said. “I don’t think I should tell you what to feel. Here, give me your mug. I’ll get some more tea.”

Subject closed. Stadler gave a cough.

“What I’d like to do,” he said, “if it’s all right, is to talk to you a bit about your life, who your friends are, the kind of people you meet, your habits, that sort of thing.”

“You don’t look like a policeman,” I said.

He gave a slight start. Then he smiled.

“What’s a policeman meant to look like?” he asked.

He was a difficult man to embarrass, or at least for me to embarrass. I had never met anyone before who looked me in the eyes the way he did, almost as if he were trying to look inside. What was he trying to see?

“I don’t know,” I said. “You just don’t have a police look about you. You look, er-”

And I ground to a halt because what I was feeling my way toward saying was that he was too good-looking to be a policeman, which was both a deeply foolish comment and miles away from being remotely appropriate to the situation and, in any case, Grace Schilling had just come in with more tea.

“Normal,” I said, belatedly ending the sentence.

“That’s all?” he said. “I thought you might say something nicer than that.”

I made a face.

“I think it’s nice not to look like a policeman.”

“Depends what you think policemen look like.”

“Am I interrupting something?” Grace asked with a touch of irony.

Then the phone rang. It was Janet. She was checking about our arrangement to meet. I covered the mouthpiece.

“It’s one of my best friends,” I said in a stage whisper. “I arranged to meet her for a drink early this evening. By the way, she definitely didn’t write the note.”

“Not today,” said Stadler.

“Are you serious?”

“Indulge us.”

I pulled another face and made an excuse to Janet. She was very understanding, of course. She wanted to chat, but I wound the conversation down. Grace and Stadler seemed a bit too interested in what I was saying.

“Is this some kind of joke?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m beginning to feel persecuted,” I said. “But not by the sad bastard who wrote that letter. I feel like something lying on a card with a pin through me. I’m still wiggling around and somebody’s looking at me through a microscope.”

“Is that what you feel?” asked Grace earnestly.

“Oh, don’t start,” I said hotly. “For God’s sake, don’t tell me that that’s significant.”

Anyway, it was only half what I felt. We sat there for the afternoon and I made tea and then coffee and found biscuits in a tin. And I dug out the scraps of paper that I call an appointment book, and I went through my address book and I held forth about my life. Every so often one of them would ask a question. It started to rain for the first time in days and days, and all of a sudden I didn’t feel like a rare specimen being examined prior to dissection, but instead like someone spending time with two rather strange new friends. Sitting on the floor with rain running down the windows, it just felt reassuring as much as anything.

“Can you really juggle?” Stadler asked at one point.

“Can I juggle?” I said pugnaciously. “You watch this.” I looked around the room. There was some fruit in the bowl.

When I grabbed two wrinkled apples and a tangerine, a puff of tiny flies flew up into the air. Something was going off in there.

“I’ll deal with that,” I said. “Now look.”

I started juggling with them, then, rather carefully, walked up and down the room. I stumbled on a cushion and they fell to the floor.

“That gives you a general idea,” I said.

“Can you do more than that?” he asked.

I made a scoffing sound.

“Juggling with four balls is very boring,” I said. “You just hold two in each hand and throw them up and down with no interchanges.”

“What about five?”

I made my scoffing sound again.

“Five is for mad people. To juggle five balls you need to sit in a room alone for three months and do nothing else. I’m saving up five balls for when I get sent to prison or become a nun or get stranded on a desert island. They’re only toddlers, and in any case it’s only a phase I’m going through while I work out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

“That’s no excuse,” said Stadler. “We want to see five balls, don’t we?”

“Minimum,” said Grace.

“Shut up,” I said. “Or I’ll show you my magic tricks.”

SIX

I can’t explain what happened next. Or at least I can’t explain it so it makes proper sense.

Grace Schilling left. She put her hands on my shoulders when she said good-bye and stared at me for a moment, as if she were going to kiss me, or cry. Or say something deeply serious. Then Stadler told me that they had arranged for a policewoman, Officer Burnett, to keep an eye on me.

“She’s not going to stay here, is she?”

“No, I wanted to explain this to you. Lynne Burnett will be the officer primarily assigned to your protection. At night she or, more often, other officers will be placed outside your house, mainly in a car. Not a police car. During the day she may spend some time inside, but that’s a matter for you and her.”

“At night?” I said.

“It’ll just be for a while.”

“What about you?” I said. “Will you be around?”

He looked at me for just a couple of seconds too long, so that I almost started thinking about saying something else, and then the doorbell rang. I started, blinked, smiled blearily at him.

“It’ll be Lynne,” he said.

“Aren’t you going to answer it, then?”

“It’s your flat.”

“It’ll be for you.”

He turned on his heel and opened the door. She was younger than me, although not much, and rather lovely. She had a large purple birthmark on her cheek. She didn’t dress like a police officer. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a light blue jacket in her hand.

“I’m Nadia Blake,” I said, holding out my hand. “Sorry about the mess, but I wasn’t exactly expecting visitors.”

She smiled and blushed.

“I’ll keep out of your way as much as possible, unless you want me for something,” she said. “And I’m rather good at tidying up. Only if you want things tidied,” she added hurriedly.

“Everything’s got a bit out of hand,” I said. I glanced across at Stadler and smiled, but he didn’t smile back, just looked at me thoughtfully. I went into my bedroom and sat on the bed, waiting for him to go. I felt tired and odd. What was going on? What was I supposed to do all evening with Lynne hanging around? I couldn’t even feel relaxed going to bed early with cheese on toast.

It could have been worse. We ate fried eggs and baked beans for supper, and Lynne told me all about her seven brothers and sisters, and her mother, who was a hairdresser. She did some tidying up, almost as if she needed something to do with her hands. Then she left. Not to go away, of course. She went and sat outside in the car. After tonight, she said, there would be other officers instead; after all, she had to sleep sometimes. I had a long bath, until the tips of my fingers were shriveled, and when I got out I looked out between the crack in the curtains. I could see her silhouette in the car. Was she reading or listening to the radio? I couldn’t tell. Probably nothing distracting was allowed. I wondered if I should go out with soup or coffee. I went to bed.

The next day Lynne followed me to the shops; she sat around while I wrote letters. There was a hint of embarrassment when Zach rang up and arranged to come round to go through the appointment book. I put the phone down, looked round at her, and said: “Um…”

She instantly responded: “I’ll wait outside.”

“It’s just that-”

“That’s fine.”

Early in the evening the doorbell rang and she went to answer it. It was Stadler. He was carrying a very serious briefcase, I saw, and wearing a somber suit.

“Hello there, Detective,” I said sweetly.

“I’ve taken over from Lynne for a spell.” His expression was impassive. No smile. “Everything all right?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“I thought I’d ask some questions.”

He sat on the sofa, and I sat opposite him in the armchair.

“What are your questions, then, Detective?” He had lovely hands. Long, with smooth nails.

He opened his briefcase and fumbled with some papers.

“I wanted to ask you about previous boyfriends,” he said.

“You’ve done that already.”

“I realize that, but-”

“You know what? I think I’d prefer talking about my past relationships with Grace Schilling.”

He took a deep breath. He seemed ill at ease. I didn’t mind that.

“You might find it useful-” he began, but I interrupted him.

“I don’t really want to tell you any more details of my sex life.”

He gazed at me then, and didn’t look down at his notes anymore. I stood up and turned away from him.

“I’m going to have a glass of wine. Do you want one? And don’t say, Not while I’m on duty.”

“Maybe a very small one.”

I poured us both a glass of white wine, neither of them small. We walked out into what there was of the garden. My yard backs onto an industrial unit where containers are stored, but it made a change from being trapped indoors. The rain of yesterday and today had stopped and the air felt fresher than it had for weeks. The leaves of the pear tree glistened.

“I’m going to do lots of work out here soon,” I said, as we stood among the bolted plants. “It’s like The Day of the Triffids. The weeds are taking over.”

“It’s private, though. No one can see in.”

“True.”

I took a sip of my wine. He knew a lot about me. He knew about my work, my family, my friends, and my boyfriends; my exam results and my affairs. The things I wanted, like an open-top sports car and a better singing voice and more dignity, and the things I was scared of-like lifts and heights and snakes and cancer. I had talked to him, and to Grace, in the way I would talk to a lover, lying in bed after sex, with quiet dark outside, telling secrets and intimate nonsense. Yet I knew nothing about him, nothing at all. It made me feel giddy.

We began to lean toward each other. Here I go, I thought: another big mistake about to happen. But as I leaned I caught my foot on a thick bramble and stumbled badly. I dropped my glass and landed on my knees in the long, wet grass. He knelt down beside me and put a hand under my elbow.

“Come on, get up,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Come on, Nadia.”

I put my arms around his neck. He didn’t look away. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, what he wanted. I kissed him full and hard on his mouth. His lips were cool; his skin was warm. He didn’t push me away and he didn’t kiss me back at first. He just knelt there letting me hold him. I saw the lines on his face, the wrinkles round his eyes, and the grooves round his mouth.

“Help me up then,” I said.

He pulled me to my feet and we stood together in the wild garden. He was much bigger than me, wide and tall, blotting out the low sun.

I ran a thumb across his lower lip. I held his heavy head in my hands. I kissed him again, harder, for longer. I felt completely tipsy, as if I’d drunk not half a glass but six glasses of wine. I put my hands on his back, beneath his shirt, and pressed myself against him. He felt solid and huge. His arms hung by his sides. I picked up one of his hands, laid it against my hot cheek, then led him back through the double doors and into the sitting room again.

He sat himself in a chair and watched me. I unbuttoned my shirt and then I sat astride him.

“Stadler,” I said. “Cameron.”

“I shouldn’t do this,” he said. He burrowed his head between my breasts and I put my hand in his hair. “I really shouldn’t.” His eyes were closed at last. Then he was on top of me, on the floor, and there was a shoe under my back and an old hairbrush spiking my left foot, and dust everywhere, and he pulled up my skirt and came into me, there on the dirty old floor. Neither of us said a word.

Afterward, he rolled off me and lay on his back beside me, arms under his head. We spent about ten minutes just lying there, side by side, staring at the ceiling and saying nothing at all.

When Lynne came back, Cameron was on the phone, very businesslike, and I was reading a magazine. We said good-bye to each other quite formally, but then, muttering to Lynne that there was something he had forgotten to check, he followed me into my bedroom with his file under his arm, and closed the door and laid me back on the bed and kissed me again, pushed his head into my neck to muffle his groans, and told me he would be back as soon as he could manage it.

I spent the rest of the evening on my bed, tingling, pretending to read and not turning a single page and not reading a single word.

SEVEN

“What’s the plan?” I said to Lynne over breakfast.

I think I’m a woman of some degree of resource, but this was more than my brain could deal with. I’d had sex the day before with a man I hardly knew. Now I was having breakfast not with the man but with a woman I hardly knew.

This morning I’d woken out of a turbulent dream that I instantly forgot, and then I remembered what had happened the day before and the day before that. It felt incredible, a violent cartoon of reality, but I looked out of the window and there was Lynne sitting in the front seat, looking dully ahead. What a job. It made being me seem intellectually demanding. I washed and dressed and brushed my hair and teeth in about two minutes and then walked outside and tapped at the window of her car, giving her a start. Some protection.

I said I’d go and get us something for breakfast and she said she’d come with me. She insisted. We bought some croissants in the bakery. She paid half. I toyed with the idea of making her pay for the whole lot since I generally don’t have breakfast at all except on special occasions.

We came back, I made coffee and found a jar with about a millimeter of strawberry jam left and we sat down for breakfast. And I asked what the plan was.

“We’re taking responsibility for your protection,” she said, as if by rote.

I took a big munch of my croissant and washed it down with a swill of coffee. Once I’ve broken my rule about not eating breakfast, I make sure that I break it properly. There was a long pause, not for reflection but for consumption. I was like a python swallowing a deer. Finally I managed it.

“All the same,” I said. “Don’t you feel this is all a ridiculous overreaction?”

“It’s for your benefit,” she said.

“Someone sent me a letter,” I said. “Are you going to guard me for the rest of my life?”

“We want to catch the person who’s sending the letters,” she said.

“What if you don’t? You can’t carry on like this.”

“We’ll see,” she said. “When the time comes.”

In the face of nonsense like that, there was nothing more to be said on the subject.

“I’m embarrassed as well,” I said. “My life’s ridiculous enough with just me here. You seem great, Lynne, and I’m not criticizing you, but the thought of doing everything I do with a policewoman staring at me doesn’t seem cheering.”

“We’ll talk about that,” Lynne said with an earnest expression, as if I’d raised some important point about policy. But we were interrupted by the doorbell. I went over to the door and Lynne hovered in the background. It was Cameron. He looked over my shoulder and nodded toward Lynne.

“Good morning, Miss Blake,” he said.

“Oh, please call me Nadia, Detective,” I said. “We’re very informal here.”

“Nadia,” he said in a sort of feeble mumble. “I’ve stopped in to relieve Lynne for a couple of hours.”

“Fine,” I said, trying to sound bright and casual.

“And make some plan for the day,” he continued. “I don’t know if you’ve got any arrangements.”

“Yes,” I said. “At half past four me and Zach have to be at a children’s party in Muswell Hill. And there are two more on the weekend. Maybe more if anybody else rings up.”

“That’s no problem,” said Cameron. “Lynne can accompany you to those.”

“It might be a bit obtrusive,” I said.

“I’ll sit outside,” Lynne said. “I can give you a lift.”

“Better and better.”

Lynne still had a half-full cup of coffee and half a croissant.

“There’s no hurry,” said Cameron, unnecessarily.

It turned out that there really wasn’t any hurry. Lynne sipped her coffee slowly and only toyed with her croissant. She was in the process of buying a flat herself and she started to ask about what it had been like buying mine. Had I sold a flat of my own before buying this one? It was quite a long story and the shorter I tried to make it, the longer it got. Meanwhile Stadler walked around the room scrutinizing it in some supposedly expert and dispassionate way, picking up objects, opening drawers. I couldn’t help feeling that he was looking at me as he did it, finding out more things I wanted to keep to myself. Finally we exhausted the subject of flat-buying. Lynne turned to Cameron.

“Nadia has certain concerns about our plans.”

“Basically, I don’t know what they are,” I said.

“I’ll discuss it with her,” said Cameron dismissively, and turned away, not continuing the conversation.

She continued holding her coffee. Hadn’t this woman had enough of me? Didn’t she have a job to do?

“So I’ll see you back here about one?” said Cameron.

“Are you going out?” she asked.

“Whatever we do, we’ll be here at one.”

She nodded.

“Fine. See you later, Nadia.”

“See you, Lynne.”

She was out of the door. I saw her legs going up the steps outside and reaching the pavement. The legs walked away. Safe. I turned toward Cameron.

“About yesterday…”

And he was on me, holding me as if I was unbearably precious, his hands touching my face, stroking my hair. I pushed him away slightly and looked him in the eyes.

“I…” I stammered. “I’m not…”

“I can’t…” he murmured, and kissed me again.

I felt his hands behind me now, on my back, then under my T-shirt, feeling for my bra, discovering there wasn’t one.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“I don’t know. No.”

He took my hand and led me into my bedroom. It was different from the day before: more relaxed, more deliberate, slower. I sat down on the bed. He walked to the window and pulled the blind down. Then he closed the bedroom door. He removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and took that off too. It occurred to me that sex with a man who needed to remove a suit and tie was almost a unique experience.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said, as if it were a symptom. “I see you when I close my eyes. What shall we do?”

“Take your clothes off,” I said.

“What?” He looked down, almost as if it were a surprise to see he was still dressed.

He took his clothes off as if in a dream, tossing his trousers into a heap on a chair, looking at me all the time. I reached out my arms toward him.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. Let me. Nadia.”

I lay in a fog of pleasure, and then at last he was inside me and later, when it was over and we lay there entwined, he was still looking at me, stroking my hair, saying my name as if it were some kind of magic spell. After a time we moved away from each other and I propped myself up on a pillow.

“That was lovely,” I said.

“Nadia,” he said. “Nadia.”

“And I feel confused,” I said.

A spell had been broken. He moved back slightly; a shadow crossed his face; he bit his lip.

“Can I be honest with you?” he said.

Suddenly I felt like shivering.

“Please,” I said.

“This job is my whole life,” he said. “And this…”

“You mean this,” I said, gesturing at the bed.

He nodded.

“It’s so not allowed,” he said. “It is so fucking not allowed.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “Is that it?”

“No,” he said bleakly.

“What is it?” I asked. He didn’t reply. “Fucking what is it?”

“I’m married,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

And he started crying. I was lying there with a naked detective crying in my bed. About eighteen hours of the relationship and we’d already moved from first lust to the weeping and recrimination. I felt sour inside. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t pat him and stroke him and say that everything was all right, there, there. Finally he gave a huge sigh, as a sign that he was pulling himself together.

“Nadia?”

“Yes?”

“Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Are you furious with me?”

“Oh, Cameron,” I said. “Just fucked off. And I suppose your wife doesn’t understand you.”

“No, no, I don’t know. I just know I want you. I’m not messing you around, Nadia, I promise you that. I want you so much. It means so much to me I don’t know what to do. Is that all right? What do you think? Nadia, tell me what you think.”

I swung round and looked at my frog-shaped clock on the bedside table. Then I leaned over and kissed Cameron’s chest.

“What do I think? I have a rule not to sleep with married men; it makes me feel bad. I can’t stop thinking about the wife. But I mainly think this is your problem, not mine. And I think that Lynne is due back in about seven minutes.”

The speed of putting clothes on was almost amusing. It felt companionable.

“I wonder if I should put different trousers on,” I said. “Just to test Lynne’s detective skills.”

“No, no,” said Cameron, looking alarmed.

“Oh, all right,” I said.

And we kissed, smiling at each other through the kiss. Married. Why did he have to be married?

That was on the Wednesday. On Thursday he only had time to talk to me on the phone, while Lynne was in the room, a strange conversation with passionate protestations on his part and blank statements on mine: Yes. Yes. Of course. Yes. I feel that as well. All right. On Friday morning, a team of men moved into my flat and fitted new locks on every door and iron grids over each window. And after lunch he came, and Lynne was needed to provide a report. We had time for a bath.

“I’d like to see your show,” he said. “I’d like to see you perform.”

“Come tomorrow,” I said. “We’re performing for a group of four-year-olds just up the road in Primrose Hill.”

“I can’t,” he said, looking away.

“Oh,” I said primly, hating myself. “Family business.”

“I can’t get out of it,” he said. “I would if I could.”

“That’s quite all right,” I said. This was why I didn’t sleep with married men-the shame and the pain and the guilt of it.

“Are you cross?”

“Not at all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Do you want me to be cross?”

He picked up my hand and held it to his cheek. “I’m in love with you, Nadia. I’ve fallen in love.”

“Don’t say that. It frightens me. It makes me feel too happy.”

She thinks they are invisible. I see them. Kissing. My girl and the policeman kissing. Crashing to the floor. As he stands at the window to close the blinds, I see on his stupid face the besotted, thickened look of a man in love.

I love her more. Nobody can love her the way that I love her. Everyone looks in the wrong direction. They look for hate. Love: That’s the key.

EIGHT

Five- and six-year-old girls make the best audiences. They are sweet and admiring, and sit in decorous rows in their silky pastel dresses, with their hair in plaits and their feet in patent leather shoes. When I call one of them up to the front to help me, she’ll put her finger in her mouth and speak in a whisper. Eight- and nine-year-old boys are the worst. They jeer at us, and shout out that they know the disappeared object is in my pocket, and they push each other about and surge forward to inspect my box of tricks. They snigger when I drop a ball. The puppet show is for sissies, they say. They sing “Happy Birthday” in a sarcastic shout. They burst all the balloons. And Zach and I have an unbreakable rule: Nobody in double figures.

This party was for five-year-old boys, with a few girls drifting round the edges. It was in a large and handsome house in Primrose Hill that had steps leading up to the front door, an entrance hall you could turn several cartwheels in before reaching the other side, a kitchen the size of my flat, a living room filled with children that stretched back, across a pale, deep carpet, to French windows. The garden was long and well tended, with a patio, a goldfish pond, a series of trellised arches, clipped box hedges, white roses.

“Blimey,” I whispered at Zach.

“Just don’t break anything,” he whispered back.

The birthday boy was called Oliver, and he was small and plump; his cheeks were blotchy with excitement; his friends raged round him like random atoms while he ripped wrapping paper off presents. His mother was called Mrs. Wyndham, and she looked very tall and very thin and very rich and already seemed terminally irritated by the party that was just beginning. She looked doubtfully at me and Zach.

“There are twenty-four of them,” she said. “Rather boisterous. You know what boys are like.”

“We do,” said Zach, dolefully.

“No problem,” I said. “If the children go into the garden for a few minutes, we can set up in the living room.” I walked into the living room and clapped my hands. “Kids, run outside now. We’ll call you when the show is about to begin.”

There was a stampede through the French windows. Mrs. Wyndham ran after them, wailing something about her camellia.

Zach and I had made the puppet theater together. We had sawed and nailed. On a canvas sheet we had painted blue mountains, a green forest, the inside of a cottage. We had even made one of our puppets, a lion, out of papier-mâché. It was messy, took ages, and looks like a lump of dried plasticine with a wonky face painted on its knobbly, asymmetrical surface. We bought the rest from a specialist shop. We have a couple of short plays, which Zach wrote. After all, he’s the writer. That’s what he says he does when anyone asks him. “I write novels,” he says firmly, maybe adding as an afterthought that he subsidizes his writing with other things, like being a children’s entertainer.

His puppet shows are short and complicated and involve too many different voices. Today’s had a boy, a girl, a wizard, a bird, a butterfly, a clown, a fox. I always feel very sweaty afterward.

Zach already knew about the letter, of course, and the police, and all of the precautions they were taking. He’d met Lynne today, for we had given him a lift to Primrose Hill, and he’d sat in the front beside her and talked to her about chaos theory and how the population of India was about to pass one billion while she maneuvered through the traffic, looking dazed.

As we were slotting together the theater, he asked me if I was at all scared by the business.

“No.” I hesitated as I hooked the curtains across the miniature stage. But I had to tell someone. “More excited, as a matter of fact.”

“That sounds a bit perverse.”

“The thing is, Zach, can you keep a secret?” I didn’t wait for him to reply. I knew he couldn’t. He’s famous for being like a sieve. “I’m having a thing with one of the policemen.”

“What?”

“I know. It’s a bit weird, but-”

“Nadia.” He took hold of my shoulders so I had to stop what I was doing. “Are you insane? You can’t do this.”

“Can’t?”

Zach gestured wildly, as if he couldn’t show by words alone how badly I was behaving.

“It’s not on. It’s wrong. It’s like having an affair with your doctor. He’s taking advantage of you, of your vulnerability. Can’t you see? Look, I’m sure that you see it as something beautiful and pure and important, but you’ve just split up with Max and you’re jumping into bed with someone who’s supposed to be protecting you.”

“Shut up, Zach.”

“Father figure. You have to stop it, Nadia.”

“He’s married,” I added miserably. Just saying it made my chest hurt.

Zach gave a sarcastic snort. “But of course.”

“He’s very attractive. I mean I’d never have thought…” I shivered as I remembered that morning, just a few hours ago, when he’d taken over from Lynne for an hour, and we’d made love in the bathroom, up against the tiled wall, fumbling at each other’s clothing, desperate.

“Nadia,” Zach said urgently. “Oh fuck, here they come.”

The boys had returned from the garden.

After the show, I got Oliver to help me do my pathetic magic trick, and the wand collapsed every time he touched it, and all the children shouted “Abracadabra!” as loudly as they could, and Mrs. Wyndham winced in the doorway. Then I asked them to give me strange objects that I could juggle with. One vile child, called Carver, presented me with a cheese grater he had found in the kitchen, but I didn’t think Mrs. W wanted blood on the carpet. I chose a melon, a napkin ring, and a drumstick, and I didn’t drop any of them. Zach blew up long balloons and twisted them into animal shapes. Then the children bolted into the kitchen for sausages on sticks and jam-filled biscuits and a birthday cake in the shape of a train. And it was over. Zach was desperate for his cigarette, so I pushed him outside.

“Do you mind?” he asked. “Clearing up the stuff?”

“No, go on, scarper.”

“Remember what I said, Nadia.”

“Sure, sure. Now push off, partner.”

“You’re not going to stop, are you?”

I shut my eyes for a moment, felt in my imagination his mouth against my throat.

“I don’t know. I can’t say.”

Parents and nannies started arriving-I can tell the difference between the two a mile off. I dismantled the theater and started to stack it into its box. A pretty young woman came up to me with a cup of tea.

“Mrs. Wyndham asked me to bring you this.” She had silver-blond hair and a funny, lilting accent.

I took it gratefully.

“Are you Oliver’s nanny?”

“No. I came to collect Chris. He lives just down the road.” She picked up a puppet and examined it, put it on her hand. “It must be hard, your job.”

“Not as hard as yours. Do you have just the one?”

“There are two older ones, but Josh and Harry are at school. Does this go in the bag?”

“Thanks.” I gulped at the tea and started loading up. I had this down to an art. She stayed, looking at me. “Where do you come from? Your English is fantastic.”

“Sweden. I was meant to go home but there was a bit of fuss.”

“Oh,” I said vaguely. Where was that wand? I bet Oliver had wandered off with it and worked out how to bend it into segments. “Well, thanks, er…”

“Lena.”

“Lena.”

She disappeared back into the kitchen, where the other nannies were gathered round their charges, watching them stuff chocolate pieces of train into their mouths and talking about boyfriends and nightlife. Children started leaving. “Say thank you,” I heard, and “Where’s my party bag?” and “Harvey’s got a blue one-I want a blue one too.”

I picked up all my stuff. Thank God Lynne was out there with her car. There were some advantages to being followed around by a blushing, stubborn policewoman. A small fair-haired boy bumped into me in the hall. He had violet smudges under his eyes and a chocolate smear round his mouth.

“Hi,” I said brightly, determined to make a quick exit.

“My mummy’s dead,” he said, fixing me with his bright gaze.

“Oh well,” I said, looking around. The mother was probably in the kitchen somewhere.

“Yup. Mummy died. Daddy says she’s gone to heaven.”

“Really?” I said.

“No,” he said, taking a suck of his lolly. “I don’t think she’s gone that far.”

“Well…” I said.

“A man killed her dead.”

“That can’t be true.”

“In true life,” he insisted.

Lena returned, carrying his jacket. “Come on, Chris, home,” she said.

He took her hand.

“I want my party bag first.”

“He says his mother was killed,” I said.

“Yes,” she said simply.

“What? Really?”

I put down the box and bent down to Chris again. “I’m very sorry,” I said again, ineptly. I couldn’t think what to say.

“Can I have my party bag now?” He tugged on Lena’s hand impatiently.

“When did this happen?” I asked Lena.

“Two weeks,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing.”

“Christ.” I looked at her with fascination. I’d never been near someone who’d been near someone who was murdered. “What happened?”

“Nobody knows.” She shook her head from side to side so her silver hair swung. “It happened in the home.”

I gawked at her.

“How terrible. How terrible for everyone.”

Mrs. Wyndham came up with a party bag for Chris. It looked three times as big as everyone else’s.

“There you are, darling,” she said, and planted a kiss on the top of his head. “If there’s anything I can do…” She sighed, as if it hurt her just to look at him. “Little lamb.” She glanced round at me. “I’ll get you your money, Miss Blake. I won’t be a minute-it’s all ready.”

“I’ve got two packets of sweets and Thomas only got one,” said Chris triumphantly. “And I’ve got a slime ball.”

“Here’s your money, Miss Blake.”

From her tone of finality, it didn’t sound as if we would be asked back.

“Thanks.” I shouldered all my gear again and turned to go.

“Good luck,” I said to the young nanny.

“Thank you.”

We lingered in the hall together. I couldn’t leave yet. Zach was going back on his own. I had to say good-bye to him.

“Was it a robbery?”

“No,” she said.

“He wrote letters,” Chris said brightly.

“What?”

Lena nodded and sighed.

“Yes,” she said. “It was horrible. Letters saying that she would be killed. Like love letters.”

“Like love letters,” I repeated dully.

“Yes.” She picked up the little boy and he wrapped his legs round her waist. “Come on, Chris.”

“Wait. Wait one minute. Didn’t she call the police?”

“Oh yes. There were many police.”

“She still died?” I said, feeling icy cold.

“Yes.”

“What were they called?”

“What?”

“The policemen. What were their names?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Can you remember their names?”

“Remember? I am seeing them every day. There is Links, Stadler. And a psychologist: Dr. Schilling. So. Why? What is it?”

“Oh, nothing important.” I smiled at her while my insides burned. “I thought I might know them.”

NINE

“You all right, Nadia?”

“What?”

I looked round, startled, hardly knowing where I was. I was sitting next to Lynne in her car. She was leaning across to me with the concerned look of a friend.

“You look pale,” she said.

“I’ve suddenly got a blinding headache,” I said. “Is it all right if we don’t talk for a while?”

“Can I get you anything?”

I shook my head and lay back in the seat with my eyes closed. I didn’t want to look at her. I couldn’t trust myself to speak. Lynne started the car and began the drive home. I felt as if my skull were full of boiling liquid and I had to hold it tight in my hands to stop it bursting apart. I suddenly remembered I’d forgotten to say good-bye to Zach. I’d left him there in the wreckage of the party. Well fuck it.

I’d been dropped into a new world, a horrible dark world, and I needed to work out where I was, but before that I would have to wait for the boiling buzzing in my head to die down. Most of all, on the short car journey home, I had to concentrate on not throwing up all over Lynne’s nice new metropolitan police-issue vehicle. I thought of the moment when you spill boiling water on your hand. There is no pain but you know that in about one second you are going to have to deal with a current of scouring agony tearing up through your hand and arm. I knew that I was going to have to settle down and properly experience what it was that I had heard. For the moment there was just a voice, somewhere far away, deep in my mind, telling me over and over again that another woman had received letters like mine, that she was dead, murdered. A woman had gone through what I’d gone through, and at the end of it she’d been killed. And just a couple of weeks ago. When I’d last been squabbling with Max she had been alive and worried about the threat and wondering when it would end and now there were children who didn’t have a mother.

The car stopped. I was taking deep breaths now.

“We’re home,” a voice said in my ear. “Do you want some help?”

“I think I’ll just go and lie down for a while.”

“Would you rather I stayed outside in the car?”

Abruptly, I felt as if my face had been plunged into ice-cold water. My mind was clear now. From now on I would just be pretending to be ill.

“No, no, definitely not. I want you inside where you can do some good.”

“If you’re sure?”

“It’s just that I won’t be very sociable. I think I may have a migraine.”

“Do you need to take anything?”

“I just need to lie down in a darkened room.”

We went inside and I left her and retreated to my bedroom. I shut the door. And I checked that the window was firmly closed. And I pulled the blind down. Like Cameron. Like fucking Detective Inspector Cameron Stadler. I lay on the bed, facedown. I felt like I was five years old. I wanted to climb into the bed, to pull the covers over my head, so that I would be safe, so nobody could find me. Except that I wouldn’t be safe. He could find me. For the first time in my life, lying in the bed I didn’t feel safe. I needed to be able to see. I pulled the pillow up against the headboard so I could lean back on it. I could see every part of the room. But what good was that? Maybe it was just better to be killed and not see it.

I tried to go over the conversation I’d had with Lena. I had difficulty reconstructing it. For a feverish few minutes I tried to construct an optimistic version of it. Maybe she was mad. But even in my feverish state, I wasn’t able to convince myself of that. She had named Links, Grace Schilling, Cameron. She’d lived nearby, hadn’t she? That was a thought.

A strange free local paper is pushed through my door every Friday. I never even look at it. I’m not interested in new one-way streets, inquiries in the social services department of the local council, and I put it straight into a cupboard under the sink ready to be used for things like screwing up and shoving into wet shoes. My shoes hadn’t got wet for some time, so the last couple of months of them would still be in the pile. I walked out of my bedroom and told Lynne I was feeling a bit better. I’d go and make some tea for us both. I filled the kettle and switched it on. That would give me the couple of minutes I needed.

I started five issues earlier. Nothing there and nothing in the following issue either. Just a drugs raid in the market, a fire in a warehouse, and articles marked “Advertising Feature.” But in the following issue, which was just over two weeks ago, there it was, small and on an inside page, and my hands started to shake so much that I thought Lynne’s attention would be attracted by the rustling.

The headline was PRIMROSE HILL MURDER. I quickly tore out the page of the newspaper. The kettle had boiled. I poured water over the tea bags.

“Biscuit, Lynne?”

“Not for me, thanks.”

I had another couple of minutes. I smoothed out the article on the work surface: “A mother of three was found murdered in her £800,000 Primrose Hill home last week. Police announced that Jennifer Hintlesham, 38, was found dead on August 3rd. Police suspect that she stumbled on an intruder in the late afternoon. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Links as he announced the setting up of a murder inquiry this week. ‘If anybody has any information I would urge them to contact us at Stretton Green Police Station.’ ”

That was it. I read it and reread it, as if I could suck out some more information through sheer desperation. No mention of any letters. Again I tried to cobble together a version in which the nanny and I had been talking at cross purposes. But then the truth forced itself on me with a bleakness that I could almost taste-dry, metallic. Lena had volunteered the information. I had told her nothing. The policemen were the same.

I picked up the two mugs of tea, but my left hand was compulsively shaking. Scalding tea splashed on my hand. I had to put them down and fill the mug again. I carried one mug through to Lynne and then returned with another for myself, and a shortbread biscuit as well. I sat down near Lynne and looked at her. Had they brought her in to look after me because she hadn’t known the previous woman or because she had? Had she sat like this with Jennifer Hintlesham, drinking tea, pretending to be her friend, saying that everything would be fine, that she was safe? I took a sip of my tea. It was too hot and I burned my tongue and started to cough. When I had recovered I dipped the biscuit in the tea and bit off the warm soft edge. When I spoke, I tried to imitate a woman making conversation.

“It still seems strange to me,” I said. “I get one letter and a policewoman stays with me for days and days. Do you do this every time anybody gets a threatening letter?”

Lynne looked uncomfortable. Or it may have been that, to me, now, Lynne’s imperturbable expression seemed a camouflage.

“I’m just following routine,” she said.

“And if somebody came into the house to attack me, you’d protect me?” I said with a smile. “That’s the idea, is it?”

“Nothing like that will happen,” she said, and for a moment I hated Lynne in a way I’ve never hated anybody in my life. I wanted to fly at her like a madwoman and claw bloody furrows into her face. Whose feelings was she trying to protect here? But the hatred subsided into nothing more than a dull ache. I gulped down the hot tea as quickly as I could. I needed time to go over things in my mind. The phone rang and it was Zach. I told him I had a migraine.

“A migraine?” he said. “How do you know?”

“Because it feels like one. I’ve got to go and lie down.”

I did go and lie down again. I tried to remember everything I could from the previous few days, which I had taken so lightly. Every memory was like an object in a house that I was wandering around. I picked up the object and examined it and it looked different. Above all, I thought of Cameron. Cameron sitting in the corner looking at me, almost hungrily. Cameron taking my clothes off as if I were a precious beautiful object that might break. Cameron stroking me tenderly with infinite care and precision. Cameron with his head between my breasts. What was it he had said? I have to be honest with you, that was it. Honest.

In the evening I wandered out with Lynne and we bought fish and chips. I picked at them, drank a bottle of beer, and hardly spoke a word. Lynne kept darting glances at me. Did she suspect I suspected? Then I went to bed, although it was still early; not yet getting dark. I lay there listening to the noises of the street, of Saturday night in Camden Town. I thought and thought and the more I thought the more I became afraid, like damp rising in a house, weakening and undermining it. Finally I slept and had fragmented dreams.

When I woke I forgot my dreams instantly, as I always do. I forget them utterly, but I was also grateful to have forgotten them, as if a part of me knew what they had been and wanted them gone. The phone was ringing. I crawled out of bed and answered it. It was Cameron. He was whispering.

“I just grabbed a moment,” he said. “I miss you so much.”

“Good,” I said.

“I’m desperate to see you,” he hissed. “I can’t not be with you. I’ve arranged that I can get away in the late afternoon. Can I come and see you around four?”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

I spent the day in a sullen fog. Lynne and I went out for a couple of hours, walking around the market at Camden Lock, but that was just because it made it easier not to speak, or at least not to speak about anything important, and not to listen to any more lies. Cameron arrived at exactly four o’clock. He was wearing jeans and a loose blue shirt. He hadn’t shaved. He looked more rumpled than usual. I could see that he was even more handsome than ever, less buttoned up. He told Lynne he’d take over for a couple of hours. There were some matters about the upcoming week he wanted to discuss with me. Lynne hung around as she always did. Did she guess what was going on? How could she not? But on this occasion I found the delay almost unbearable. I felt I could hardly restrain myself, that I would damage myself. Finally her feet clattered up the steps to the pavement and disappeared. Cameron gently closed the front door behind her and turned to me.

“Oh Nadia,” he said.

I walked toward him. I had prepared myself for this moment for the whole day since I had talked to him on the phone. He reached his arms out toward me. I clenched my fist as hard as I could. When I was a foot away I looked him in the eyes and then, with all my strength, I punched him in the face.

TEN

He lifted his hands to his face. Was it in self-defense or to hit back? I stood with my chin up, almost daring him to strike. But then he lowered his hands and took a pace backward.

“What the fuck?” His voice wasn’t loud, but it was cold. His eyes were cold. His handsome face looked heavy and stupid and vicious. I saw with satisfaction that blood trickled down from his nostril, where my ring had nicked it.

“I know, Detective Inspector Stadler.”

“What?”

“I know everything.”

“What are you going on about?”

“Did it turn you on?”

“What?” he said again. “What?” He wiped the blood away from his nose and examined his fingers.

“It did, didn’t it? It turned you on, thinking that you were fucking a woman who was going to die.”

“You’re hysterical,” he said, voice flat with contempt.

I jabbed him in the chest with a forefinger.

“Jennifer Hintlesham. Does that name ring any bells for you?”

His expression changed; the first glimmering of comprehension crept across his features.

“Nadia,” he said. He took a step toward me and put out his hand, as if I were a wild animal that needed coaxing. “Nadia, please.”

“Stay where you are, you… you.” I couldn’t find a word that was nasty enough. “What were you thinking? How could you do that to me? Did you think of me dead?”

His face shut down.

“We told you we were taking the threat seriously,” he said blankly.

“You fucking hypocrite. You were fucking me there, in the bathroom, and on the floor there in the living room, and in my bed.”

“I didn’t notice you resisting.”

I slapped him across the cheek. I wanted to hurt him, mutilate him, pulverize him.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I can’t believe I did that with you.” I looked at him, disgusted. “A married man who gets turned on by having sex with someone he’s supposed to be protecting.”

“We are protecting you.”

I shocked myself then by bursting into tears.

“Nadia.” His voice was soft, with a hint of triumph in it. “Darling Nadia, I’m sorry. I hated not telling you.”

I felt his hand on me and it made me jump.

“Fuck off,” I screamed through my tears. “I’m not fucking crying because of you. I’m scared, don’t you see? I’m so scared I feel like there’s a great hole in my chest.”

“Nadia.”

“Shut up.” I pulled a tissue out of my pocket and blew my nose. Then I looked at my watch. “Lynne’s back in an hour. I need you to answer some questions. I’m going to wash my face.”

“Wait,” he said. “I won’t touch you, I promise, but can I just say that what happened between us, it wasn’t, I mean it’s not, I wouldn’t want anyone…” He ground to a halt and looked at me with an expression that was both obsequious and resentful. He was scared of me now.

In the bathroom I washed my hands and face, and cleaned my teeth. There was a nasty taste in my mouth. I watched myself in the mirror. I didn’t look any different from usual. How was it possible that I looked the same? I smiled and my reflection smiled back happily.

The heat had gone out of my hatred. I felt cold and calm and ghastly. Cameron seemed dulled too. We sat across the table from each other, like indifferent strangers. It seemed impossible that a couple of days ago he was holding my head between his hands as if I were the most adored object in the world, feeling for me beneath my clothes. I shuddered at the memory.

“How did you find out?” he asked.

“North London’s a small place,” I said. “Especially rich north London. I met the nanny, Lena.” He didn’t reply but I saw a slight nod of recognition. “She told me about the notes. And you. Are you sure they’re from the same person?”

He didn’t meet my eyes.

“Yes,” he said.

“He wrote letters to her, like the one he wrote to me, and then he killed her.”

“Yes.”

“But weren’t you guarding her?”

“We had been. There were complicating factors.”

“But he still got into the house and murdered her.”

“We weren’t exactly guarding her at that point.”

“Why not? Didn’t you take it seriously?”

“Not at all,” he replied, stung. “We took it very seriously, after all-” He stopped abruptly.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Nadia, you should understand that we are taking every precaution to protect you.”

“What? After all, what? Tell me.”

“We knew how serious the letters to Mrs. Hintlesham were,” he muttered, so quietly I had to strain to hear him.

“Why?” He caught my eye and then I realized. The new knowledge flooded over me so I could scarcely breathe. I stared at him. My voice came out in a hoarse whisper. “She wasn’t the first, was she?”

Cameron shook his head.

“Who else?”

“A young woman called Zoe Haratounian. She lived over in Holloway.”

“When?”

“Five weeks ago.”

“How?”

Cameron shook his head again. “Please, Nadia. Don’t. We’re looking after you. Trust us.”

I couldn’t suppress an ugly laugh.

“I know how you must be feeling, Nadia.”

I sank my head into my hands.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “I don’t know what I feel. How do you know?”

“What are you going to do?”

I lifted up my head and glared at him. He meant: Was I going to tell on him? What a baby; a cruel, vain baby.

“I’m going to live,” I said.

“Of course you are.” His voice was placatory and saccharine. He sounded like a doctor talking to a dying patient.

“You think I’m going to die, don’t you?”

“Not at all,” he said. “No way.”

“A madman,” I said. Fear rose in my throat, like bile. Blood roared in my ears. “A killer.”

The doorbell rang. Blushing, smiling, lying Lynne. Cameron said in a low voice: “Please don’t tell anyone about us.”

“Fuck off. I’m thinking.”

ELEVEN

In a twisted way, I almost enjoyed my meeting with Lynne. She had tried to ask Cameron some technical questions about next week’s roster, but he was scarcely able to speak or catch her eye-or my eye. He just stroked his cheek lightly as if he was trying to detect with his fingertips whether there was a revealing mark where I’d hit him. Then he mumbled something about having to get away.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” I said.

“What?” he said miserably.

“About arrangements,” I said.

He looked sharply at me, then gave a shrug and left. Almost with surprise, I found myself alone with Lynne. I hadn’t even thought of what I would say to her after speaking to Cameron.

“Want a drink?” I asked.

I’m not the sort of person who ever needs a drink, but God, I needed a drink.

“Tea would be great.”

So I bustled off and put the kettle on. I seemed to be always making tea for her, as if I was her grandmother. Just a mug and tea bag for her. In the back of a cupboard I found a bottle of whiskey that somebody had once bought in duty-free for me as a present. I splashed some into a tumbler and topped it up from the cold tap. We walked out into the garden. Although it was now the early evening, it was still fiercely hot.

“Cheers,” I said, clinking my whiskey against her mug and taking a sip of my drink, which stung the back of my throat and I could feel sizzling all the way down the inside of my body into my tummy. The garden was a disaster, of course, but just because it was so overgrown, it felt like a refuge from all that horrible stuff outside, which I could still hear: the traffic, music from a sound system in a flat along the road. We walked across to a corner where there was a plant that looked like a bush trying to become a tree. It was covered in cone-shaped clusters of purple flowers. White and brown butterflies were fluttering around it like tiny scraps of paper blown about by the wind.

“I love to stand out here in the evenings,” I said. Lynne nodded back at me. “I mean in the summer. I don’t do it in the rain. I like looking at the flowers and wondering what their names are. Do you know anything about gardening?” Lynne shook her head. “Pity.” I took another sip. Now for it. “I owe you an apology,” I said, just as she was lifting the mug to her lips, testing the heat of the liquid with that delicate first sip. She looked puzzled.

“What for?”

“Yesterday I was asking you whether all this-I mean all the protection-wasn’t a bit much. I wondered why you were doing this. But in fact I knew.”

Lynne froze in the act of lifting the mug of tea to her mouth. I continued.

“You see, a funny thing happened. Yesterday at the children’s party I got talking to the nanny of one of the children. And then completely by chance I discovered something. She worked for, I mean used to work for, a woman called Jennifer Hintlesham.” I had to give Lynne credit. She gave no visible reaction at all. She wouldn’t catch my eye, that was all. “You have heard of her?” I said.

Lynne took some time to answer. She looked down at her tea.

“Yes,” she said, so quietly I could hardly catch the words.

A thought-actually more a feeling than a thought-occurred to me. I remembered that strange sensation when I’d gone somewhere with Max and he would say something that would make me realize that he’d been there before with an earlier girlfriend. And, although I knew it was stupid, things would go a bit gray and sour.

“Did you do this with her? With Jennifer? Did you stand in her garden with her, drinking tea?”

Lynne looked trapped. But she couldn’t run away. She had to stay here, looking after me.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It felt bad not telling you, but there were strict instructions. They thought it might be traumatic for you.”

“Did Jennifer know about the one before?”

“No.”

I felt that my mouth was flapping open. I was aghast. I just couldn’t think what to say.

“I… you lied to her as well” was all I finally managed.

“It wasn’t like that,” said Lynne, still not catching my eye. “It was a decision made from the beginning. They thought it would be bad to panic you.”

“And to panic her. I mean Jennifer.”

“That’s right.”

“So-let me get this straight in my mind-she didn’t know that the person sending her letters had already killed somebody.”

Lynne didn’t reply.

“And she couldn’t make decisions about how to protect herself.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Lynne said.

“In what way wasn’t it like that?”

“This wasn’t my decision,” Lynne said. “But I know that they’ve been acting for the best. What they thought would be the best.”

“Your strategy for protecting Jennifer-and the first one as well, Zoe-it didn’t quite work out.” I took a gulp of the whiskey, which made me cough. I wasn’t really used to spirits. I felt so miserable and frightened and sick. “I’m sorry, Lynne, I’m sure that this is awful for you, but it’s worse for me. This is my life. I’m the one who’s going to die.”

She moved closer toward me.

“You’re not going to die.”

I recoiled. I didn’t want these people to touch me. I didn’t want their sensitivity.

“I don’t understand, Lynne. You’ve been sitting here with me for days. You’ve been here in the house, drinking my tea, eating my food. I’ve talked to you about my life. You’ve seen me barefoot, slouched on the sofa; half-naked, wandering around. You’ve seen me believing you, trusting you. I can’t understand it. What were you thinking?”

Lynne stayed silent. I didn’t speak, either, for a time. I reached for my whiskey and sipped at it.

“Do you think I’m being stupid?” I said. “It’s just that I have this problem with everybody knowing something about me and me not knowing it. What would you feel, if it was you?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I took another sip of the drink. It was starting to work on me. I have a startlingly low resistance to any kind of drug. I would like it to be because I have a perfectly attuned body, but I think it’s just a weak head. It was getting harder to maintain my feeling of fury, although the fear was still throbbing away somewhere deep inside. But I could feel the alcohol all over my body and outside it as well, making the world seem softer, fuzzier in the golden light of this summer evening right in the middle of north London.

“Did you look after the first one?”

“Zoe? No. I only met her once. Just before… well…”

“And Jennifer?”

“Yes. I spent time with her.”

“What were they like? Were they like me?”

Lynne drained her mug of tea.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry you were kept in the dark like this. But it’s completely forbidden to divulge details of that kind. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you understand what I’m saying?” I raised my voice in some bitterness. “I’ve never met these two women. I don’t even know what they look like. But I’ve got something very big in common with them. I’d like to know about them. It might help.”

Lynne’s face had gone blank now. She suddenly looked like a bureaucrat behind a desk.

“If you’ve any concerns, you’ll have to raise them with DCI Links. I’m not authorized to make any disclosures.” There was a flash of human concern on her face. “Look, Nadia, I’m not the one to ask. I haven’t seen the files on the case. I’m just on the edge of it, like you.”

“I’m not on the edge,” I said. “I wish I were. I’m in the black hole at the center. So that’s it? You just want me to trust you, to have faith that you’re getting better at this?”

Fuck her, I thought. Fuck all of them. We walked inside, hardly looking at each other. She made some sandwiches with bits of ham that were left in the fridge and we sat watching the TV and not talking. I hardly noticed the program. At first I thought angrily, playing through scenes from my recent life, conversations with Lynne, Links, Cameron. I remembered lying in bed with Cameron, the way he gazed at me. I tried to imagine the erotic charge of a naked body like mine, the body of a woman who was going to die soon and didn’t know it. What was it like to be a lover whose only rival was a murderer? Did that make sex more exciting? The more I thought of it, the thought of him nuzzling my body made me want to vomit, as if there had been rats gnawing at my breasts and between my legs.

I hadn’t ever really been scared before. I don’t think I am someone who scares easily. I fall in love easily, and get angry quickly, and happy too, and irritated, and excited. I shout, cry, laugh. These things lie close to my surface, and they bubble up. But fear is deep down and hidden. Now I was scared, but the feeling didn’t obliterate all other emotions the way rage does, for instance, or sudden desire. It felt more like walking out of the sunlight into the shadow: stony cold, eerie. A different world.

As the night wore on, I realized that I didn’t know who to turn to. I thought about my parents but quickly dismissed them. They were old and nervous. They had always been anxious about me, before there was any real need for anxiety. Zach, darling glum Zach. Or Janet, maybe. Who would be calm, strong, a rock? Who would listen to me? Who would save me?

And then, without meaning to, I started to think about the women who had died. I knew nothing about them except their names, and that Jennifer Hintlesham had had three children. I remembered her little son’s belligerent cherub’s face. Two women. Zoe and Jenny. What had they looked like, how had they felt? They must have lain awake in their beds in the dark, as I was doing now, and felt the same icy fear flowing round their bodies that I was feeling now. And the same loneliness. For now of course it was not two but three women, joined together by one madman. Zoe and Jenny and Nadia. Nadia: That was me. Why me? I thought, as I lay there and listened to the sounds of the night. Why them, and why me? And just why?

But even as I lay there, curled up in my covers with my heart thumping and my eyes stinging, I knew I was going to have to move on from this blind and helpless state of terror. I couldn’t just huddle up and wait for something to happen, or for other people to rescue me from the nightmare. Crying under the sheets wasn’t going to save me. And it was as if a small part deep inside me clenched itself in readiness.

I fell asleep in the early hours, and the following morning, when I woke dazed with tiredness and strange dreams, I didn’t exactly feel braver or safer. But I did feel steelier. At ten o’clock I asked Lynne if she could leave the room because I had a private phone call to make. She said she’d wait in the car, and when she had gone, pulling the door firmly shut behind her, I phoned Cameron at work.

“I’m feeling desperate,” he said as soon as he came on the line.

“Good. So am I.”

“I’m so sorry that you feel betrayed. I feel terrible.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “You can do something for me.”

“Anything.”

“I want to see the files on this case. Not just about me, about the other two women as well.”

“That’s not possible. They’re not available to the public.”

“I know. I still want to see them.”

“It’s completely out of the question.”

“I want you to listen to me very clearly, Cameron. In my opinion you behaved badly about the whole sex thing. Presumably the thought of having sex with a potential victim is some kind of sicko turn-on. But I enjoyed it as well and I’m a grown-up and all that. I’m not interested in punishing you. I just want to make that clear. But if you don’t bring me the files I will go and see Links and I will tell him about our sexual relationship and I’ll probably cry a bit and talk about having been in a vulnerable state.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“And I’ll contact your wife and tell her.”

“You wouldn’t-that would be…” He made a coughing sound, as if he was choking. “You mustn’t tell Sarah. She’s been depressed; she couldn’t deal with it.”

“That doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “I’m not interested. Just get me the files.”

“You wouldn’t do it,” he said in a strangled voice. “You couldn’t.”

“Listen carefully to what I’m saying. There is a man who has killed two women and is now going to kill me. Just at this moment, I don’t care about your career and I don’t care about your wife’s feelings. If you want to try playing poker with me, try it. I want the files here tomorrow morning and enough time to read through them. Then you can take them away again.”

“I can’t do it.”

“It’s your choice.”

“I’ll try.”

“And I want everything.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Do,” I said. “And think of your career while you’re doing it. Think of your wife.”

When I put the phone down I expected to cry or feel ashamed, but I surprised myself by catching sight of my reflection in the mirror above the fireplace. At last, a friendly face.

TWELVE

I cleared my big living room table but there still wasn’t enough space. After Cameron had got rid of Lynne, it took him three trips to bring in the files from his car. There were two bulging cases and two cardboard boxes. He unloaded the red, blue, and beige files onto the tabletop and, when there was no more room, onto the carpet as well. When he had finished, he was panting, his face pale and slimy with sweat. His skin had a tired gray deadness.

“Is that all?” I asked ironically as the final pile was dumped at my feet.

“No,” he said.

“I said I wanted everything.”

“You’d need a small van for everything,” he said. “These are the active files from the office, and the others that I’ve got direct access to. Anyway, I don’t know what good you think this will do you. You’ll find most of it incomprehensible.” He sat in the uncomfortable wicker chair in the corner. “You’ve got two hours with this. And if you mention to anybody that you’ve seen any of this at all, then that’s my job.”

“Hush,” I said, picking up files at random. “How are these arranged?”

“Don’t get them out of order,” he said. “Mostly the gray files are for statements. The blue files are our own reports and documents. The red files are forensic and crime scene. It’s not completely consistent. Anyway it’s all written on the outside.”

“Are there photographs?”

“There are pictures of the crime scenes in the albums on the floor by your feet.”

I looked down. It seemed strange that police would put pictures of murders into the same sort of album that people use for their holiday snaps. I felt cold suddenly. Was this a good idea?

“Maybe in a minute. I just wanted to see what they looked like.”

Cameron came forward and started rummaging on the table, muttering to himself.

“Here,” he said. “And here.”

As I reached for it he took my hand.

“Sorry,” he said.

I pulled away from him. I was in a hurry.

“Go away,” I said. “Go into the garden. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

“Or what?” he said wearily. “Or you’ll ring my wife?”

“I can’t read with you here.”

He paused. “It doesn’t make nice reading, Nadia.”

“Leave me.”

Slowly and reluctantly, he left the room.

I had a moment’s hesitation in opening the first file, in even touching it, as if there were an electric current protecting it. I was going to open a door and go into a room and somehow things would always be different. I would be different.

I opened the file and there she was. A snapshot was pinned to a piece of paper. Zoe Haratounian. Born February 11, 1976. I looked closely at the picture. She must have been on holiday. She was half sitting on a low wall with an intensely blue sky behind her. The fierce sunlight was making her squint slightly (she was holding a pair of sunglasses in her hand) and she was also laughing, saying something to whoever was taking the photograph. She was wearing a green vest and floppy black shorts. She had blond hair that came down to her shoulders. Was she lovely looking? I think so, but it was difficult to tell. Certainly she looked nice. It was a happy picture, the sort that should have been pinned on a cork notice board in the kitchen next to the shopping list and the card of the local taxi firm.

Also in the file were some typed notes. This was what I’d been looking for. Boyfriend, friends, employer, references to other files, contact numbers, addresses. I had a notebook ready for this. I jotted down some names and numbers, looking round to check that Cameron couldn’t see me. I flicked through the files. There was another photograph, a black-and-white portrait that looked as if it had been taken for some kind of identification. Yes, she was lovely. I’d seen in the previous picture that she was slim but there was a slight roundness to her face. She looked very young. Although she had a basically serious expression, there was a glint of something in her eyes as if, the very moment that the picture had been taken, she was going to break out into a naughty smile. I wondered what her voice had sounded like. Her name sounded foreign but she had been born somewhere near Nottingham.

I closed the file and put it carefully to one side. Now for the second. Jennifer Charlotte Hintlesham, born 1961, looked completely different from Zoe. Admittedly, it was a more formal photograph, taken in a studio. I could imagine it standing on a dressing table in a silver frame. She was more striking-looking than Zoe. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was a woman who would catch your attention. She had large dark eyes and prominent cheekbones that were made more prominent by her long, thin face. There was something old-fashioned about her: She was wearing a round-necked sweater with a necklace of small pearls. Her dark brown hair was brushed so that it shone. She reminded me of one of those minor British movie stars of the fifties who were a bit left behind when the sixties started.

I had felt that Zoe was much younger than me; Jennifer Hintlesham seemed a generation older. It wasn’t that she had an older-looking face than me. The only faces that look more haggard than mine, especially first thing in the morning, have been dug out of a peat bog after two thousand years of mummification. She just seemed grown-up. I felt I’d like to have met Zoe. I wasn’t sure I’d have been Jennifer’s type. I looked at the file again. Husband and three children, names and ages. Fuck. I wrote down details.

Something occurred to me. I looked in the pile of files where these two had come from. As I thought, there was a file with my name on it. I opened it and was looking at a picture of myself. Nadia Elizabeth Blake, b. 1971. I shivered. Maybe in a few weeks this file would be fatter and another would have been opened.

I looked at my watch. What on earth next? And what was the point of this, apart from curiosity? When I was eleven years old there was a five-meter board at our local swimming pool. I never dared jump from it until one day I just climbed the steps as if I happened to be climbing a ladder for no reason and stepped over the edge of the board without thinking and I’d done it. I did this now.

I reached down for the first album of pictures, bound in gaudy red plastic. It should have contained pictures of little girls blowing out candles and people kicking balls along the beach. I opened it and mechanically turned the pages one after another. Not that much to see, really. I turned back to the beginning to check. Yes, this was the scene of the murder of Zoe Haratounian. Her own flat. And then there she was. She was lying facedown on a carpet. She wasn’t naked or anything like that. She was wearing knickers and a T-shirt. And she didn’t look dead. She could have been asleep. There was a ribbon or tie or something pulled tight around her neck and there were photographs showing it from various angles. I just kept looking at the knickers and the shirt. It was the thought of her putting on those clothes that morning and not knowing that she’d never take them off. It’s the sort of stupid thought you can’t get out of your mind.

I put it down and picked up the second book. The crime scene at Jennifer Hintlesham’s house. I began to flick dutifully through it as I had the previous one, but then I stopped. This looked completely different. It was a single photograph, it was a single scene, but I saw it in fragments: staring open eyes, wire around the neck, clothes ripped or slashed off, legs splayed, and something like a metal bar pushed into her, I couldn’t see into what bit of her. I threw the book down and ran to the sink. I got there just in time, vomit spluttering out of my mouth. My stomach heaved and heaved, painfully emptying itself. I looked down and it was almost funny. The sink was full of dirty dishes. Even dirtier dishes.

I washed my face in warm and cold water and then embarked on the most disgusting washing-up of my life, and I’m speaking as someone who shared a house with a girl and two boys at college. The activity made me feel steadier. I was able to walk back to the table and close the photograph album without looking at it.

I didn’t have much time. I would have to be selective. I rummaged through the files quickly, checking their contents. I saw plans of Zoe’s flat and Jennifer’s house. I skimmed through witnesses’ statements. They were so long, rambling, and diffuse that it was almost impossible to extract any sense from them. Zoe’s boyfriend, Fred, talked about the increasing fear she had felt and his efforts to calm her. Her friend, Louise, seemed distraught. She had been the one who had actually been sitting outside the flat in her car while Zoe had been strangled. The witness statements for Jennifer’s murder filled ten bulky files. I could do little more than identify the interviewees, mainly people who worked for her. The Hintleshams seemed to have been major employers.

I paid a little more attention to the pathologist’s reports on the two dead women. Zoe’s was much simpler: ligature strangulation with the belt of her dressing gown. There were some minor contusions, but these were only related to the force required to hold her down while she was strangled. Vaginal and anal swabs showed no sign of sexual assault.

The report on Jennifer’s death was far longer. I did nothing more than note details: ligature strangulation, a thin deep furrow on the neck consistent with the use of wire; incised wounds and stabbed wounds; blood splashes, pools, smears, trails; tearing of the perineum; a copious amount of urine. She’d pissed herself.

There was a fat file dealing with the analysis of the letters. They included photocopies of the letters sent to Zoe and Jennifer, and I read them with a macabre guilty sense that I was reading stolen love letters. But they were love letters, with their promises and their vows. And there was a drawing as well of a mutilated Zoe. Strangely, of all the horrors I saw that day, it was that vile, crude drawing that made me cry. It was the one that made me dwell on the crazed ingenuity that one person was putting into destroying another. I skimmed through the analysis of the documents. There had been attempts to associate the letters with people Zoe knew: her boyfriend, Fred; an ex-boyfriend; a real estate agent; a potential buyer of her flat. However, incised marks on the drawing (confirmed, a note added, by injuries inflicted on Jennifer Hintlesham) showed conclusively that the murderer was left-handed. The above suspects were all right-handed.

There were files of crime-scene reports on dust and fabric and hair and much else. Many of them were so technical that I couldn’t work out whether anything significant had been found. It didn’t look like it. There was a single-page summary report at the front, which was copied to Links, Cameron, and other members of the murder inquiry. What was clearly stated was that no significant links had been found among the forensic traces recovered from the two murder scenes. The hair and fiber samples found on the clothes that the dead Zoe was wearing, and also found on the carpet, bedclothes, and other items of clothing, were only those of the recent inhabitants of the flat: namely her boyfriend, Fred, and Zoe herself. The hair and fiber analysis of the Jennifer Hintlesham crime scene was more complicated. There were numerous unidentified samples due to the sheer number of people who had been on the premises. There was, however, no forensic link between the two scenes, apart from Jenny’s locket found in Zoe’s flat, and Zoe’s photograph found in Jenny’s house. More awful news.

I also read through a bundle of internal memos, which outlined the various stages of the inquiry, including the result of an informal internal inquiry that was marked “Most Secret.” It was there I learned that Jennifer Hintlesham’s guard had been removed because her husband, Clive, was in the process of being charged with the murder of Zoe Haratounian. What a fuck-up.

Just as I was about to call Cameron back I started flicking through a routine-looking file. It consisted of rosters, minutes of meetings, holiday assignments. But then at the bottom a photocopied memo caught my eye. It was from Links to a Dr. Michael Griffen, with copies to Stadler, Grace Schilling, Lynne, and a dozen other names I didn’t recognize. It began by apparently responding to a complaint by Dr. Griffen that the two murder scenes, especially in the flat of Zoe Haratounian, had been compromised by faulty procedures by the first officers on the scene:

I will make every effort to ensure that the scene of any future scene will be swiftly and effectively sealed. I realize that in all probability, and in no small part because of the practical difficulties of personal protection, the solution of this case will lie in the hands of the forensic scientists and we will furnish you with all possible cooperation.

I shouted for Cameron and he was in the room in a few seconds. Had he been watching through the window? What did it matter?

“Look,” I said, handing him the note. “ ‘Any future scene.’ Not exactly a vote of confidence in your own abilities.”

He looked at it, then replaced it in the file.

“You asked to see the files,” he said. “Obviously we have to plan for every eventuality.”

“Maybe it looks different from where I’m standing,” I said. “That’s me: any future scene. Me.”

“So what did you think?”

“It was horrible,” I said. “And I’m glad I know.”

Cameron started gathering up the files, putting them in boxes, cramming them into the briefcases.

“We’re not very alike,” I said.

He paused.

“What?”

“I thought we’d all be the same type. I know it’s hard to tell from photos and a few particulars, but we seem completely different. Zoe was younger, sweeter than me, I bet. Also, she had a real job. And as for Jennifer, she looks like a member of the royal family. I don’t think she’d have had much time for me.”

“Maybe not,” said Stadler wistfully, and at that moment I felt a stab of jealousy. He’d seen her, talked to her. He knew what her voice sounded like. He had seen her funny little gestures, the sort that would never get written down on a form.

“You’re all small,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re all short and light,” he said. “And you live in north London.”

“So that’s where you’ve got to,” I said. “Nearly six weeks and two women dead and you know that this murderer doesn’t choose six-foot bodybuilders and he doesn’t choose women who live randomly all over the world.”

He was finished packing up.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “Lynne’s about to arrive.”

“Cameron?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t tell your wife, or Links or anyone.”

“Good.”

“But I would have done.”

“That’s what I thought.”

We were both acting a bit embarrassed with each other now. For me it was that embarrassment of being with someone who you’ve been naked with and now don’t fancy in the very least. Added to it was a very strong feeling that all I wanted to do was retreat into my bedroom and cry and think about dying for a few hours.

“Nadia?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry about everything. It has all been so… so.” He stopped and rubbed his face, then looked around as if he thought Lynne might already be in the room without either of us knowing. “I’ve got something else.”

“What?” I could tell from the tone of his voice that it wasn’t good news.

He reached inside his jacket and took out a paper. In fact it was two sheets of paper. He unfolded them and flattened them on the table.

“We intercepted these in the last few days.”

“How?”

“One was sent as a letter. I think the other was pushed through the door.”

I stared at them.

“This was the first,” he said, pointing at the sheet on the left.

It read:

Dear Nadia,

I want to fuck you to death. And I want you to think about that.

“Oh,” I said.

“This came two days ago,” Stadler said.

Dear Nadia,

I don’t know what the police are saying to you. They can’t stop me. They know that. In a few days or a week or two weeks you’ll be dead.

“I wanted to be honest with you,” he said.

“You know, it had been a very small comfort to me that there was just the one letter. I thought maybe he was going to kill someone else.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking around. “I’ve got to get this stuff into the car. But I’m very sorry.”

“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” I said. “I mean, at least that must be what you think.”

He already had a box in his hand.

“No, no,” he said, moving toward the door. “You’ll be fine.”

THIRTEEN

“I’m going to Camden Market,” I said. “Straightaway.”

Lynne looked confused. It was Saturday and only just past nine o’clock, and I guess she’d got used to my staying in my bed till late, trying to find ways of being alone. For the past two days I had been locked into my nightmare, seeing those photographs over and over again in my mind. Zoe, looking as if she had simply gone to sleep; Jenny, obscenely mutilated. Yet here I was, washed and dressed and strangely friendly, and ready to go.

“It’ll be crowded,” she said doubtfully.

“Just what I need. Crowds, music, cheap clothes and jewelry. I want to buy lots of useless things. You don’t need to come with me.”

“I’ll come, of course.”

“You’ve got to, haven’t you. Poor Lynne, trailing round after me, having to be polite all the time, having to lie. You must miss your normal life.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“I know you don’t wear a wedding ring. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes.” Her familiar blush spread over her pale face, her birthmark flamed.

“Hmmm. You must be wishing this was all over. One way or another. Come on. It’s only five minutes’ walk away.”

Lynne was right. It was a hot day, the sky a faded dirty blue, and Camden Market was packed. Lynne was wearing long woolen trousers and heavy shoes. Her hair hung down her face in sweaty little tails. She must be sweltering, I thought to myself with satisfaction. I had put on a lemon-yellow sundress and flat sandals; my hair was tied back. I felt cool, light-footed. We pushed our way through the crowds, and the heat rose from the pavements. I looked round as we walked and felt a wave of euphoria rise in me, that I was among this great sea of people again. The dreadlocks, the punks, the bikers, the girls in bright dresses or tie-dyed skirts, the men with pitted faces and watching eyes, the teenagers slouching by and being cool in that self-conscious kind of way you lose, thank God, as you get older. I tipped back my head and breathed in the patchouli oil and dope and incense and scented candles and good honest sweat.

There were stalls selling freshly squeezed juices on the corners and I got us each a tumbler of mango and orange and a pretzel. Then I bought twenty thin silver bangles for £5, and slipped them onto my wrist, where they clinked satisfyingly. I bought a floaty silk scarf, a pair of tiny earrings, some flamboyant clips for my hair. Nothing I couldn’t put on immediately. I didn’t want to be carrying anything. Then, while Lynne was examining wooden carvings, I slipped away. It was as easy as that.

I went quickly down the staircases that led to the canal and ran along the path until I got to the main road. It was still crowded and I was just another body in the crowd. I ducked and weaved between them. If Lynne came this way, looking for me, she wouldn’t be able to see me now. Nobody would be able to see me. Not even him, with his X-ray eyes. I was on my own at last.

I felt free, quite different, as if I’d shaken off all the rubbish that had been clinging to me over the past weeks: The fear and the desire and the irritation fell away. I felt better than I had in days. I knew where I was going. I had planned the route last night. I had to be quick, before anyone worked out where I was.

I had to ring the bell several times. I thought maybe he had gone out, although the curtains in the upstairs windows were still closed. But then I heard footsteps, a muffled curse.

The man who opened the front door was taller and younger than I had expected, and more handsome. He had pale hair flopping over his brow, pale eyes in a tanned face. He was wearing jeans and nothing else. He looked bleary.

“Yes?” His tone wasn’t exactly friendly.

“Are you Fred?” I tried to smile at him.

“Yes. Do I know you?” He spoke with a languid self-assurance. I imagined Zoe beside him, her eager, pretty face looking up at his.

“Sorry to wake you up, but it’s urgent. Can I come in?”

He raised his eyebrows at me.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Nadia Blake. I’m here because I am being threatened by the same man who killed Zoe.”

I thought this would surprise him, but it clearly hit him like a physical blow. He almost fell backward.

“What?” he said.

“Can I come in?”

He stepped back and held the door open. He looked utterly dazed. I was past him before he could say anything more. He followed me upstairs to a small cluttered living room.

“I’m sorry about Zoe, by the way,” I said.

He was looking at me intently.

“How did you hear about me?”

“I saw you on a list of witnesses,” I said.

He ran his hand through his tousled hair and then rubbed his eyes.

“Want some coffee?”

“Thanks.”

He went into the adjoining kitchen and I stared around me. I thought there might be a photograph of Zoe, something that would remind me of her, but there was nothing. I picked up some of the magazines lying on the floor: horticultural manuals, a guide to London club life, a TV guide. There was a heap of round stones on one of the shelves and I picked up a marbled one that looked like a duck’s egg and held it in the palm of my hand. I put it carefully back and picked up a brown felt hat that was hung on the edge of the chair, swung it round on my forefinger. I wanted to feel close to Zoe, but she felt utterly absent. I picked up a carved wooden duck from a shelf and examined it. When Fred came back into the room I hastily restored it to the shelf.

“What are you doing?” he asked suspiciously.

“Just fidgeting. I’m sorry.”

“Here’s your coffee.”

“Thanks.” I had forgotten to tell him I don’t like it with milk.

Fred sat on a sofa that looked as if it had been retrieved from a dump and motioned me into the chair. He held his mug in both hands and stared into it. He didn’t speak.

“I’m sorry about Zoe,” I said again, for want of anything better.

“Yeah,” he said.

He shrugged and looked away. What had I been expecting? I had felt that there was a bond between us, because he had known Zoe and that made him, in a quite irrational way, closer to me in my imagination than any of my friends.

“What was she like?”

“Like?” He looked up sulkily. “She was nice, attractive, happy, you know, all that, but what do you want from me?”

“It’s stupid, I know. I want to know silly things about her: her favorite color, her clothes, her dreams, what she felt like when she got the letters, everything…” I ran out of breath.

He looked uncomfortable, almost disgusted.

“I can’t help you,” he said.

“Did you love her?” I asked abruptly.

He stared at me as if I had said something obscene.

“We had good fun.”

Good fun. My heart sank. He hadn’t even known her, or didn’t want me to know her through him. Good fun: what an epitaph.

“Don’t you wonder, though, all the time what she must have felt like? When she was being threatened, I mean, and then when she died?”

He reached across for a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches on a low table by the sofa.

“No,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“The photograph I saw of her looked quite old. Do you have a more recent one?”

“No.”

“Not one?”

“I don’t take photos.”

“Or any things of hers that I could look at? There must be something.”

“What for?” he said, his face hard and unyielding.

“I’m sorry. I must seem like a ghoul. It’s just that I feel a connection to these two women.”

“What do you mean two women?”

“Zoe and then Jenny Hintlesham, the second woman he killed.”

“What?” he said, leaping forward. He put the mug on the table, spilling quite a lot of the coffee. “What the fuck?”

“Sorry, you didn’t know. The police have been keeping it a big secret. I only found out by mistake. This other woman got the same letters. She was killed a few weeks after Zoe.”

“But… but…” Fred seemed lost in thought. Then he looked at me with a completely new intensity. “That second woman.”

“Jenny.”

“She was killed by the same man?”

“That’s right.”

He gave a low whistle.

“Fuck,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

The telephone rang, loud as an alarm, and we both started. Fred picked up the receiver and turned his back on me.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m up.” A pause, then: “Come round now and we’ll collect Duncan and Graham later.”

He put the phone down and glanced over at me.

“I’ve got a friend coming round,” he said in dismissal. “Good luck, Nadia. Sorry I couldn’t be any help.”

Was that it? That couldn’t be it. I gazed at him helplessly.

“Good-bye, Nadia,” he said again, almost pushing me to the door. “Take care.”

I walked with my head down, making my way blindly toward the underground. Poor Zoe, I thought. Fred had struck me as a man almost entirely without imagination, handsome and heedless. I couldn’t imagine him being very sympathetic toward her while she was receiving the threats, whatever he had told the police afterward. I went over what he had said, which was not very much-nothing that made it worth escaping from police protection. A sudden shiver of fear went through me. I was on my own, nobody looking after me. I imagined eyes in the Saturday crowd looking after me.

Suddenly my way was blocked. A man standing in my path looked down at me. Dark hair, pale face, teeth glinting behind his smile. Who was he?

“Hello there, you look miles away.”

I stared at him.

“It is Nadia, isn’t it? The woman with the ancient computer?”

Ah, now I remembered. Relief flooded through me. I smiled.

“Yes. Sorry. Um-”

“Morris. Morris Burnside.”

“Of course. Hi.”

“How are you, Nadia? How have you been?”

“What? Oh, fine,” I replied absently. “Look, I’m really sorry but I’m in a bit of a hurry, actually.”

“Of course, don’t let me keep you. You’re sure you are okay? You look a bit anxious.”

“Oh, just tired, that’s all. You know. Well, bye then.”

“Good-bye, Nadia. Take care of yourself now. See you.”

The house was beautiful. I’d seen it in the photographs of course, but it was grander in real life: set back from the road in its own gardens, steps leading up to its porched front door, wisteria climbing up the tall white walls. Everything about it was substantial and spoke of good taste and wealth. I knew about the wealth of course, but now I could practically smell it. I looked upward to the windows on the first floor. In one of those rooms, Jenny had died. I smoothed back my hair and fiddled nervously with the straps on my cheap cotton shift. Then I walked briskly up to the door and banged the brass knocker.

I almost expected Jenny to open the door herself: to see her narrow face and her glossy dark hair framed in the doorway. She’d be polite to me, in that well-bred and faintly surprised way that says get lost to people like me: the rude and the reckless.

“Yes?” Not Jenny, but a tall and elegant woman with blond hair swept smoothly back, jewels at her ears, wearing a pair of well-cut black trousers and an apricot-colored silk blouse. I had read about Clive’s affair in the file and I had a pretty good idea who she was. “Can I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Clive Hintlesham, please. My name is Nadia Blake.”

“Is it urgent?” she asked with chilly pleasantness. “As you can probably hear, we’ve got visitors.”

I could hear the rise and fall of voices coming from inside the house. It was midday on Saturday and the bereaved widower Clive was hosting a small social event with his lover. I could hear the clink of glasses.

“It is urgent, actually.”

“Come in, then.”

The hall was huge and cool, and from here the sound of voices was louder. She had lived here, I thought, gazing round. This is the house that she had wanted to turn into her dream home, but now Gloria was presiding over the dream home, for the workmen had obviously come back. The room in front of me was full of ladders and pots of paint. There were drapes over the furniture at the end of the hall.

“Would you like to wait here?” she said.

I followed her through anyway. Together, we went into a large living room, obviously freshly painted in slate gray, with large French windows giving out onto a newly dug-over garden. On the mantelpiece there was a photo in a silver oval frame of three children. No Jenny. Was this what would happen to me, if I died-would the waters just close over me like this?

The room had maybe ten or twelve people in it, all holding glasses and standing in clusters. Maybe they had been friends of Jenny’s and now they were gathered here to welcome the new mistress of the house. Gloria went up to a solid-looking man with dark, graying hair and a jowly face. She put a hand on his shoulder and murmured something in his ear. He looked up sharply at me and walked across.

“Yes?” he said.

“Sorry to butt in,” I said.

“Gloria said you had something to tell me.”

“My name is Nadia Blake. I’m being threatened by the same man who killed Jenny.”

His face hardly altered. He looked around shiftily as if he was checking whether anybody else was paying attention.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, what do you want?”

“What do you mean? Your wife was murdered. Now he wants to kill me.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said evenly. “But why are you here?”

“I thought you could tell me things about Jenny.”

He took a sip of wine and began steering me toward the edge of the room.

“I’ve told the police everything that’s relevant,” he said. “I don’t quite see what you’re doing here. This has been a tragedy. Now I am just trying to get on with my own life as best as I can.”

“You seem to be managing pretty well,” I said, looking round the room.

His face turned purple.

“What did you say?” he said furiously. “Please leave now, Miss Blake.”

I felt in a panic of rage and mortification. I started to make a stammering attempt at self-justification. Even as I spoke, I saw a boy, a teenage boy, sitting alone on the window seat. He was skinny and pale, with greasy fair hair and dark smudges under his eyes, pimples on his forehead. He had about him all the awkward spindly hopelessness of male adolescence; all the messy, terrified confusion of a son who has lost his mother. Josh, the eldest son. I stared at him and our eyes met. He had huge dark eyes, like a spaniel’s. Lovely eyes in a plain face.

“I’ll go now,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. It’s just that I’m scared. I’m looking for help.”

He nodded at me. Maybe his face wasn’t so cruel, really, just a bit stupid and complacent. Maybe he was just like everybody else. A bit weaker, maybe, a bit more selfish.

“Sorry,” he said with a helpless shrug.

“Thanks.” I turned on my heel, trying not to cry, trying not to care that everyone was looking at me as if I was some beggar who had forced her way in. In the hall a little boy on a trike pedaled furiously across my path and stopped.

“I know you. You’re the clown,” he shouted. “Lena, the clown’s come to visit. Come and see the clown.”

FOURTEEN

“I’ll have everything,” I said firmly. “Eggs and bacon, fried bread, fried potatoes, tomato, sausage, mushrooms. And what’s that?”

The woman behind the counter inspected the contents of the metal container.

“Black pudding.”

“All right, I’ll have that. And a pot of tea. What about you?”

Lynne had gone slightly pale, maybe at the sight of what was being piled onto my plate.

“Oh,” she said. “A piece of toast. Some tea.”

We carried our trays out of the café into the sunny garden on the edge of the park. We’d arrived when it opened and we were the first. I chose a discreet table in a corner and we unloaded our plates and cups and metal teapots. I began eating. I attacked the fried egg first, cutting into the yolk so that it spread around the plate. Lynne looked at me with what I took to be fastidious disapproval.

“Is this not your sort of thing?” I said, wiping my mouth with the paper napkin.

“It’s a bit early in the day for me.” She sipped her tea delicately and took a caterpillar-sized nibble out of her toast.

It was a beautiful morning. Tame sparrows stalked around the table legs in search of crumbs, squirrels were chasing each other along branches of the large trees on the other side of the wall in the park proper. For a blessed few seconds I just pretended Lynne wasn’t there. I took bites of my heart-attack breakfast and washed it down with mahogany-brown tea.

“Do you want me to move away from the table?” Lynne asked. “When your friend arrives.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “You know her.”

“What?” she asked, looking startled.

This was the bit I enjoyed. It must have been the magician in me.

“It’s Grace Schilling.”

I took a triumphant bite of grilled tomato attached to a piece of bacon.

“But…” Lynne stammered.

“Hm?” was all I could manage from my full mouth. I could see she was trying to decide which of fourteen questions she was going to ask.

“Who… who arranged it?”

“I did.”

“But… does DCI Links know?”

I shrugged.

“Dr. Schilling may have let him know. That’s not my problem.”

“But…”

“There she is.”

Dr. Schilling had walked into the eating area. There were several tables occupied now-people with children, couples spreading out the Sunday papers-and she hadn’t spotted us yet. She was smartly dressed as usual, maybe just a bit more casual. She wore dark blue trousers that came only halfway down her ankles and a black V-necked sweater. And she wore sunglasses. She caught sight of us and walked across. She took the sunglasses off and put them on the table with a bunch of keys and, I was interested to see, a packet of cigarettes. She looked at us warily. She had her normal cool expression and I felt in an amused way as if I had been caught sitting in a pigsty with my head in the trough.

“Do you want some breakfast?” I said.

“I’m not really a breakfast sort of person.”

“Black coffee and a cigarette?” I said.

“That’s usually all I can manage.”

I looked over at the aghast Lynne.

“Could you get Dr. Schilling a coffee?” I asked.

Lynne scampered off.

“It’s a bit like having a PA,” I said with a smile. “I quite like it. Did you talk to Links?”

She lit a cigarette.

“I told him you had asked to see me.”

“Is that all right?”

“He was surprised.”

I cleared up the last of the egg yolk with my fried bread.

“Can you be discreet?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen the files,” I said. “Well, some of them. It wasn’t exactly through the normal channels, so I’d rather you didn’t talk about it too much.”

She was startled. Of course she was. I was getting used to the look. She took a deep drag of her cigarette and shifted in her chair. She was ill at ease. Did she feel she had lost control? I hoped so.

“Then why did you tell me?”

“I need to ask you some questions. I know that you’ve been lying to me solidly.” She looked up sharply, opened her mouth to speak but didn’t. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not interested in that anymore. I want you to realize that I know about Zoe and Jennifer. I’ve seen the autopsy reports. I’ve got no illusions. All I want is for you to be frank with me.”

Lynne returned with the coffee.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked.

“Sorry, Lynne, but I think this conversation had better be private,” I said.

She flushed and moved away to a neighboring table. I turned back to Grace Schilling. “I don’t have any opinion one way or the other about the general ability of the police. But obviously you’ll understand that I don’t have any confidence in their ability to protect me from being killed. You, they, whatever, have had two women under protection and they’re both dead.”

“Nadia,” said Grace. “I can appreciate how you feel, but there were particular reasons for that. In the first case of Miss Haratounian-”

“Zoe.”

“Yes. In that case the degree of threat wasn’t appreciated until it was too late. In the case of Mrs. Hintlesham, there was a problem…”

“You mean the arrest of her husband?”

“Yes, so you should realize that your situation is entirely different.”

I poured myself a new cup of tea.

“Grace, you may have misunderstood me. I’m not here to score points against you, or gather information for a complaint, or to get some reassurance. But please don’t insult me by saying I shouldn’t be worried. I’ve seen the police memo, which you’ve also seen, about how the scene of my murder should be dealt with.”

Grace lit another cigarette.

“What do you want from me?” she asked impassively.

“There was no report by you in the files I saw. Maybe that’s because it says things about me I wouldn’t like. I need to know what you know.”

“I’m not sure I know anything useful.”

“Why me? I hoped the files would show something we had in common. I couldn’t find anything beyond the fact that we’re all little.”

Grace looked reflective. She took a deep drag on her cigarette.

“Yes,” she said. “And you’re all striking-looking, in different ways.”

“Well, that’s very nice…”

“You’re all vulnerable. Sexual sadists prey on women the way a hunting animal preys on other animals. It chooses ones who hang back, who are unsure. Zoe Haratounian was new to living in London, unsure of herself. Jenny Hintlesham was trapped in an unhappy marriage. You’ve just split up with a boyfriend.”

“Is that it?”

“It may be enough.”

“Can you tell me anything about him?”

She paused again for a while.

“There will be clues,” she said. “There are always clues. It is just a question of recognizing them as such. A French criminologist, Dr. Locarde, once famously said that ‘every criminal leaves something of himself at the scene of the crime-something no matter how minute-and always takes something of the scene away with him.’ Until we find out precisely what those clues are-and we will find out-all that I can say is that he’s probably white. Probably in his twenties or early thirties. Above average height. Physically strong. Educated, possibly to university level. But I’m sure you’ve worked most of that out for yourself.”

“Do I know him?”

Grace stubbed out her cigarette and started to speak, then stopped and for the first time looked really unhappy. She was having obvious difficulty pulling herself together.

“Nadia,” she said finally. “I wish I could say something helpful. I’d like to say it’s not somebody you know well, because I hope that the police would have established some connection with the other women. But it might be a close friend, might be somebody you’ve met once and forgotten about, or it might be someone who just saw you once.”

I looked around. I was glad I had chosen to meet her on a sunny morning with children running around making a racket.

“It’s not a matter of sleeping,” I said. “At the moment I don’t dare close my eyes because when I do I see the photograph of Jenny Hintlesham lying dead with… well, I’m sure you’ve seen it. I can’t accept that there is someone I have met, who is walking around leading a normal life after having done that.”

Grace was running a long, slim finger around the rim of her coffee cup.

“He’s highly organized. Look at the notes and the effort taken to deliver them.”

“But I still can’t believe that the police couldn’t have protected these women after he’d said what he was going to do.”

Grace nodded vigorously.

“In the last few weeks I’ve done some research. There have been a number of cases of this kind. One was a case a few years ago in Washington, D.C. A man made murderous explicit threats in notes to women. The husband of the first woman hired armed guards and she was still murdered in her home. The second had twenty-four-hour police guard and was tortured and killed in her own bedroom while her husband was in the house. I’m sorry to talk like this, but you asked me to be frank. Some of these men see themselves as geniuses. They’re not geniuses. They’re more like men with an obsessive hobby. What they are is motivated. They want to make women suffer and then to kill them, and they devote all their energy and resourcefulness and intelligence to carrying it out. The police do their best, but it’s hard to combat such singleness of purpose.”

“What happened to that killer in Washington?”

“They finally caught him at the scene.”

“Did they save the woman?”

Grace looked away.

“I can’t remember,” she said. “All I can say is that this isn’t a sweating psychopath living in a cardboard box under a bridge. He’s probably functioning perfectly well at the moment. Ted Bundy returned from committing two separate murders and, according to his girlfriend, he didn’t even seem tired.”

“Who’s he?”

“Another man who killed women.”

“But why go to all this trouble?” I protested. “Why not just attack women in dark alleys?”

“The trouble is part of the pleasure. The point I’m making, Nadia, is that you’ve got to give up all your commonsense views about character or motive. He’s not after your money. He doesn’t even hate you. At least, that’s not how he sees it. He may see it as love. Think of the letters he sends: They are love letters, in a perverse way. He becomes obsessive about the women he chooses.”

“You mean he’s the train-spotter and I’m the train.”

“Well, sort of.”

“But why? I can’t understand all this effort, writing notes, doing a drawing, taking terrible risks delivering the notes, and then killing these ordinary women horribly. Why?”

I looked Grace in the eyes. Her face was now almost a mask, expressionless.

“You think because terrible things are happening there have to be big motives. At some point, this person will be in custody and someone-it may be me-will talk to him about his life. Maybe he was savagely beaten as a child, or abused by an uncle, or suffered a head injury which resulted in a brain lesion. That will be the reason. Of course there are plenty of people who were savagely beaten or abused or injured who don’t grow up as sexual psychopaths. It’s just what he likes doing. Why do we like doing what we like doing?”

“What do you think will happen?”

She lit yet another cigarette.

“He’s escalating,” she said. “The first murder was almost opportunistic. He probably didn’t even look at her face, as if he wanted to eliminate her individuality. The second was far more violent and invasive. It’s a characteristic pattern. The crimes become more violent and uncontrolled. The perpetrator gets caught.”

I suddenly felt as if a cloud had passed over the sun. I looked up. It hadn’t. The sky was a beautiful blue.

“That should be helpful to the person after next that he picks on.”

We both got up to leave. I looked round at Lynne and she avoided my gaze. I turned back to Grace.

“How do you feel about the last couple of months?” I asked. “Are you pleased with the way you’ve conducted the inquiry?”

She picked up her sunglasses, her keys, and her cigarette packet.

“I gave up smoking-when was it?-five years ago, I think. I keep going over and over and thinking what I could have done different. When he’s caught, maybe I’ll know.” She gave a rueful smile. “Don’t worry. I’m not asking for your sympathy.” She took something out of her pocket and offered it to me. It was a business card. “You can call me anytime.”

I took it and looked at it in the pointless, polite way one does.

“I don’t think you’d be able to get there in time,” I said.

FIFTEEN

When I was at college, supposedly learning how to be a grown-up and ready for the real world, I had a friend who died of leukemia. Her name was Laura, and she had tiny feet, cheeks like rosy apples, and a dirty laugh. She got ill in her first year and died before her finals. We got used to the fact of her death and her absence from us horribly quickly, remembering her occasionally in jolts of shame and sentimentality, but I thought a great deal about Laura now. In a strange and entirely unwelcome way, I felt closer to her-and to Jenny and Zoe, women I’d never met-than I did to my living friends.

Even Zach and Janet felt distant to me. They seemed appalled, yet almost embarrassed, by my situation. They rang me up too often but didn’t come round often enough, and when we did meet there was nothing we could properly talk about, because I was in the shadow and they were in the sunlight. We were self-conscious together. It was as if I had gone beyond them, into some other place that they could not enter and I couldn’t exit. I remembered with a shiver that Laura had said the same kind of thing, toward the end, when it was obvious to all of us that she wasn’t going to make it. She had said, or shouted, rather, that she felt as if she had gone into a waiting room, and soon the door on the other side of it would open for her and she’d have to go through. I remembered the shudder of terror I had felt when she’d said that. I had imagined the door opening out onto pitch black, and stepping out of a lit and furnished room into the empty abyss.

Laura had gone through all the stages you’re supposed to go through when you’re confronting the fact of death: disbelief and anger and grief and terror and finally a dazed, numbed kind of acceptance-perhaps because she was so worn down by the treatment and by the lurches between hope and despair. One night after she had died, a group of us had had an ugly argument, fueled by too much to drink, about whether she could have lived, or lived longer, if she had struggled more, rather than giving up and letting go. In the past, the image of letting go had for me been one of a hand gently uncurling from the hand of a beloved; now, after seeing the photos and case notes, it was more of two hands clinging to a ledge until a heavy boot stamps them off. Someone said she should have fought harder, as if it was Laura’s fault that she had died, not just brutal bad luck.

I was going to fight. I didn’t know if it would make the smallest bit of difference, but that wasn’t the point. I wasn’t going to cower in blind terror in a fucking waiting room, staring at the door in the opposite wall, feeling only the heart-thumping, mouth-drying, stomach-churning, blinding, dehumanizing dread I’d been feeling for the last few days. I’d seen the photographs, the case notes. I’d talked to Grace. I didn’t have much faith in Links and Cameron, partly because I sensed they didn’t have much faith in themselves and, without ever admitting it, they were waiting for me to die. So I was left with me. Just me. And I have always hated waiting.

One thing was certain. I couldn’t go on sitting in my flat any longer, hiding from Lynne and from my own fear. The odd thing was that Lynne and I were still not talking about my possible death. It was a taboo subject. We only discussed plans, functional things like where I was going to go, and where she should wait for me. We no longer ate meals together, not even takeaway chips or toast at breakfast. I had stopped treating her like a semi-guest, a nearly-friend.

The day after I met Grace Schilling I went ice skating with Claire, who was a resting actress and usually more resting than acting. She could skate backward and do those twizzles that make your head spin. Lynne and another policewoman sat morosely on the side and watched me smashing into young children, toppling them like nine pins, and falling over myself in a wild flailing of arms and legs. Then, later the same day, I invited myself to Zach’s and told him to get other friends round, which he obediently did. Lynne waited outside while we ate tacos and I drank too much red wine and made loud and stupid jokes, and only tipped myself back into the waiting car at two in the morning. And all the time, even when I was flooding my body with alcohol or flirting with a man called Terence who was clearly gay and embarrassed by me, I was trying to think what to do next. Grace had said that people like this man were always several steps ahead: more focused, more determined, more persistent. I wanted to get a step ahead of him.

The next morning I woke with a splitting headache and a dry mouth. I felt queasy, and when I drew the curtains, the light was like a shaft of pain boring through my eye sockets. I staggered to the kitchen and drank two tumblers of water, ignoring Lynne’s sympathetic, mildly reproachful expression. Then I made a large pot of tea and returned to my bedroom, carrying it. I sat cross-legged on my bed, wearing a tatty gray vest and a pair of sweatpants, and stared at my reflection in the long wardrobe mirror. I was looking at myself much more often these days, I suppose because I no longer took myself for granted. Shouldn’t I look different, thinner and more tragic? As far as I could tell, nothing about me had changed from the outside. There I was, just a small woman with freckles over the bridge of her nose, unbrushed hair, and a hangover.

The doorbell rang and I heard Lynne answer. I listened, but I could make out only a few muttered words. Then there was a knock on my bedroom door.

“Yes?”

“There’s someone who’s come to see you.”

“Who?”

There was a fractional hesitation on the other side of the door.

“Josh Hintlesham.” Lynne lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “Her son.”

“Oh my God. Hang on.” I jumped off the bed. “Tell him to come in.”

“Are you sure? I don’t know what Links would-”

“I’ll be through in a minute.”

I rushed into the bathroom, swallowed three acetaminophen for my headache, splashed cold water over my face, and scrubbed my teeth vigorously. Josh. The boy on the window seat with teenage acne and Jenny’s dark eyes.

I went into the living room and held out my hand.

“Josh, hello.”

His hand was cold and limp in mine. He didn’t meet my gaze but muttered something and stared at the floor.

“Can you wait outside, in the car, Lynne?” I said.

She left, casting an anxious gaze back over her shoulder as she closed the door behind her. Josh shifted nervously from foot to foot. He was wearing a tracksuit that was a bit too small for him, and his greasy hair flopped over his eyes. Somebody needed to take him shopping, tell him to take a bath and wash his hair and use deodorant. I couldn’t see Gloria doing that.

“Coffee or tea?” I asked.

“I’m all right.” His voice was a mumble.

“Juice?” Though come to think of it, I didn’t have any juice in the fridge.

“No. Thanks.”

“Sit down.”

I gestured to the sofa.

He perched uncomfortably on one end, while I ground some coffee beans and waited for the kettle to boil. I saw how large his hands and feet were, how bony his wrists. His skin was pale but the rims of his eyes were red. He looked a mess to me, though I hadn’t met a teenage boy in ten years. Any boys over nine were a mystery to me.

“How did you find me?”

“I looked in the Yellow Pages, under ‘Entertainers.’ Christo told me you were a clown.”

“Brilliant.” I sat opposite him with my cup of coffee. “Listen, Josh, I’m sorry about your mother.”

He nodded and shrugged.

“Yeah,” he said. Mr. Cool.

“You must miss her.”

God, why couldn’t I just shut up?

He winced and started to chew one of his nails.

“She didn’t really have much time for me,” he said. “She was always in a hurry, or cross about something.”

I felt compelled to stick up for her.

“I suppose that with three children and the house and stuff,” I said, and pretended to take a sip from my empty cup. Nadia the amateur therapist. “Have you got someone you can talk to about all of this?” I asked. “Friends or a doctor or something?”

“I’m all right,” he said.

We sat in silence and for something to do I poured myself another cup of coffee and gulped it.

“What about you?” he asked suddenly.

“Me?”

“Are you scared?”

“I’m trying to be positive.”

“I dream about her,” he said suddenly. “Every night. I don’t dream of her being killed or stuff. They’re nice dreams, happy dreams all about Mum stroking my hair and hugging me and stuff like that, though she only used to stroke Christo’s hair. She said I was too old for all that now.” He flushed furiously. “It just makes it worse.” Then he said: “Nobody’ll tell me exactly how she died.”

“Josh…”

“I can cope with the truth.”

I thought about the photograph of Jenny’s corpse and looked at the awkward brave boy in front of me.

“Quickly,” I said. “She died quickly. She wouldn’t have known what was happening.”

“You’re lying to me as well. I thought you’d tell me the truth.”

I took a deep breath.

“Josh, the truth is: I don’t know. Your mother is dead. She’s out of pain now.”

I was ashamed of myself, but I didn’t know how to do any better. Josh stood up abruptly and started wandering around the room.

“Are you really a clown?”

“An entertainer.”

He picked up my juggling beanbags.

“Can you juggle?”

I took them from him and started to toss them around. He looked unimpressed.

“I meant, really juggle. I know loads of people who can juggle with three balls.”

“You try it.”

“I’m not an entertainer.”

“No,” I said dryly.

“I’ve brought you something,” he said.

He crossed the room to his rucksack and fished out a manila envelope.

There were dozens of photographs, most of them taken on holiday over the years. I leafed through them, horribly aware of Josh at my shoulder and of his labored breathing. Jenny very slim and tanned in a yellow bikini on a sandy beach under a slice of blue sky. Jenny in well-pressed jeans and a green polo shirt, in the stiff circle of Clive’s arm and smiling prettily for the camera. She was so much better looking than he was. Jenny with a much younger Josh, hand in hand; holding a bald baby who was presumably Chris; sitting on a lawn surrounded by all three sons. Jenny with long hair, bobbed hair, layered hair. Jenny skiing, crouched neatly forward with poles tucked behind her. In groups, alone.

The one that touched me most was a photograph taken when she was obviously unaware of the camera and no longer wore her watchful look. She was in profile and slightly blurred. There was a strand of glossy hair against her face. Her cheek looked smooth; her lips were slightly parted, and her hand was half raised. She seemed thoughtful, almost sad. Armor off, she looked like someone I could have known after all. Something else hit me like a blade pushed into me: There was something interesting about her. I could see what might have caught someone’s attention. I could imagine her as a woman people could be fascinated by. Oh God.

I laid them down in silence and turned to Josh.

“You poor boy,” I said, and he started crying then, but trying not to: gulping and sniffing and gagging on his grief, and saying “Jesus” under his breath; hiding his head in the crook of his arm. I put a hand on his shoulder and waited, and eventually he sat up, fished in his pocket for a crumpled tissue, blew his nose snottily.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t,” I said. “It’s good she has someone to cry for her.”

“I ought to go now,” he said, gathering up the photographs and pushing them back into the envelope.

“Will you be all right?”

“Yeah.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“I’ll give you my card so if you want to call me, you don’t have to look me up in the Yellow Pages again. Hang on.”

I went to my desk in the bedroom and Josh lounged in the doorway. He was so thin. He looked as if he would fall over if he didn’t have something to lean on. A pile of bones.

“You’re not exactly tidy,” he remarked. Lippy sod.

“True. I didn’t know you were coming, so I didn’t tidy up for you.”

He grinned in embarrassment.

“And your antique computer,” he observed.

“So I’ve been told.”

I rummaged in the drawers for my business cards.

“Are you on-line?”

“On-line? Not as such.”

He sat down and started tapping at the keyboard. He looked at the screen as if it were a porthole with something comical on the other side.

“How big is your hard disk?”

“You’ve lost me.”

“That’s what it’s all about. You just need more power. This is like a mosquito trying to pull a lorry. You need a system with proper memory.”

“Right,” I said, hoping he’d shut up.

“Faster hamsters.”

I found the card and brought it through, brandishing it.

“Here you are. Nadia Blake, children’s entertainer, puppeteer, juggler, magician, and general-” Then I froze. “What? What the fuck did you say?”

“Don’t be angry. It’s just that a computer is almost useless without proper-”

“No, what did you actually say?”

“I said you needed more power.”

“No. What fucking exact words did you say?”

Josh paused and thought for a moment and then for the first time I saw him laugh.

“Sorry, that’s just a stupid expression. Faster hamsters. It just means more power.”

“Where did you get it from?”

“It’s just a metaphor. It must come from hamsters running round on wheels, I suppose. I never really thought about it before.”

“No, no, no. Who did you hear it from?”

“Who?” Josh pulled a face. “Just a guy at our school’s computer club.”

“What? A pupil?”

“No, Hack, one of the guys who helps run it. He’s been really nice to me, since Mum died especially.”

I was trembling.

“Hack? What kind of name is that?”

“It’s his handle. It’s his nom de guerre.”

I tried to control myself. I gripped my hands together.

“Josh,” I said. “Do you know his real name?”

He wrinkled his brow. Please please please.

“He’s called Morris, I think. He knows about computers, but he’ll just say the same thing I’ve said.”

SIXTEEN

My hands were shaking so much I could hardly punch the numbers on the phone. I got myself put through to Links. I had discovered that if you were insistent enough, he always turned out to be in. He was wary and distant with me on the phone. I don’t think he’d quite known how to handle me since I’d absconded. He’d like to have charged me with something, no doubt, but it didn’t seem I’d broken any law. Still, he could be grumpy at least, from his position of weakness.

“Yes?” he said.

“I’ve just been talking to Joshua Hintlesham.”

“What?”

“He’s Jennifer Hintlesham’s son.”

“I know that. What are you doing talking to him?”

“He came round to see me.”

“How? How does he know who you are?”

If he had been within reach I think I would have leaned over and shaken him and rapped my knuckles on his skull, but he wasn’t.

“Don’t bother about that. It doesn’t matter. The point is, I’ve found someone we both know.”

“What do you mean?”

“The other day something went wrong with my computer and I called a number on some card and this guy called Morris came round and fixed it. It was actually very easy. I actually know sod-all about computers. And the other day, when I slipped away, I bumped into him in the street. He was very friendly. I didn’t think anything of it. But I was talking to Josh and he goes to a computer club that’s connected to his school. And one of the people who runs it is this guy called Morris.”

Now there was a long pause on the phone. That had given him something to chew on.

“Is it the same person?”

“Sounds like it.” I couldn’t resist adding: “It may not mean anything. Do you want me to do some checking?”

“No, no,” he said instantly. “Definitely not. We’ll do that. What do you know about him?”

“He’s called Morris Burnside. I think he’s in his mid-twenties. I can’t say much about him. He seemed nice, clever. But then I’m impressed with anybody who can switch a computer on. Josh liked him a lot. He’s not like some weirdo. He’s good-looking. He wasn’t shy or strange with me or anything like that.”

“How well do you know him?”

“I don’t know him. As I said, I just met him twice.”

“Has he tried to get in touch with you?”

I went through our meetings in my mind. There wasn’t much.

“I think he was attracted to me. I told him that I’d just split up. He half asked me out and I put him off. But there was nothing nasty about it. He offered to help me buy a powerful new computer. I said no, but that doesn’t seem enough reason to kill me.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“I’ve got his phone number. Is that all right?”

I read it to him off the card, the card I’d been so pleased to find just two weeks earlier.

“Fine, leave it with us. Don’t make any attempt to get in touch with him.”

“You’ll talk to him?”

“We’ll check him out.”

“It may be nothing,” I said.

“We’ll see.”

“It may not be the same person.”

“We’ll check.”

When I put the phone down I wanted to collapse in a heap, to cry, to faint, to be put to bed and looked after. But there was just Lynne, hovering like an annoying fly that I wanted to swat. She had been listening to my end of the phone conversation with growing interest. Now she looked at me expectantly. She wanted to be filled in. My heart sank. Sometimes it felt like having a live-in au pair without even having a child for her to look after. I needed to get out of here. Quickly, without even giving myself time to speak, I picked up the phone and dialed.

“You met him.”

Zach stopped, as if he couldn’t walk and think hard at the same time.

“When?”

“The other day. When you came round and this young man had fixed my computer. You met him when he was on the way out.”

“The one who wouldn’t take any money?”

“That’s right.”

“Sandy-colored hair.”

“No. Quite long dark hair.”

“Have you seen my hair?”

Zach stepped over and tried to look at his reflection in a shop window. We were walking along Camden High Street, in and out of shops, occasionally trying things on, not buying anything. Lynne was twenty yards behind, hands in pockets.

“It’s going,” he continued. “What I ought to do is shave it, if I had any integrity. What do you think?”

He turned his anxious face to me.

“Leave it as it is,” I said. “I don’t think a shaved skull would suit you.”

“What’s wrong with my skull?”

“As I was saying, it turned out that this guy, who’s called Morris, also knew the son of one of the women who was killed.”

“You mean he might have killed her?”

“Well, he’s the only connection we’ve found.”

“But he couldn’t have. I know I only met him for eight seconds, but he just seemed a normal person.”

“So? I talked to the psychologist who’s an expert on this. She said it probably would be someone who seemed normal. I’m just praying it’s him. If he could just be locked away and my life could start again.” I reached for Zach’s hand. “You know, I was absolutely convinced I was going to die. They tried to protect these other two women and they failed. They were killed. I just keep thinking about dying. About being dead. I’ve been so scared.”

Tears started running down my face. It wasn’t precisely the time or the place for that, with shoppers pushing their way past us. Zach put his arms around me and kissed the top of my head. He could be nice sometimes. He pulled some fairly pristine tissues from his pocket and handed them to me. I wiped my face and blew my nose.

“You should have asked for help,” he said.

“What would you have done?”

“Something,” he said. “For example, about being dead. Think of before you were born. You were dead for millions and billions of years. You don’t find that frightening, do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

Suddenly there was a presence at my elbow. It was Lynne.

“There’s a message from DCI Links. He’d like to see you straightaway.”

“What’s happened?”

Lynne gave a shrug.

“He just said he wants to see you.”

They were so nice to me at the police station. I was whisked straight through and taken into a grander office, set away from all the other desks in the open-plan setting. I was seated in the chair in front of the desk and brought tea and two biscuits on a little saucer and I was told that Links would be along in just a tick. I had managed no more than a couple of sips and a dip of the biscuit into the tea when Links and Cameron came into the room. They both looked serious and formal. Cameron sat on the sofa to one side and Links sat behind the desk. So it was his office.

“They got you tea?” he said.

I held up my cup. There wasn’t really much to be said.

“I wanted to tell you straightaway,” he said. “We’ve interviewed Morris Burnside and we’ve now eliminated him from the inquiry.”

The room seemed to shift around me, leaving me queasy and dazed.

“What?”

“I want to assure you that this is a positive step.”

“But how could you clear him so quickly?”

He had picked up a paper clip from his desk. First he had unwound it so that it was straight. Now he was trying to twist it back into its old shape. I had tried that before. It never works as well again. But as an activity it at least prevented him from having to look me in the face.

“I understand from Dr. Schilling that you have found out that there are two other murders-I mean two murders involved-in this inquiry. Document analysis has shown with complete certainty that the same person was involved in the murders of Zoe Haratounian and Jennifer Hintlesham and in sending you the threats that you have received. It’s not just the documents.” Links was now talking as if he were in severe pain. “We know that the murderer went to the trouble of placing an object belonging to Mrs. Hintlesham in the flat of Miss Haratounian as a means of er… muddying the waters.” He untwisted the clip again. “On the morning that Zoe Haratounian was murdered, Morris Burnside was in Birmingham at an information technology conference that lasted all that weekend. He was manning a stall, doing presentations. We made a couple of calls. There are numerous witnesses who can place him there for the entire Sunday, morning till evening.”

“Couldn’t he have got away?”

“No, he couldn’t.”

“How did he react to being questioned?”

“He was a bit shocked, of course. But he was perfectly polite and cooperative. Nice young man.”

“Was he angry?”

“Not at all. Anyway, we didn’t mention you had given us his name.”

I leaned forward and put my teacup on the desk.

“Is it all right if I leave that here?”

“Yes, of course.”

I had nothing left. Everything seemed to have drained out of me. I’d thought I was safe. Now I had to go back out into it again. I couldn’t face it. I was too tired.

“I thought it was all over,” I said numbly.

“You’ll be fine,” Links said, still not looking at me. “The protection will continue.”

I got up and looked around for the door, in a daze.

“You must see it as a positive step. We’ve eliminated one potential suspect. That’s progress.”

I looked around.

“What?” I said.

“One less person to bother about.”

“Only six billion to go,” I said. “Oh, I suppose we can eliminate women as well and children. That’s probably two billion. Minus one.”

Links stood up.

“Stadler will see you out,” he said.

It was a matter of half leading, half carrying me out. On the way he stopped in a quiet stretch of corridor.

“You all right?” he said.

I moaned something.

“I need to see you,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking about you all the time. I want to help you, Nadia. I need you and I think that you need me. You need me.”

He touched my arm.

“Uh?” It took me some time to work out what he was doing. I moaned something again and shook him off me. “Don’t touch me,” I said. “Don’t ever touch me again.”

SEVENTEEN

Fear kicked in. I was legless with it; my insides felt molten with it. I crawled into bed and lay staring up at the ceiling, trying not to think, yet trying desperately to think. A few hours of hope and elation, and what now, then? What now, when I was back at the beginning where I’d begun just a few days, a week or so, ago? Except it didn’t seem like days, but months and years, a dreary and ghastly eternity of fear. I slept and woke and slept again, stale and itchy sleep, just under the first level, where dreams lurk and catch you like thick weeds waving under the surface of the water. It was dark and then it was dim and then at last light again, a steely sky outside the window. I lay and listened to a bird singing outside. I peered at my watch. Six-thirty. I pulled the covers over my head. What was I supposed to do with myself today?

The first thing I did was to ring Zach. His voice when he answered was thick with sleep.

“Zach, it’s me. Nadia. Sorry. But I had to. It wasn’t him after all. It wasn’t Morris. He couldn’t have been the one.”

“Shit,” he said.

“Right. What am I going to do now?” I found I was crying. Tears were dribbling into my mouth, itching against my nose, tracking their way down my neck.

“Are they sure?”

“Yeah, it’s not him.”

“Shit,” he said again. I could tell he was trying to think of something to add that wouldn’t sound so dismaying.

“I’m back at square one, Zach. He’ll get me. I can’t do this. I can’t go on like this. It’s no use.”

“Yes you can, Nadia. You can.”

“No.” I wiped the sleeve of my nightie over my teary, snotty face. My glands ached and my throat hurt. “No, I can’t.”

“Listen to me. You’re brave. I have faith in you.”

He kept saying that: I have faith in you; you’re brave. And I kept crying and snuffling and saying: I’m just me, and: No, I can’t. But somehow the repetitions made me feel a bit better; my protests thinned out. I even heard myself giggle when Zach swore I’d live to be a hundred. He made me promise to make myself some breakfast. He told me he’d ring me in an hour or so, that he would come round to see me later.

I obediently toasted some rather stale bread and ate it with a large cup of black coffee. I sat in the kitchen and stared out of the window. People walked past and I thought to myself: It could be him, with the baseball cap and the wide trousers, lips pursed in a whistle I couldn’t hear. Or him with headphones, towing the yappy dog. Or him, with the straggly beard and thinning hair, hunched inside his quilted anorak on a baking late-August day. Anyone. It could be anyone.

I tried not to think about Jenny after she had died. If I called to mind that photograph, panic almost closed my throat. Before I saw the files, the killer had been a lurking menace, something abstract and almost unreal. But there was nothing abstract about Zoe’s sweet face, or about Jenny’s grotesque corpse, and now there was a stirring, tentative part of me that was starting to feel personal hatred toward him: an intimate, purposeful feeling. I sat at the kitchen table and held on to that feeling, let it take clearer shape in my mind. He wasn’t a cloud, a shadow, something dreadful in the air I breathed. He was a man who had killed two young women and wanted to kill me. Him against me.

I found an unopened letter informing me on the outside of the envelope that I had already won a prize and I started to make notes on the back of it. What did I know? He had killed Zoe in mid-July, Jenny in early August. As Grace put it, he was “escalating.” A locket of Jenny’s, missing for weeks, had been discovered in Zoe’s flat, a photograph of Zoe had been found among Clive’s possessions, but those were the only things that had been found to connect the two women. The only link-weak and, as it turned out, meaningless-between me and Jenny was Morris. I thought of the other people who had been interviewed: Fred, of course, though never as a suspect since he had been cleared before the murder was even done; Clive; the real estate agent, Guy; a businessman called Nick Shale; a previous boyfriend of Zoe’s back from traveling round the world; Jenny’s crew of architects and builders and gardeners and cleaners. Now Morris. All the police had achieved, it seemed to me, was to eliminate the obvious suspects.

I sipped my cooling coffee. Where did that leave me? It left me sitting at my kitchen table, pathetically trying to be my own detective, watching men out the window, thinking: him, or him, or anyone at all. I was banging my head against the same wall the police had been banging their heads on for weeks.

I went into my bedroom and found the scrap of paper on which I’d written the names and addresses I’d filched from the files Stadler had shown me. I stared at them, until the writing blurred. Then, for lack of any better idea, I took a deep breath and picked up the telephone.

“Good morning, Clarke’s. Can I help you?” A woman’s voice, ringing with fake enthusiasm.

“I heard you’re selling a flat in Holloway Road. I wondered if I could have a look at it.”

“Hold on, please,” she said, and I sat for a couple of minutes listening to Bach played on a child’s miniature electric organ.

A male voice announced its presence on the line with a discreet cough.

“Guy here. Can I help you?”

I repeated my request.

“Great,” he said. “Superbly located. Extremely convenient for Holloway Road.”

“Can I see it today?”

“Definitely. How about this afternoon?”

“Is the owner there?”

“I’ll show you round myself.”

Lucky me.

I rang another number from my scrap of paper next. I don’t really know why. Perhaps because of all the people in the files, she was the only one who had sounded sad.

“Hello?”

How do you begin? I decided to be direct.

“I’m Nadia Blake. You don’t know me. I wanted to talk to you about Zoe.” There was a silence on the other end of the phone. I couldn’t even hear her breathing. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Who are you? Are you a journalist?”

“No. I’m like her. I mean I’ve been getting letters from the man who killed her.”

“Oh, God. I’m sorry. Nadia, you say?”

“That’s right.”

“Can I do anything?”

“I thought we might meet.”

“Yes, of course. I’m still on holiday. I’m a teacher.”

“How about at her flat, then, at two?”

“Her flat?”

“I’m being shown round.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see it.”

“Are you sure?” She sounded doubtful. Maybe she thought I was mad.

“I just wanted to find out about Zoe.”

“I’ll be there. This is weird. You’ve no idea.”

I had four hours before the appointment. A different woman police officer was here today. Bernice. I told her I wanted to go and visit a flat on Holloway Road just before two, and she didn’t even blink, just nodded impassively and made a mark in the notebook she carried around with her. Perhaps she didn’t know Zoe’s old address, or perhaps everybody was just getting bored waiting for something to happen. Then I had a long bath, washed my hair, soaked in the sudsy water until the skin on my fingers and toes softened and shriveled. I painted my toenails and put on a dress I’d hardly ever worn. I’d been saving it up for a special occasion, some glamorous party where I’d meet my next Mr. Right, but it seemed stupid to wait for that now. I might as well wear it for Zoe’s flat, for Louise and Guy. It was a lovely pale turquoise, tight-fitting with short sleeves and a scoop neck. I put on a necklace, some small earrings, a pair of sandals. I looked fresh and smart, as if I was about to go out to a summer party, drink champagne in some green garden. If only. I put on some lipstick to complete the picture.

At midday, Bernice came in and told me that two young men were here to see me. I peered out the hall window and saw Josh standing fidgeting at the doorway. Beside him stood someone with dark tousled hair, wearing a black cloth jacket. He was holding a packet of cigarettes in one hand and a bunch of flowers in the other and smiling at the doorway I was going to appear in.

When, for a couple of elated hours, I had thought Morris was the killer, the face I had remembered had been a murderer’s face: cunning, his eyes dead, like shark’s eyes. Now I saw that he was boyish and handsome. He looked rather endearing as he arranged his smile for me, and held up his paper-wrapped bouquet.

“Come in, both of you.”

Josh muttered something and stumbled in, tripping over his undone laces. Morris held out the flowers.

“It should be me giving you flowers, to apologize for my suspicions,” I said. “But thanks; they’re lovely.” On an impulse I stretched up and kissed him on his cheek. Bernice closed the door behind us like a jailer.

“I hope you don’t mind me turning up like this,” said Morris, watching me as I filled a jug with water and stuck the flowers in.

“Hack thought we should all get together,” added Josh.

He was doing his restless prowl around the living room again, picking things up and putting them down, running his hands over objects.

“Sit down, Josh. You’re making me nervous. It’s good to see you both. It feels a bit odd.”

“What?”

“Come on, look at us.” I started to giggle wretchedly, and Josh, out of nervous politeness, joined in. Morris stared at us both, frowning.

“How can you laugh,” he asked when I’d stopped my hysterical chuckling, “when there’s someone out there who wants to kill you?”

“You should have seen me this morning. Or yesterday, when I discovered it wasn’t you after all. I hope you won’t take it the wrong way when I tell you that I really, really wanted it to be you.”

“Hope’s a cruel thing,” said Morris, nodding his head gravely.

I looked at Josh with concern.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, fine.”

He didn’t look fine at all; he looked dreadful, with a pallor that was almost green and bloodshot eyes. I stood up and steered him over to the sofa, pushed him back into its cushions.

“When did you last have something to eat?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’m going to make you something to eat. Pasta maybe, if I’ve got any. Do you want some?” I asked Morris.

“I’ll help you,” he said. “Just rest there,” he said to Josh, giving him a small slap on his shoulder. “Gather your strength.”

Josh lolled back and closed his eyes. A pale smile spread over his face.

Morris chopped tomatoes. I found half a bag of pasta spirals. I poured them into a pan with a clatter and put the kettle on.

“Are you very scared?” he asked, just like Josh had done.

“It comes and goes,” I said. “I’m trying to stay strong.”

“That’s good,” he said, chopping away. “Are they helping you?”

“Who?”

“The police.”

“Sort of,” I said dismissively.

I didn’t want to get into all of that. I had found a tin of pitted black olives. When the pasta was ready, I tossed a handful over it and sprinkled some olive oil over the top. It looked rather minimalist and elegant. I should have Parmesan cheese and black pepper to finish it off, though. Never mind. Morris was still cutting the tomatoes very slowly and methodically, into tiny cubes.

“How do you imagine him?” he asked.

“I don’t,” I said, surprising myself by my firmness. “I think about the women. Zoe and Jenny.”

He scraped the tomatoes into a bowl.

“If there’s anything I can do,” he said. “Just ask.”

“Thanks,” I said. But not too encouragingly. I’ve got enough friends.

As we ate, I told Josh and Morris about my appointment to see round Zoe’s flat. Both of them looked appropriately dumbfounded by the idea.

“Why don’t you two come with me?” I asked suddenly, half regretting the suggestion as soon as I’d made it.

Josh shook his head. “Gloria’s taking all of us to meet her mother,” he said bitterly.

He seemed much better after his pasta, although all the olives were piled in a neat heap on the side of his plate.

“Yes,” said Morris with a smile. “I’ll come with you.”

“I’m meeting a friend of Zoe’s there as well,” I said. “A woman called Louise.”

“That’s funny,” Morris said.

“Why funny?”

Morris looked a bit taken aback.

“You’re getting to know people who knew Josh’s mother. And now people who knew Zoe. It seems strange.”

“Does it?” I said. “It seems like something I have to do.”

He murmured something that sounded like vague agreement. When he had finished his pasta, he stood up and fished a slim mobile phone out of his jacket pocket.

“Checking my messages,” he said. He stood by the window and pressed buttons on the phone and listened, frowning. “Shit,” he said eventually, buttoning up his jacket. “I’ve got an urgent call. I’ll have to skip the flat. Sorry. I feel awful about that, after promising to help you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He took my hand and squeezed it. Then he left. He liked me; I could tell he liked me. He’d liked me the first time he saw me, when he came round to mend my computer. Couldn’t he tell I was miles away from things like that now, so far away it seemed impossible that one day I would feel desire again?

Josh left soon after. I kissed his cheek at the doorway and tears welled up in his eyes.

“See you,” I said as cheerfully as I could. “Take care of yourself now.”

Then, before he slouched off up the road, he blurted out: “You first. I mean you take care of yourself.”

EIGHTEEN

Guy wore a chocolate brown suit, a Bart Simpson tie, and a large smile. He had very white teeth and a tan. He shook my hand firmly. He asked if he could call me Nadia and then kept saying my name, as if it was something he had learned at a course. As he unlocked the front door, a voice behind us said:

“Nadia?”

I turned and saw a woman about my size, about my age. She was dressed in a sleeveless yellow top and a very red skirt, which was so short I could almost see the curve of her buttocks; her bare brown legs were strong and shapely. Her glossy brown hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail; her lips were painted a red to match her skirt. She looked bright, alert, pugnacious. My spirits rose.

“Louise? I’m glad you came.”

She smiled reassuringly. Together we went into a dingy entrance hall and up the narrow stairs.

“This is the living room,” said Guy unnecessarily as we stepped into a cramped space, which smelled musty and unlived in. A pair of thin orange curtains were half drawn across the small windows, and I stepped forward and opened them. What a depressing little flat.

“Tell you what,” I said to Guy, “would it be all right if we just looked round it without you? You can wait outside.”

“Don’t you…?”

“No,” said Louise. Then, as he left, “Creep. Zoe couldn’t stand him. He asked her out. Kept hassling her.”

We smiled at each other sadly. I felt tears prick the back of my eyes. Zoe with the lovely smile lived here. Through that door, she died.

“I like the sound of her,” I said. “I wish-” I stopped.

“She was great,” said Louise. “I hate saying ‘was.’ The kids at the school adored her. Men were smitten too. There was something about her…”

“Yes?”

Louise was walking around looking with eyes that clearly saw things I couldn’t. When she talked it was almost to herself.

“She lost her mother when she was young, you know. And somehow she always seemed like that-like someone who didn’t have a mother. It made you feel protective towards her. Maybe that’s why…”

“What?”

“Who knows? Why does a woman get picked on?” She caught my eye.

“I’ve been wondering about that,” I said.

I walked round the room, looking: Nothing had been cleared away yet, although somebody had obviously tidied everything up. Books were neatly stacked on surfaces, a couple of pencils, a ruler and an eraser lay on top of a lined notebook on the small table by the window. I opened it up and there on the first page was a list of lesson ideas, neatly listed and numbered. Zoe’s handwriting: small looped letters, neat. On the wall was a framed page from a newspaper, with a picture of Zoe, surrounded by dozens of small children, holding a giant watermelon.

We went into the kitchen. Mugs stood on the draining board; some dead flowers drooped in a vase. A single bottle of white wine stood by the kettle. The fridge was open and gleamingly empty.

“Her aunt owns the flat now,” said Louise, as if I had asked her some questions about arrangements.

I picked up a calculator that was lying on the counter surface and idly pressed a few buttons, watched a sum appear on its screen.

“Was she terrified?”

“Yeah. She stayed at my place. She had been completely out of it, but she seemed calmer on that last day. She thought it was going to be all right. I was outside, you know.” Louise jerked her head toward the street. “Waiting on a double yellow line in my car along the road. I waited and I waited. Then I tooted the horn and waited some more and cursed her. Then I rang the doorbell. Finally I called the police.”

“So you didn’t see her body?”

Louise blinked at me.

“No,” she said eventually. “They would not let me see it. It was only later they brought me to look at the flat. I couldn’t believe it. She just got out of my car and said she wouldn’t be a minute.”

“Are you ladies all right in there?” called Guy from the stairwell.

“We won’t be long,” I shouted back.

Together we went through into her bedroom. The bed was stripped and a pile of sheets and pillowcases lay stacked on the chair. I opened the wardrobe. Her clothes were still there. She didn’t have many. Three pairs of shoes stood on the wardrobe floor. I put up a hand and fingered the cloth of a pale blue dress, a cotton jacket with an unstitched hem.

“Did you know Fred?” I asked.

“Sure. Very charming. Zoe was better off without him, though. He wasn’t exactly supportive. It was a relief to her when she finally told him it was over.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Briefly I closed my eyes and let myself see the photograph of her corpse, peaceful on the floor as if she had gone to sleep there. Maybe she didn’t suffer. I opened my eyes and there was Louise, looking at me with mild concern.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What’s all this for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hoped I might learn something, but I’ve no idea what it would be. Maybe I’m just looking for Zoe.”

She smiled. “Are you looking for a clue?” she asked.

“Stupid, aren’t I? Is anything missing?”

Louise looked around.

“The police wanted to know that. I couldn’t really tell. The only thing I noticed was that there was a wall hanging that Fred had given her. That was gone.”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw that in the file on the murder scene.”

“It seems a funny thing to steal. It can’t have been worth anything.”

“The police assumed that the killer used it to carry stuff away in.”

Louise looked puzzled. “Why not just use a plastic carrier bag from the kitchen?”

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose people are all that rational just after they’ve killed someone.”

“Anyway, she didn’t have that many things. Her aunt may have helped herself already. And the police will have removed stuff, of course. Mostly it looks just like I remember it. Dreary place, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“She hated it. Especially by the end. But it doesn’t give you any idea of what she was like.” Louise went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa. “On her last day, we went shopping together. Just to buy her a couple of things to wear until she collected all her stuff, you know. We got her a pair of knickers and a bra and some socks, and then she said she wanted to buy a T-shirt. Mine were all too big for her. She was a skinny thing, and she’d lost weight with all the fear. So we ended up going to this kids’ shop down the road from my flat and she found a light summer dress and a white T-shirt with little embroidered flowers all over it. Size ten to eleven, it said on the label. Ten to eleven: It fitted her perfectly. She tried it on in the fitting room and when she came out wearing it she looked so-so sweet, you know, with her hair all mussed up and her thin arms and her bright face, giggling a bit, in this kids’ T-shirt.”

Tears were trickling down Louise’s face. She made no attempt to wipe them away.

“That’s how I think of her,” she said. “She was twenty-three, with a proper grown-up job and a flat and all that. But when I think of her, I see her standing giggling at me, wearing clothes made for a child. She was so little, so young.” She fished inside her bag and pulled out a tissue, wiped her face. “That’s what she was wearing when she was killed. All dressed up in her brand-new clothes. Clean and fresh as a daisy.”

“Ladies,” called Guy again, putting his head round the door. He looked confused when he saw us hugging in the middle of the room, tears streaming down our faces. I didn’t know who I was crying for, but we stood there like that for a while, weeping, and when we left Louise put her hands on either side of my face and held me like that for a moment and stared at me.

“Good luck, Nadia, my new friend,” she said. “I’ll be thinking of you.”

NINETEEN

Just before seven on the following evening I was lying on the sofa in my flat when the front doorbell rang. Up to that point, the day had gone wrong. In the night I’d been thinking about Zoe and Jenny. I thought of them like friends now. More than that, maybe. I lay in bed that night and thought of myself as walking on a footpath and knowing that Zoe and then Jenny had walked this footpath before me. Sometimes I would see traces showing they had passed and always I knew that they had seen what I was seeing. They had gone ahead, and, in that early morning with the light around my curtain edges, I thought of them waiting for me out there, in the darkness and nothingness.

Had they thought about dying? What had they done? I didn’t mean what precautions they had taken. Had they lived their lives in a different way? What do you do when you may have a day or a week to live? It was supposed to make life more precious. I should think clearly, read great books. I wasn’t sure I had any great books. After I got up and made myself some coffee, I looked along the shelves and found a book of poems someone had given me for a birthday present. They were supposed to be particularly suited to learning by heart but I couldn’t even read them off the page. Something seemed to be wrong with my brain. I couldn’t follow the sense of the poems. Their meaning was a song playing in the next house too faintly to make out. I put it back in the shelf and switched on the television.

Just a day earlier I’d been thinking about constructive ways to use the rest of my life. Now I was watching a talk show involving women who’d had affairs with their sister’s boyfriend and then a cooking program that was also a game show and then a repeat of a sitcom from the seventies and a rather old-looking documentary about a coral reef somewhere. The divers had sideburns. I saw lots of weather reports.

If I died at twenty-eight and somebody wrote an obituary of me, which they wouldn’t, what would they find to say? “In her later years she found her niche as a moderately successful children’s party entertainer.” Zoe had a job as a teacher, though she was hardly more than a child herself. Jenny had three children. She had Josh, a child who was almost a man.

I fell asleep on the sofa and woke up and watched the end of a western and some indoor bowling and a quiz program and another cookery program, and it was then that the doorbell rang. I opened the door. Josh and Morris were standing there. The damp, warm aroma of Indian food blew in. Morris was in discussion with a policewoman.

“Yes, she does know us. And the other woman who was here already has our names and addresses. I can give it to you again if you want.” He turned and saw me. “We bought a takeaway and we were nearby, so we thought we’d drop in.”

I looked blank. It wasn’t them. It was having spent an entire day in front of the TV screen. I felt tranquilized.

“It’s fine,” Morris continued. “Don’t worry. We can go off with our food and find a bench somewhere or a doorway. Somewhere under a street lamp. In the rain.”

I couldn’t help smiling. The day was still sunny and bright.

“Don’t be stupid. Come in.” The policewoman looked reluctant. “It’s all right. I know them.”

They came in bringing the lovely smell with them and dumped three carrier bags on the table.

“You’re probably going out to a dinner party,” said Morris.

“As it happens, I’m not,” I confessed.

They both took off their jackets and tossed them to one side. They looked very at home.

“I rescued Josh from a nightmarish soiree at home and we went out in search of a woman.”

Josh smiled so awkwardly that I almost felt I should give him a hug, except that that would have made things even worse. They started unloading tinfoil cartons.

“We didn’t know about your tolerance,” said Morris, peeling off the cardboard lids. “So we got everything from extremely mild cooked in cream to meat phal, which is marked dangerously hot, and various things in between and a couple of nans, papadums, dhal, and various veg. Beer for the grown-ups, whereas Josh will have to make do with lager.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Are you allowed to drink, Josh?”

“Of course,” he said truculently.

Oh well. I had enough to worry about. I got out plates, glasses, and knives.

“What would you have done if I hadn’t been in?” I asked.

“Morris was sure you’d be in,” Josh said.

“Oh yes?” I asked, turning to Morris with a mock-ironical expression.

He smiled.

“I wasn’t making fun of you,” he said. “I thought you might be a bit shaken up.”

“I was a bit,” I said. “It’s not been a good time.”

“I can see that,” he said. “So eat.”

And we did and it was good. I needed a good, messy, undignified meal in which lots of things were piled up together, and I ripped off bits of nan and dipped them in different sauces. We challenged each other to take mouthfuls of the phal with glasses of very cold beer standing by. I think Morris cheated and only took a tiny amount while pretending to be brave, but Josh took a few deep breaths and really did put a substantial spoonful of the fiery meat into his mouth and chewed and swallowed it. We stared at him and beads of sweat started to pop out of pores on his forehead.

“You’re going to erupt,” I said. “We’d better stand clear.”

“No, I’m fine,” Josh said in a strangled tone, and we all laughed. It was the first time I’d ever seen him with any expression more cheerful than an awkward self-conscious grimace, and I couldn’t remember when I’d last laughed helplessly. There hadn’t been anything to laugh about.

“Now you,” said Josh.

With exaggerated elegance I took a large spoonful and ate it. They stood looking as if I were a firework taking a long time to go off.

“How do you do it?” Morris asked finally.

“I love hot food,” I said. “And I can deal with it like a lady.”

“We’re impressed,” said Josh, awestruck.

I then hastily took a massive gulp of cold beer.

“You all right?” Josh asked.

“Just thirsty,” I said casually.

Surprisingly quickly, there was just the cooled wreckage of a meal. While I cleared the table, which meant putting the foil containers one inside the other, the boys wandered over to my notorious computer. They crouched over it and I heard occasional gasps and guffaws. I came back with another glass of beer, sipping it. I felt pleasantly dizzy.

“I know it’s comical.”

“No, it’s great,” Josh said, clicking away expertly with the mouse. “You’ve got all these primeval versions of programs, all these one-point-ones and one-point-twos. It’s like a software dinosaur park. Hang on-what’s this?”

It turned out that my computer had somewhere embedded in it a solitaire card game that I hadn’t even found. Did I know the rules? they shouted at me. No, I didn’t. So with much shouting and fighting over the controls, they began playing.

“This is like an evening with two thirteen-year-olds,” I said.

“So?” said Josh.

He seemed to be loosening up. He was certainly more relaxed with me. There was no longer any of that agonized, embarrassed respectfulness. They shouted for more beer and I brought them two cans, cold from the fridge.

“I feel like I’ve become the Princess Leia in this scenario,” I said.

Josh turned from the screen, looking at me thoughtfully.

“More like Chewbacca, I think,” he said.

“Who?”

“Forget it.”

Maybe too much fuzziness wasn’t entirely a good thing. I went and made a pot of coffee. I poured myself a mug. Very black, very hot.

“There’s coffee,” I shouted.

Josh was absolutely engrossed. For the moment he didn’t know I existed. But Morris wandered over and poured himself a coffee.

“Is there any milk?”

“I’ll get it.”

“You stay there. I’ll find it.”

Morris went off to the kitchen and I looked across at Josh, who was staring into the screen with fierce attention. His arms looked surprisingly thin and white. He was still a little boy. While being very big. Morris came back.

“Nice flat,” he said. “Very quiet.”

“Are you flat hunting?” I asked. “In which case you should take a look at the one I saw yesterday. Not very quiet, though.”

“How did that go?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure what I was doing there. It was probably stupid, but it felt important. I talked to Zoe’s friend, Louise. She was nice. It brought me closer to Zoe.”

Morris took a sip of coffee.

“Can you really care about somebody you’ve never met?”

“Well, you know, I feel slightly connected to Zoe and Jenny.”

“Did you see the news report about the landslip in Honduras last week?”

“No.”

“They recovered more than two hundred bodies. They don’t even know how many people are missing.”

“That’s awful.”

“It was a very small news item on the foreign pages of my newspaper. If it had happened in France it would have been a big story. If it had happened to people who speak English it would have been on the front page.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You’ll excuse me if I’m a bit self-obsessed at the moment. It’s the constant feeling of fear and nausea all the time. It does that to you.”

Morris leaned forward and put his coffee down delicately, on a magazine, as if the value of my crappy table could be reduced any further.

“Do you really feel that?” he said sympathetically.

“Yes,” I said. “I try to forget about it or cover it up, but it’s always there. You know when you’re a bit ill and everything you eat has a slightly curious undertaste? That’s what it’s like.”

“If you want to talk about it, that’s all right. You can tell me what you’re feeling. Anything.”

“That’s nice of you, but there’s nothing complicated about it. I just want it to be over.”

Morris looked around. Josh was still engrossed in the game.

“What are your plans?” he said.

“I don’t know. I had some stupid idea that I could try and look for clues myself, but I think it was a waste of time. The police have combed through everything.”

“What were you looking for?”

“I’ve no idea, isn’t that the most ridiculous thing of all? Looking for a needle in a haystack is one thing, but what about looking through a haystack without even knowing what you’re looking for? Maybe I’m looking for a bit of hay. I had a brief look at some of the police files.”

“They let you look at their files?” said Morris sharply.

I laughed.

“Well, sort of.”

“What were they like? Were there autopsy reports?”

“Mostly bureaucratic stuff. There were some horrible pictures. What was done to Jenny. You don’t want to know. I still see it when I close my eyes.”

“I can imagine,” Morris said. “Did you learn anything?”

“Not really. Oh, lots of information, but nothing that would help me. It was horrible, but it was pointless, really. I suppose I was hoping I would recognize something, some connection, that would link us: Zoe, Jenny, and Nadia, the three strange stepsisters.”

“You found me,” he said with a smile.

“Yes. Don’t worry, Morris-I’ve still got my eye on you. And there was also the estate agent, Guy, who may have been a link between Zoe and Jenny. He seemed pretty weird. But I know a little bit about probability. We all live in north London. It would be strange if there weren’t connections between us. We must have gone to the same shops, we must have passed each other in the street. But that’s not important. It’s just that I keep worrying away at it in my head. There must be something. There must be. I talked to this psychologist and she mentioned some principle that the criminal always takes something to the scene of the crime and always takes something away with him. It’s a haunting idea, isn’t it?”

Morris shrugged.

“Well,” I continued. “It haunts me. I feel I’ve got it all in my head. I’ve got the haystack inside my head and I feel there are two straws in there and if I bring them together, maybe I’ll save my life.”

“Of course you will,” Morris said. “You mustn’t give up hope.”

“I sometimes think I should. You know what the real pain is? It’s the occasional moment when I have a feeling of what it might be like to get through all this and live a normal life and grow old.” I had to stop and pull myself together before tears started running down my cheeks. I was aware of a presence next to me. It was Josh. I poured him some coffee. “This evening has been a bit like that,” I said. “Something unexpected and casual.”

We were silent for a moment. Josh looked grown-up again, sitting on the sofa with two adults. We all sipped our coffee and caught each other’s glances and smiles.

“So what you’ve been doing,” Morris said, “is trying to make a connection between you and the other two women, Zoe and… er… Josh’s mum.”

“Of course.”

“I’ve been thinking about it-and would you mind if I said something that was really dumb but it was a thought?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “It’ll make a change from me prattling away.”

“It’s just that there is an obvious connection between the three of you.”

“What?”

“It’s a trick question, really, but who are the people you have in common?”

“Who?”

I looked from Morris to Josh. Suddenly Josh’s face lit up in a smile. “I know,” he said smugly.

“Well who? Tell me then.”

“I think you should guess for a bit longer.” Josh was actually teasing me now, like an irritating younger brother.

“Fucking tell me, Josh, or I’ll tweak your nose.” I held up my hand threateningly.

“All right, all right,” he said. “The police.”

“Has it been the same lot?” Morris asked.

“I think so,” I said. “But really…”

“Actually,” he said, “there’s a major flaw in my brilliant theory.”

“What’s that?”

“The first one, Zoe. The police would only have become aware of her after the first note.”

“Oh, yeah.”

We relapsed into silence. Suddenly I felt a small charge in the back of my head. It was the sort of thing I’d been looking for.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“What?” said Morris.

“What you said, that they only came on the scene after the first note.”

“What do you mean? How could they know about her earlier?”

“It was in the files. Zoe was in the papers just before it happened. She tackled a mugger in the street. She hit him with a watermelon. She was famous; she had her picture in the paper. The police did know about her.”

“I didn’t mean it completely seriously,” said Morris. “But still… It might be worth thinking about whether there’s been any strangeness about the way they’ve treated you. I suppose it’s just been the normal detached sort of police style.”

I looked up slightly nervously. I must behave as if there were nothing to feel odd about.

“Yes,” I said. “Just the normal sort of style.” I know I’m not a good liar. Is that what a person would have said who was telling the truth?

“Are you all right?” Morris asked.

“Yes, of course. Why shouldn’t I be?” My mind was now racing. There was too much to think about, too much to go over in my mind. “I mean, it couldn’t be a policeman, could it?”

“What do you think, Josh?”

Josh was shaking his head in puzzlement. “No, it couldn’t be. It’s just too weird. Except, I was… no, it’s stupid.”

“What?” I said. “Out with it.”

“I don’t know if you heard that before my mum… well, you know, they actually picked up my dad because of something belonging to my mum that had been planted in the flat of the other woman, Zoe. Who else could have done that?”

There was a silence like a dark cavern.

“I’ve got to get my head round this,” I said. “It’s like a crossword puzzle. I’m not intelligent enough.”

“I’m sorry,” said Morris. “I seem to have started something. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t be stupid. It’s worth thinking about. I just can’t believe it. What do I do?”

Morris and Josh just looked at each other and shrugged.

“Just look after yourself,” Morris said. “Keep your eyes open.” He winked at Josh. “We should go,” he said.

I walked with them to the door.

“What do I do?” I repeated pathetically.

“You think about things,” Morris said. “And we’ll think as well. Maybe we’ll come up with something. Remember, we’re on your side.”

I closed the door and I didn’t even sit down. I stood there by the door, thinking and thinking, trying to put it into a shape that fitted. My head hurt.

I am there, right at the heart of things. Invisible. I stand in front of her and she smiles at me in that way she has, that crinkles her eyes. She giggles at my jokes. She puts her hand on my shoulder. She has kissed me on the cheek: a soft, dry kiss, burning into my skin. She lets her eyes well up with tears and doesn’t wipe them away. There aren’t many people she trusts anymore, but she trusts me. Yes, she trusts me perfectly. While I am with her I must not laugh. The laughter builds up inside me, like a bomb.

She is strong, resilient; she bends but she doesn’t break. She has not collapsed. But I am strong. I am stronger than she is, stronger than anyone. I am clever, cleverer than those fools who snuffle around for clues that are not there. And I am patient. I can wait for as long as it takes. I watch and I wait and, inside, I laugh.

TWENTY

“You,” I said.

“Me,” Cameron said. We stared at each other. “I’m Lynne for the day. Orders.”

“Oh.” I had gone to the door wearing a skimpy robe and with my hair unbrushed, expecting Lynne, or Bernice. I didn’t want him seeing me like this. His eyes dropped from my face to my chest, my bare legs. Instinctively I put my hand up to my throat and I saw him give a tiny smile. “I’ll get dressed,” I said.

I put on jeans and a T-shirt, good and plain. I brushed my hair back from my face and tied it up. It was a cooler day; I almost thought I could smell autumn in the air, a sense of freshness. I wanted to see the autumn: trees turning, fast gray skies, and rain in the winds. Pears on the tree out in the yard, blackberries from the cemetery up the road. I thought about walking through the coppice near my parents’ house, boots crunching on leaves. I thought about sitting by a fire at Janet’s house and eating buttered toast. Little things.

I could hear Stadler in the kitchen, familiar with all the appliances. I remembered what Morris had said yesterday, and I thought: Yes, it could be, it could be true. I let myself think about what had happened between me and Cameron, remember it while he rattled the cups next door. He had hidden his head between my breasts, groaning; pinned me down; been savage, brutal, gentle. When he had stared at me with his hungry eyes, what had he seen? What did he see now? Should I be scared of him?

I took a deep breath, went to join him in the kitchen.

“Coffee,” he said.

“Thanks.”

There was a silence. Then I said:

“I’ve arranged to go and see my parents today. They live near Reading.”

“Fine.”

“I’d like you to wait outside. I won’t tell them about you.”

“Are they very anxious?”

“Not about this. They don’t know. I haven’t told them.”

They were always anxious, though, I thought. That was why I hadn’t said anything to them. Every time I’d picked up the phone, I had imagined my mother’s mild and fretful voice with its submerged note of panic. She was always waiting to hear bad news from me. Each time she heard my voice on the other end of the phone, she thought I was going to break some unwelcome event to her and her unfocused fears were going to find a point. She had never been sure about me, I don’t know why. She didn’t trust my capacity to look after myself and make a life for myself. But I was going to tell them today. I had to.

“Nadia, we need to talk…” He put his cup down and leaned toward me.

“I wanted to ask you something…” I told him.

“About us. You and me.”

“I wanted to ask you about Zoe and Jenny.”

“Nadia, we need to talk about what happened.”

“No, we don’t.” I tried to keep my voice businesslike. I concentrated on holding the coffee steadily in my hands.

“You don’t mean that,” he said.

I looked at him. Tall and solid, like a wall between me and the rest of the world. He had strong, thick hands with hair on the knuckles. Hands that had held me, touched me, felt for all my secrets. He had eyes that stared at me, undressed me.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said hoarsely.

“Have you told your wife?”

He flinched, then said, “She’s got nothing to do with this. This is just about you and me here in your flat.”

“Tell me about Zoe and Jenny,” I said insistently. “You’ve never told me about them. What were they like?” He shook his head irritably, but I persisted. “You owe it to me.”

“I owe you nothing,” he said, but he put his hands up in a gesture of surrender, then closed his eyes for a moment. “Zoe: I didn’t know Zoe so well; I hardly got the chance… I saw her first in a huge photograph from a newspaper that was put up on the wall at the station, you know, after she poleaxed a mugger with a watermelon. She was like a heroine to the guys, and a kind of dirty joke too.”

“What was she like, though?”

“I never met her.”

“What about Jenny? You must have known Jenny well.” I watched his face.

“Jenny was something else.” He almost grinned at the memory, then checked himself. “Small, too. You’re all small,” he added musingly. “But strong, energetic, dense, dark, angry. Coiled wire, Jenny was. Clever. Impatient. Seriously insane sometimes.”

“Unhappy?”

“That as well.” He put a hand on my knee and I let it lie there for a moment, though his touch sent a wave of repulsion through me. “She’d have bitten your head off for saying it, though. Bit of a dragon.”

I stood up, to be free of his hand; poured myself some more coffee, to give myself something to do.

“We ought to go soon,” I said.

“Nadia.”

“I don’t want to be late.”

“I lie in bed at night and I see you, your face, your body.”

“Keep away.”

“I know you.”

“You think I’m going to die.”

Before we left, I phoned Links, while Cameron was in the room with me, and told him that Detective Inspector Stadler was driving me to see my parents, and that we should be back mid- to late afternoon. I could hear the note of bemusement in Links’s voice: He couldn’t understand why I should be ringing up and telling him my arrangements. I didn’t care, though. I repeated myself loudly and clearly: So he couldn’t help but hear, so that Cameron couldn’t help but hear, either.

We didn’t talk much on the way there, up the M4 then along small lanes. I gave him curt instructions, and he drove and looked across at me with his heavy gaze. I sat with my hands on my lap and tried to look out my window, but I could feel his head turning toward me, his brooding stare.

“What do your parents do?” he asked, just before we arrived.

“Dad was a teacher, geography, but he took early retirement. Mum did odd things, but mostly she stayed at home and looked after me and my brother. Right here, at the T-junction. You’re not coming in, remember.”

The house was a thirties semi, much like all the others along the cul-de-sac. Cameron drew up outside it.

“Hold on one minute,” he said as I reached for the door handle. “There’s something I ought to tell you.”

“What?”

“There was another letter.”

I lay back in the car seat and closed my eyes.

“Oh God,” I said.

“You made me promise to tell you everything.”

“What did it say?”

“It was short. It just said, ‘You’re being brave, but it won’t do you any good.’ Something like that.”

“And that was all?” I opened my eyes and turned my head to look at him. “When was it sent?”

“Four days ago.”

“Have you got anything from the note?”

“We’re using it to augment our psychological evaluation.”

“Nothing,” I said with a sigh. “Well, I guess it doesn’t really change much. We knew he was still out there, didn’t we?”

“Yes, we did.”

“I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

“Nadia.”

“What?”

“You are being brave.” I stared at him. “It’s true,” he said.

I looked at him.

“You mean brave like Zoe and Jenny?”

He didn’t reply.

Mum had made a neck of lamb stew, with rice-overcooked so it stuck together in lumps-and a green salad. I used to love lamb stew when I was a girl. How do you ever tell your mother you’ve gone off something? It was hard to eat, gristly and with too many sharp splinters of bones. Dad opened a bottle of red wine, although neither of them ever drink at lunchtime. They were so pleased to see me. They fussed over me, as if I were a stranger. I felt like a stranger with these two nice old people, who weren’t really old yet.

Always cautious, making their way through life in a gingerly fashion. They were careful with me, as well, waiting up for me every time I went out in the evenings, putting a hot-water bottle in my bed on cold nights, telling me to put on an extra layer when it was cold, sharpening my crayons for me before the beginning of each new school term. It used to drive me insane, their care, the way they thought about every detail of my life. Now the memory made me feel intensely nostalgic: a lump of homesickness beneath my ribs.

I thought I would wait until after lunch to tell them. We drank coffee in the living room, with mint chocolates. I could see Cameron sitting at the wheel of his car. I cleared my throat.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said.

“Yes?”

Mum looked at me expectantly, apprehensively.

“I… there’s a man who-” I stopped and looked at the pleasure flowering on her face. She thought I had a serious boyfriend at last; she had never thought much of Max as a long-term possibility. I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth. “Oh, it’s nothing really.”

“No, go on. Tell us. We want to hear, don’t we, Tony?”

“Later,” I said, standing up abruptly. “First I want Dad to show me what’s going on in the garden.”

The plums were ripening on the tree, and he was growing runner beans, lettuce, and potatoes. There were tomato plants in his greenhouse, and he insisted on giving me a plastic tray of cherry tomatoes to take back with me.

“Your mother’s got some jars of strawberry jam she has set by for you,” he said.

I took hold of his arm.

“Dad,” I said. “Dad, I know we’ve had our disagreements”-homework, cigarettes, drink, makeup, staying out late, politics, drugs, boyfriends, lack of boyfriends, serious jobs, you name it-“but I just wanted to say that you’ve been a good father.”

He made an embarrassed tutting sound in the back of his throat and patted my shoulder.

“Your mother will be wondering what’s keeping us.”

I said good-bye in the hall. I couldn’t hug them properly because I was holding the tomatoes and the jam. I pressed my cheek against Mum’s and breathed in the familiar smell of vanilla, powder, soap, and mothballs. Smell of my childhood.

“Good-bye,” I said, and they smiled and waved. “Good-bye.”

For just one moment, I let myself think I would never see them again, but you can’t be like that; you can’t walk down the path and get into the car and smile and keep on going if you let yourself be like that.

All the way home, I pretended to sleep. I told Stadler that he should stay in his car after he had done his check round the flat. I wanted to be alone for a while. He started to protest, but the pager strapped to the belt of his trousers bleeped, and I slammed the door in his face.

I sat on the edge of my bed with my hands on my knees. I closed my eyes and then opened them again. I listened to myself breathing. I waited, not for anything to happen but for this feeling to go away.

Then the telephone rang, as if it was ringing inside my skull. I reached out a hand, picked it up.

“Nadia.” Morris’s voice was hoarse and urgent.

“Yes?”

“It’s me. Don’t say anything. Listen, Nadia. I’ve found something out. I can’t tell you over the phone. We’ve got to meet.”

I felt the fear growing in my stomach, a great tumor of fear.

“What is it?”

“Come to my flat, as soon as you can. There’s something you’ve got to see. Is anyone with you?”

“No. They’re outside.”

“Who is it?”

“Stadler.”

I heard the intake of Morris’s breath. When he spoke again, he was very calm and slow.

“Get away from him, Nadia. I’m waiting for you.”

I put down the phone and stood up, balanced on the balls of my feet. So it was Cameron, after all. My fear ebbed away, and I was left feeling strong, springy, and full of clarity. It had come at last. The waiting was over, and with it all the grief and all the dread. And I was ready and it was time to go.

TWENTY-ONE

As I walked through my front door my head felt very clear. I knew what I was going to do. Matters had become simple for the moment. The layer of fear was still there, but even that had receded a little. Cameron was out of his car and beside me in a second, looking questioning, hopeful even.

“I’m going up the road to get some food for supper,” I said.

We walked along together. I didn’t speak.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “For everything. I just want to make it all right. For you and me. Us.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

He didn’t reply. We walked across High Street and along the pavement until we were standing outside Marks amp; Spencer. We mustn’t have an argument, nothing to arouse his suspicions. I put my hand on his forearm. Contact but nothing excessive.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not dealing with things in a rational way at the moment. It’s not the time.”

“I understand,” he said.

I turned to go into the shop. I gave a sigh. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Don’t worry.”

The Camden Town Marks amp; Spencer has a small back entrance. Up the escalator and out, and within a few minutes I was on an underground train. Going down the escalator to the platform, the warm air blowing past me, I had looked back. He was definitely not there.

As I sat on the train for the short journey, I tried to make sense of what Morris had said. I felt as if I had been trapped for weeks in a thick mist and now it was not exactly lifting, but it was becoming thinner and some sort of landscape was starting to become visible. If it had been a policeman, if it had been Cameron, suddenly what had seemed impossible became simple. The police had easy unquestioned access to Zoe’s flat, to Jenny’s house. My heart sank. To my flat. But why would they do that? Why would Cameron do that?

I only had to think of Cameron’s gaze and I knew the answer. I remembered my first meetings with the police, Cameron in the corner, his eyes fixed on me. Cameron in my bed. I had never been looked at like that before, never touched like that, as if I were an infinitely attractive and strange object. I’d felt he wanted to look at me and touch me and penetrate me and taste me all at the same time, as if nothing could ever be enough. It had been wonderfully exciting at first and then repellent, and now it seemed appallingly understandable. To be right next to the woman you were terrifying, to fuck her, to find out all her secrets. What a turn-on. And yet, what evidence was there? Had Morris found something I could use?

Morris’s flat was only a few minutes’ walk from the tube station. The main road itself was packed with crowds of people. He lived in a small alley that was difficult to find. I walked past it the first time, then asked and found it and walked along and round the corner. The tiny cobbled backstreet was deserted on this Saturday evening. At the end I found a door with a little card by the bell: BURNSIDE. I rang the bell. There was silence for a time.

Could he have gone out? Then I heard a series of knobs being turned, levers pulled, and he opened the door. He looked amazing, a live wire. He was wearing bulky trousers with large pockets all over and a short-sleeved shirt. He was barefoot. But there was something about his eyes, bright and alive, that was captivating. He had an energy about him that was like a force field. He was an attractive man, and what was more-here my heart sank a little-he was a man who fancied himself in love. I hoped he hadn’t made a mountain out of a molehill, just in the hope of wooing me.

“Nadia,” he said with a welcoming smile.

He stood in the doorway and looked over my shoulder. I turned and looked as well. There was nobody there at all, the whole length of the street.

“How did you get away?” he said.

“I’m a magician,” I said.

“Come in,” he said. “I haven’t tidied up.”

It looked very tidy to me. We had stepped straight into a small and cozy living room with a doorway at the far end leading into a short corridor.

“Was this a warehouse?”

“Some kind of workshop, I think. I’m just flat-sitting for a friend who’s out of the country.”

The only thing out of place was an ironing board and iron to one side by the table.

“You’ve been doing your ironing,” I said. “I’m extremely impressed.”

“Just this shirt,” he said.

“I thought it was new.”

“That’s the trick,” he said. “If you iron your clothes, they look like new.”

I smiled.

“The real trick is to wear new clothes,” I said.

I walked around the room. I was addicted to looking at other people’s houses. I gravitated with the instinct of a master snooper to a large cork board on the wall on which, here and there, were pinned takeaway menus, business cards of plumbers and electricians, and, most interesting of all, little snapshots. Morris at a party, Morris on a bike somewhere, Morris on a beach, Morris and a girl.

“She looks nice,” I said.

“Cath,” he said.

“Is she someone you’re seeing?”

“Well, we had a sort of thing.”

I smiled inwardly. She was someone he was seeing. When men said of a girl that they had had a sort of thing with her, it was the equivalent of a man taping over his wedding ring. They wanted to be ambiguous about their state of availability.

“Where are the rest of them?”

“What?”

“The pictures,” I said. “Many drawing pins, few pictures.” I pointed. There were gaps all over the board.

“Oh,” he said. “There were just some I got bored with.” He laughed. “You should have been a detective.”

“Speaking of which, this had better be good, because Detective Inspector Stadler is going to be very angry. I’ll probably be lucky if I get away with a charge of wasting police time.”

Morris gestured me to a chair at the table and he sat opposite me. “I’ve been going over the interview I had with Stadler and-what was the other one?”

“Links?”

“That’s right, and I’m convinced that there’s something strange about Stadler. The way he talked about those other two women was really strange, and I wanted to go through it with you. And I just felt I had to get you away from him.”

“Have you got any evidence?”

“What?”

“I thought you might have found something we could use against him.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could have.”

I tried to think. The mist in my mind that had been clearing suddenly became thicker again. Then suddenly I felt a wave of coldness pass through me.

“It doesn’t work anyway,” I said dully.

Morris looked puzzled. “What doesn’t?”

“The police theory. I got so excited about Zoe and that watermelon and her connection with the police before the notes arrived. But that doesn’t explain Jennifer.”

“Why?”

“Her locket was planted in Zoe’s flat before Zoe died, before Jennifer started getting the notes, before she called the police.”

“The police might have faked the planting of the locket.”

I thought for a moment.

“Well, maybe,” I said doubtfully. “Still, that doesn’t explain the connection with Jenny. Why pick on her?”

“Stadler may have seen her somewhere.”

“You could say that about anybody. The police theory depended on the fact that they had dealings with all the women.”

I felt depressed and sick. “It was all wrong,” I said. “I’d better go.”

Morris leaned across and touched my arm. “Just stay a bit,” he said. “Just a bit, Nadia.”

“It would have been so good,” I said flatly. “It was such a nice theory, it’s a pity to let it go.”

“Back to the haystack,” Morris said. He was smiling at me as if that was funny. His teeth, his eyes, his whole face, shone.

“You know what?” I said dreamily.

“What?”

“I used to feel strange that I’d never met Zoe and Jenny. It’s different now. Sometimes I think of us as sisters, but more and more I think of us as the same person. We’ve gone through the same experiences. We’ve lain awake at night with the same fears. And we’re going to die in the same way.”

Morris shook his head. “Nadia…”

“Shhh,” I said, as if to a small child. I was almost talking to myself now and I didn’t want my reverie interrupted. “When I went to the flat with Louise-that’s Zoe’s friend-it was amazing. It was almost as if she had already been my best friend, as if we recognized each other. It was so funny when she talked of going shopping with Zoe on that last afternoon; it was almost as if she had been talking of a shopping expedition that we had made together. She felt it too. I could tell.”

And at that moment, quite suddenly, the fog lifted and the landscape was there-there it was-cold and hard in the sunshine and I could see it. There was no doubt. I had been going over the forensic file in my mind ever since I had seen it.

“What is it?”

I started. I had almost forgotten Morris was there. “What?” I said.

“You don’t seem quite here,” he said. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking,” I said, “that when Zoe was killed she was wearing a shirt she had just bought with Louise. Funny, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” said Morris. “Tell me why it’s funny, Nadia. Tell me.”

“Pity to mess it up,” I said.

Morris gazed at me as if he was trying to see inside my mind. Did he think I was going a bit mad? Good. I leaned over the table and took his hand. It felt clammy. Mine felt cool and dry. I held his right hand between my two hands and squeezed it.

“Morris,” I said. “I’d love some tea.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course, Nadia.” He was smiling and smiling. He couldn’t stop.

He got up and walked out of the room. I looked across at the front door. There were several levers and knobs. Then fifty or sixty yards down the deserted road; no one about. I stood up and walked over to the cork notice board.

“Can I help?” I shouted.

“No,” he shouted from the kitchen.

I looked at the notice board. Below it was a writing desk with drawers. As quietly as I could I opened the first. Checkbooks, receipts. I opened the second. Postcards. The third. Catalogs. The fourth. A pile of photographs. I picked up a couple. I knew roughly what I was going to see, but still I gave a shiver of horror. Morris and someone and someone and Fred. Morris and Cath and Fred. Morris and someone and Fred. I put one of them in the back pocket of my jeans. Maybe it would be found on my body. I closed the drawer and went and sat down at the table. I looked around. It would have to do. I cleared my mind. No, that’s wrong. I didn’t clear my mind; I filled it. I made myself think of the photograph of Jenny dead. I made myself think of every detail. What would Jenny do if she were sitting where I was sitting?

Morris came in, somehow managing to hold a teapot, two mugs, a carton of milk, and a packet of digestive biscuits. He put them on the table and sat down.

“Hang on a second,” I said, before he could pour. “I want to show you something.” I stood up and walked round the table. “It’s a sort of magic trick.”

He smiled at me once again. Such a nice smile. He looked happy, excited. The excitement was like a light behind his eyes.

“I don’t know very much about magic,” I said, “but the first thing you learn is you never tell your audience in advance what you are going to do. If it goes wrong, then you can pretend you did it on purpose. Look.” I took the lid off the teapot and then lifted the pot and then very quickly threw it into his face. Some of it splashed on me as well. I didn’t even feel it. He let out a howl like an animal. In the same movement I reached for the iron. I took it in both hands. I had one chance and I had to do real damage. He was clutching his face. I lifted the iron up and then brought it down with all my weight on his right knee. There was a cracking crumbling sound and a further scream. He crumpled and slumped off the side of his chair. What else? I thought of the photograph. I felt white hot, glowing, like a poker. His left ankle was exposed. I brought the iron down again. More cracking. Another scream. I moved back but as I did so I felt a hand clutching my trousers. I raised the iron again but as I pulled back the grip fell away.

I moved back out of his reach. He was lying sprawled on the floor, twisted, whimpering. What I could see of his face was a livid blistering red.

“If you move one inch towards me,” I said, “I’ll break every fucking bone in your body. You know I’ll do it. I’ve seen the pictures. I’ve seen what you did to Jenny.”

But still I moved backward, never taking my eyes off him. I glanced around quickly and found the phone. Still with the iron in my hand, the cord trailing on the floorboards, I dialed.

TWENTY-TWO

I put the receiver down and stood there, as far away as it was possible to get from him in that room. He was still slumped on the floor groaning and wheezing. I wondered if he was gathering his strength, if he would raise himself to his feet and come at me. Should I go back to him and hit him again? Should I run to the front door and out? I couldn’t move my feet. There was nothing I could do. Suddenly I started to tremble in every bit of my body. I leaned back against the wall to try and steady myself.

I saw some traces of movement, tentative at first, then more purposeful. He was pulling himself up, groaning with the effort. I quickly saw that there was no prospect at all of his getting up. His legs were clearly useless. All he could do was drag himself, whimpering with the pain, so he was leaning against the bookshelf. He pushed himself up a bit farther and twisted so he could look at me. He was really badly burned on his face, blistered across his cheeks and forehead. One of his eyes was almost closed. Saliva was spilling out of his mouth, running down his chin. He coughed.

“What’ve you done?”

I didn’t speak.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I didn’t do it.”

I took a firm grip on the iron.

“One move, and I’ll smash some other bit of you.”

He shifted slightly and cried out.

“Jesus.” He panted. “It hurts so fucking much.”

“Why did you do it?” I said. “She had children. What had she done?”

“You’re mad,” he said. “I didn’t do it, I swear, Nadia. They told you. I was a hundred miles away when Zoe was killed.”

“I know,” I said.

“What?”

“I know you didn’t kill Zoe. You were going to but you didn’t. You killed Jenny.”

“You’re wrong, I swear it,” he said. “Oh God, what have you done to my face? Why did you do that to me?”

He was crying now.

“You were going to kill me. Like you killed her.”

I was having difficulty in speaking. My breath was coming in uneven gasps, my heart beating hard.

“I swear, Nadia,” he said in little more than a whisper.

“Shut the fuck up. I’ve seen the pictures. In the drawer.”

“What?”

“Of you and Fred, the ones you took down before I arrived.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “I admit I hid the pictures. I got in a panic because it looked bad. But it doesn’t mean I killed anybody.”

“The way you panicked when we were due to meet Louise at the flat?”

“No, that was a real message. Nadia, you’re all confused here…”

I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe I wanted him just to admit to what he’d done and to say something, however inadequate, that would make it comprehensible. Now I realized that he would never give up, and that I would never understand. He would lie and lie and maybe even he would grow to believe all his lies in the end. I stared at him, his peeling face, his writhing body, the one eye gazing up at me.

“I ought to kill you,” I said. “I should finish you off before the police get here.”

“Maybe you should,” he said. “Because I didn’t do it, Nadia, and there’s no evidence against me. And they’ll let me go and they’ll send you to prison. But could you do it? Could you, Nadia? Could you kill me?”

“I’d like to do it, I promise you.”

“Do it then. Come on, darling. Come on.” Spittle ran down his face. He tried to smile.

“I’d like to make you suffer the way you made Zoe and Jenny suffer.”

“I’ll help you,” he said, and with much panting and groaning, he started to crawl toward me across the floor like a big fat horrible slug. His progress was very slow.

“Come any closer and I’ll smash your head,” I said, taking a firm grip on the iron.

“Do it,” Morris said. “You’re going to prison anyway. They’re going to let me go. Even if they don’t, I’ll be out soon. Wouldn’t it be better to get rid of me?”

“Stop it, stop it!” I shouted and started to cry. I felt he was wriggling around in my head as well as on the floorboards. I was about to fling the iron at him when there was a banging at the door and voices shouting my name. I looked around; there were lights outside. I ran across and opened the door. It turned out to be easy. It took no more than a couple of seconds. A blur of figures rushed past me. There were a couple of police officers in uniform and Cameron. Over his shoulder I could see two police cars, and another was arriving. Cameron looked at the scene. He was sweating, his tie flapping over his shoulder.

“What the hell have you done?”

I didn’t speak. I just bent down and placed the iron on the floor.

“Did you call an ambulance?”

I shook my head. He shouted across at one of the officers, who walked out.

“She attacked me,” Morris said. “She’s gone mad.”

Cameron looked from Morris to me and back again in obvious bafflement. “Are you hurt?” he said to Morris.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m so fucking hurt. Mad.”

Cameron walked up to me and put his hand on my shoulder.

“You all right?” he whispered.

I nodded. I kept looking at Morris slumped on the floor and every time I looked at him he was staring back. Staring at me with an eye that never seemed to blink. The officer bent over and was saying something, but he just kept on looking at me.

“Sit down,” Cameron said to me.

I looked around. He had to lead me across the room to one of the chairs by the table. I sat so I didn’t have to see Morris. I thought I would throw up if I had to look at him for one more second.

“Now, Nadia, I have to say this before we do anything more, so listen to me. You don’t have to say anything. But if you do say anything, then in the event that charges are brought, anything you say may be used as evidence. Also, you have a right to a lawyer. If you wish, we can arrange for one to be provided for you. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“No, you have to say out loud that you understand.”

“I understand. I don’t mind talking.”

“So what happened?”

“Look in the drawer. Over there.”

He went over to the open front door and barked out something about a scene-of-crime officer. An ambulance arrived noisily. A man and a woman in green overalls rushed in and bent down over Morris. Cameron stared at me. From his pocket he took thin plastic gloves that were more like the rubbishy ones they give away in petrol stations than the kind that surgeons use. He opened the drawer and looked at the photographs.

“He knew Fred,” I said.

The scene was becoming farcical. Cameron was staring stupefied at the picture. Morris was whimpering in pain as they cut his trousers off him. Then Links arrived.

“What the hell…?” he said, trying to make sense of what happened.

“She attacked Morris with an iron,” Cameron said.

“What the fuck-Why?”

“She said he did the murder.”

“But…”

Cameron handed Links one of the photographs. He stared at it. Then he looked at me.

“Yes, but still…” He turned to Cameron. “Have you cautioned her?”

“Yes. She says she’s willing to talk.”

“Good. What about Burnside?”

“I haven’t managed to talk to him.”

Links leaned down by Morris and showed him the photograph. In response he just shook his head and groaned. Then he came over and sat by me. I was feeling calm now, clear-headed.

“Did Morris attack you?”

“No,” I said. “If Morris had attacked me, I would be dead now. No, not dead. Dying. Being killed.”

“But Nadia,” Links said in a gentle tone. “You do realize that, well, for example, Morris Burnside couldn’t have killed Zoe Haratounian. He wasn’t there.”

“I know. I know who killed Zoe.”

“What? Who?”

“It suddenly came to me. You all got it into your heads that the person who sent the notes must have killed her. But what if somebody else killed her first?”

“Why would anyone else kill her?”

“I was thinking about something that Grace Schilling told me. Something about how the criminal always leaves something of himself at the scene and always takes something away. You’ve heard that?” I looked up at Cameron, who was busying himself with the contents of the drawer. “I saw the forensic report of the crime scene. Do you remember the report on the shirt she was wearing when she was found?”

“Yes, I do, but how on earth do you-”

“Do you remember what it said?”

“It shared the background traces of the flat in common with her other clothes, the carpets, the beds. Just her and her ex-boyfriend.”

“But the shirt shouldn’t have had traces of Fred. She came into the flat carrying it in a plastic bag. She had bought it the day before with her friend, Louise.” I twisted my head to look over at Morris. He was paying attention. “Fred left traces of hair on Zoe’s shirt while he was strangling her.”

I thought I almost caught the tiniest trace of a smile on Morris’s face.

“You didn’t know that, did you?” I said to him. “Your friend killed Zoe before you could.” I looked at Stadler and Links. “Two murderers. See? Two. Didn’t you think about why the murders were so different? There wasn’t any fucking escalation. It was because they were done by different people. Was that why it was so violent, Morris? Did you punish Jenny because you’d missed out on Zoe?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“But there was a compensation,” I said. “You suddenly found yourself with the perfect alibi. It gave you a chance to get at me from close up, to really watch me suffer.”

“But how could Fred have done it?” Links asked. “Miss Haratounian wasn’t even intending to return to her flat.”

“I don’t think he planned it,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been puzzling about, sitting here. I was thinking about that strange thing that was stolen, the crappy hanging from the wall that Fred gave her. Why would anybody take that? I don’t think it was taken. I think Fred took it back. I think he came to collect his stuff. Zoe came back suddenly and he grabbed the cord from her dressing gown and strangled her.

“That’s why the forensics were so difficult. The thing he took away was something that had belonged to him. What he brought to the scene was just more of what was already there. More Fred. Too much Fred. And he had the perfect alibi as well. The police knew he couldn’t have written the notes. And who else would have killed Zoe but the man who said he was going to? Funny, isn’t it, Morris? You and Fred made a great team, if you’d only known it.”

The paramedics had lifted Morris onto a stretcher and were inserting a drip.

“Are you going to look in his pockets?”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I think he was going to attack me.”

Cameron glanced at Links, who nodded. Morris’s nice new trousers were now in halves. They had endless pockets, and Cameron started rummaging in them. I saw something glisten in his hands. He was holding up a wire.

“What’s this?” he said to Morris.

“I was doing some repairs,” he answered.

“What repairs were you doing that needed piano wire tied into a running noose?”

He didn’t reply. He stared at me instead and said in a whisper, “Darling. I’ll be back, darling.”

The paramedics picked up the stretcher and carried it out. Links shouted at one of the uniformed officers.

“Two of you go with him to the hospital. Caution him on the way. Keep him fully secure-no access.”

I watched him go. He looked at me steadily until they turned the corner, with his bright eye, his friendly murderer’s face. He was smiling at me through his mask of blood and blisters.

Then: “What about Fred?” I said.

Links gave a sigh. “We’ll interview him immediately. Or as soon as we can.”

“What about me? Can I go?”

“We’ll give you a lift home.”

“I’ll walk. Alone.”

Links stood firmly in front of me.

“Miss Blake, if you refuse to go in a police car and with police protection, I shall have you restrained.”

“I think,” I said, as coolly as I could manage, “I think I would feel safer on my own.”

“Very well,” he said heavily. I saw fear in his face: He was looking at public disgrace, a career in tatters.

“I was always safer on my own.”

TWENTY-THREE

What did I do next? What does one do when a life has been given back?

I spent the first day and night at my parents’ house, helping my father paint the garden shed and lying facedown on the faded chenille counterpane in my old bedroom, the smell of mothballs and dust in my nose, while my mother clattered anxiously round the kitchen, making milky cups of tea and baking ginger biscuits that I couldn’t eat. Every time she saw me she would gaze at me with her red-rimmed eyes and press my shoulder or put her hand cautiously on my hair. I had told them something of what had happened, but I had left everything out. Everything that mattered.

Then I went back home and I cleaned my flat. My first thought had been that I would move out immediately, pack up my bags and begin again-but what would be the point of that if I couldn’t begin again with me? I didn’t want to. So I threw open the French windows, and I put on an old pair of cotton dungarees that looked as if they had been given to me as a joke-certainly I couldn’t remember buying them. I turned on the radio so it was blaring cheerful, inane music through all the rooms. I went through every drawer. I filled bin bags with torn tights, old envelopes, scraps of hard soap, empty toilet rolls, leaking pens, moldy cheese. I put newspapers in a pile of recycling, bottles in a large box. I folded clothes or hung them in the wardrobe, filled a laundry basket with washing, put bills in piles, poured bleach down the sink and lavatory and anywhere else that looked like it needed it. I defrosted the fridge, scrubbed the kitchen floor. I cleaned the windows. I dusted, for Christ’s sake.

It took two days. For two days I just worked, morning till evening. It was like meditation. I could have thoughts without really thinking, let memories bob around without pursuing them, without tracking them down to their source. I didn’t feel euphoric, and I hardly even felt relieved, but bit by bit I felt I was crossing back over into my life. I picked up Morris’s business card from my desk and remembered his bright eyes watching me as he had been carried away, and put it with the other rubbish in the bin bag. I screwed up the paper covered with my jottings from the case files Cameron had filched for me and threw that away too, though not before copying down Louise’s address. I collected two small buttons from the floor. Cameron’s? I held them for a minute in the palm of my hand before depositing them into a shoe box, which from now on would be where I kept my sewing things.

I screened all my calls-and there were a lot of them, because the first tremors of the story had reached the media. There were even pictures of us-Zoe, Jenny, and me, though I didn’t know where they had managed to get hold of the one of me-in a line across the top of page three of the Participant, as if we had all of us died. Or all lived. Reporters rang, and friends suddenly wanted to get in touch, and Cameron rang several times with a hissing, secret urgency, and people I had met once or twice in my life rang, breathless with discovering that they knew someone who was suddenly and briefly a little bit famous. I didn’t pick up the phone.

Not until early on the morning of the fourth day after, a blowy beautiful day when the sun was streaming in through the open French windows and the first few autumn leaves were scattering themselves under the pear tree, where I had first put my arms round Cameron and kissed him. I was thinking about beginning on my garden next, hacking down the nettles, when the phone rang and the answering machine clicked on.

“Nadia,” said a voice that made me stop in the middle of pouring boiling water over a tea bag. “Nadia, it’s Grace. Grace Schilling.” Pause. “Nadia, if you’re listening to this, can you pick up the phone?” Then: “Please. This is urgent.”

I crossed over to the telephone.

“I’m here.”

“Thanks. Listen, can we meet? There’s something important I need to tell you.”

“Can’t you tell me over the phone?”

“No. I need to see you.”

“Really important?”

“I think so. Can I come to your flat in, say, forty-five minutes?”

I looked round at my gleaming home that smelled of bleach and polish.

“Not here. On the heath?”

“I’ll come over to your side. Ten o’clock, by the pavilion.”

“Fine.”

I was early, but she was already there. It was a warm morning, but she was huddled up in a long coat, as if it were winter. Her hair was pulled back austerely, which made her face look curiously flat, and older and more weary than I had remembered. We shook hands formally and started walking up the hill, where a solitary man was flying a huge red stunt kite, which flapped and jerked in the wind.

“How are you?” she asked, but I just shrugged. I didn’t want to be talking about my mental health with her.

“What is it?”

She stopped and took out a pack of cigarettes; struck a match into the cup of her hand and inhaled deeply. Then she looked at me steadily with her gray eyes.

“I’m sorry, Nadia.”

“Is that the important thing?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well.” I kicked a stone out of our path and watched as it clattered away into the grass. Above us, the red kite swooped and danced. “And what did you want me to say back?”

She frowned but didn’t reply.

“Do you want me to forgive you or something?” I asked curiously. “I mean, it’s not me who’s dead.” She winced. “I can’t just hug you and say there, there.”

She made an impatient gesture with her hand, as if she were swatting a cloud of insects away from the space between us.

“I don’t want that. I’m saying sorry because I’m sorry.”

“Did they send you, then? Is this a group apology?”

She smiled and took a drag of her cigarette. “God, no. Everybody has been forbidden to have contact with witnesses.” Another dry smile. “Pending legal proceedings and internal inquiries. And TV documentaries.”

“Are you in trouble then?”

“Oh yes,” she said in a vague tone. “That’s okay. We should be in trouble, Nadia. What we did was-” She checked herself. “I was about to say unforgivable. It was unprofessional. Stupid. Blind. Wrong.”

She dropped her cigarette on the path and ground it out with the toe of her narrow shoe.

“Maybe I should be taping this for Clive’s solicitor.”

She frowned. “Yes, he’s taking legal action. And Zoe’s aunt. I don’t care, really. I do care about Zoe and Jennifer. And you. I care about what you went through.”

We turned off the path and walked down the hill, toward the pond. Ruffles of wind blew across the surface of the water and showers of leaves fell at our feet. A small child stood with his mother, throwing chunks of bread at the fat, indifferent ducks.

“It wasn’t really your fault,” I said cautiously. “It wasn’t your decision, was it? I mean, not telling us what was going on.”

She looked at me and didn’t respond: She had decided to take the blame full on, not slide away.

“For what it’s worth,” I plowed on, “I think that within the limits of the situation, you weren’t as dishonest as you could have been.”

“Thanks, Nadia. But I don’t think I’m going to put that on my résumé. It’s strange,” she continued. “I am always talking about taking control of one’s life, but it got out of control. One step taken-to keep the press out of Zoe’s death, not to scare the local population, not to make ourselves look incompetent, or worse-which led to the next step, then the next, and before they-we-knew it, we were on this road and couldn’t turn back. And we ended up lying and lying and not looking after the people who looked to us.” She smiled ruefully at me. “That’s not an excuse, by the way.”

“All that fear,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve never really been able to believe in God. Have you?”

She shook her head.

“There are these two women,” I said, “I feel connected to, though I never met them. And then there are these two men, who I did meet, of course. Did you?”

She took a deep breath.

“I met Fred when he was questioned after Zoe, and then I met Morris of course after you had discovered he knew both you and Jennifer Hintlesham.”

“I need your help here, Grace. You know about this. They seemed normal. Could you imagine them, you know, when you met them, could you see that they could be killers? Was there anything about them-I mean, Fred, for instance. Did he have a history of violence?”

“He does now.”

“I mean…”

“I know what you mean. You want me to say that these men are different, don’t you? You want to put a label on them: dangerous. Or: mad.” We stopped by the side of the pond and she lit another cigarette. “That’s what’s going to happen, of course. People like me will question Morris and they’ll discover that he was abused or neglected, that he was hit or pampered, that he saw a video or fell on his head off a climbing frame. And someone will eventually get in touch with the press to say that Fred hit them five years ago, or whatever. And then there will be politicians and various pundits getting hot under the collar and saying why wasn’t it spotted.”

“And?”

“There wasn’t anything to spot. When people commit murder most of them do it to someone they know. That’s what the numbers say. Fred was jilted by Zoe and he was humiliated and furious and then, by bad luck for both of them but especially for Zoe, found himself alone with her. And he killed her. It’s as simple as that. It happens all the time. He’s probably no more murderous than a lot of people, except he happened to commit a murder that went unnoticed because the woman happened to be receiving threatening letters from somebody else.”

“Comforting,” I said dryly.

“I didn’t think you were asking for comfort. I don’t think you have ever asked me for comfort. That’s not your style, is it? Morris, well, Morris is different, of course, and maybe you could call him mad, in the same way you can call anyone who commits senseless crimes mad. Or evil, if you believe in those kinds of terms. But that doesn’t get us anywhere, does it? Because what troubles you is that for all the terror and all the horror and the death, this has no lesson, no label.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly.” We walked on, back to the path we had left, and for a few minutes we didn’t speak.

“Can I ask you a question, Nadia?”

“Sure.”

“It’s been bugging me. How on earth did you get to see all the files?”

“Oh, that. I had sex with Cameron Stadler and then I blackmailed him.”

She looked at me as if I had just slapped her face. Her face looked comical.

“Don’t ask,” I said. “You don’t want to know.”

She started laughing then, an unsteady and not entirely cheerful sound, but I joined in and soon we were holding on to each other’s arms, giggling and chortling like teenagers. Then she suddenly stopped and her expression became grave.

“You can’t go round feeling guilty for the rest of your life,” I said.

“Want to bet?”

“Not really.”

We came to a fork in the path and she stopped. “I go this way,” she said. “Good-bye then, Nadia.”

“Bye.”

She held out her hand and I shook it. Then I started walking back the way we had come, to where the kite still swung in the air.

“Nadia!”

I looked back. “Yes?”

“You saved us,” she called. “Us, yourself, the other women who would have come after. You saved all of us.”

“It was just luck, Grace. I was lucky.”

TWENTY-FOUR

It was too cold for snow. The sky was icy blue and the pavement still sparkled with the frost of the previous night. My breath smoked in the air, my eyes watered, my nose felt red and sore, and my chin stung above the itchy wool of my ratty old scarf. The wind was a knife. I walked quickly, head down.

“Nadia? Nadia!” A young voice gusting across the street. I turned and squinted.

“Josh?”

It was. He was with a group of boys and girls about his age, all of them muffled up in thick jackets and hats and jostling against each other, but he crossed the road to me. “I’ll catch up with you,” he shouted at them, waving them off. He seemed solider than I had remembered him, less pallid and weedy. He stopped a few feet from me and we smiled at each other a bit awkwardly.

“Joshua Hintlesham, I’ve been thinking about you,” I said, aiming for the bright notes.

“How are you?”

“I’m alive.”

“That’s good,” he said, almost as if there were some doubt about the issue. He looked around edgily. “I should have got in touch,” he said. “I felt bad. Coming around with Morris, all that. Everything.”

It seemed more than five months ago since he had sat on my sofa, a pitiable heap of frail bones. I didn’t know what to say to him, because too much lay between us: a great mountain of horror and loss and fear.

“Do you have time for coffee or something?” He took his woolly hat off as he spoke, and I saw he had dyed his hair a bright orange and put a stud in his ear.

“What about your friends?”

“That’s all right.”

We walked together without talking until we came to a small Italian café. Inside it was dim, hot, and smoky, and an espresso machine hissed and spluttered on the counter.

“Bliss.” I sighed, and peeled off my coat and hat and scarf and gloves.

“I’m buying,” he said, trying to be casual, looking pleased with himself and jingling the coins in his pocket.

“Okay, rich boy. I’ll have a cappuccino.”

“Anything to eat?” he asked hopefully.

I didn’t want to disappoint him. “One of those almondy croissants.”

I sat at a table in the corner and looked at him while he ordered. Jenny’s eldest son, leaning over the counter with his orange hair, trying to be a man, trying on his cool and his confidence in front of me. He must have turned fifteen, I calculated. He almost was a man now. In a few years he’d be finished with school.

He set my coffee and croissant down in front of me. He had ordered hot chocolate for himself and he sipped it carefully, a small frothy mustache forming on his upper lip. We smiled at each other again.

“I should have got in touch,” he repeated.

We took gulps of our drinks and looked at each other over the rims of the cups.

“I heard that you fixed Morris pretty good,” he said.

“It was him or me.”

“Was it really with an iron?”

“That’s right.”

“It must have hurt him.”

“Oh yes.”

“I guess I should be pleased about that,” he said. “You know those Yakuza gangs in Japan? When they kill you, they do whatever they do until you’re unconscious. Then they drag you outside and drive a car over and over you, breaking all your bones. There’s a theory that you suffer pain on a very primitive level so you feel it even when you’re in a coma and dying.”

“Nice,” I said, pulling a face.

“I felt for some time that I ought to do something to Morris. I thought of him hanging around with me and all the time him knowing what he’d done to Mum.”

“I think that was part of the point.”

“Then I thought, Fuck it. But maybe when he gets out.”

“He won’t get out until he’s a doddery old man.”

“A doddery old man with an arthritic knee,” Josh said with a grin.

“I hope so. Fred will be out sooner. I was talking to Links about it. The trial won’t be until next year, but for something minor like strangling your ex-girlfriend because she dumped you, he won’t serve more than eight or ten years.”

He put his cup down on the table and ran a thumb over his top lip, rubbing away the chocolate.

“I don’t know what I want to ask you,” he said in frustration. “I think a lot about asking you about it all, but now I don’t know what I want to ask. I know what happened and everything; I know all of that-it isn’t that.” He frowned and stared hopelessly at me with those eyes of his that had always made me think of Jenny, and he looked suddenly much younger, like the Josh I remembered from our ruinous summer.

“You think there’s something I should be able to tell you.”

“Something like that,” he mumbled, and drew a finger through a small heap of sugar on the table. I remembered saying almost the same to Grace, all those months ago on the heath. I took a breath.

“Your mother was murdered by Morris for fun. Then he picked on me, and if I hadn’t been lucky you could have been sitting here with the next woman he chose, or the one after that. There’s no reason. It could have been anyone, only it happened to be Jenny. And I’m really sorry,” I added after a pause.

“ ’S’all right,” he muttered, still making patterns in the sugar, not looking up.

“How’s school?”

“I go to a different one now. It seemed a good idea to change.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s better. I’ve got friends.”

“Good.”

“And I’ve been seeing someone.”

“You mean a girlfriend?”

“No. Someone. To talk about things.”

“Oh, well, that’s good as well.” I looked at him helplessly.

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“What are you doing now?”

“This and that.”

“You mean the same as before?”

“No, I don’t,” I said vigorously. I gestured to the small nylon hold-all tucked under my chair. “Do you know what’s in that bag?”

“What?”

“Among other things, five juggling balls.”

He looked at me as if he didn’t understand.

“Five,” I repeated. “What do you think of that?”

“That’s amazing,” he said, clearly impressed.

“My master plan is to get out of this work altogether, but in the meantime I haven’t exactly been standing still.”

“Show me,” he said.

“Here?”

“Go on, show me.”

“Do you really want me to?”

“I have to see it.”

I looked around. The café was almost empty. I took the balls out of the bag, three in one hand, two in the other. I stood up.

“Are you paying attention?” I said.

“Yes.”

“You have to concentrate.”

“I’m concentrating.”

I began. It went right for about one second and then they went everywhere. One hit Josh, one hit my empty coffee cup.

“That gives you the general idea,” I said, and scrambled under the table for one that had bounced into the corner.

“Is that it?” he said, smiling.

“Well if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.”

“No, it was great,” he said, and he started laughing and laughing. Maybe this was my gift to Josh, and my good-bye: Nadia the jester, the one who didn’t die, throwing colored balls around in a dark little café. A giggle, or maybe it was a sob, rose in my chest. I gathered the balls and put them back in the bag.

“I better get going,” I said.

“Me too.”

We kissed at the door of the café, once on each cheek, and then went out into the blasting cold. As we turned to walk off in our separate directions, he said:

“I still put flowers on her gravestone, you know.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“I don’t forget.”

“Oh Josh,” I said. “You’re allowed to forget sometime. Everyone’s allowed to forget.”

But as I went down to the canal path and walked along it, toward my flat, I thought to myself: I can’t forget. I won’t forget them, the women who died. Zoe and Jenny. Sometimes I know that they are gone. They are not here, and never will be again, no matter how I wait for them, these women I never met. But I still catch myself believing that I will see them when I round the bend in the road, when I climb on board a crowded bus and make my way up the aisle looking for a seat, when I scan the faces in a moving crowd looking for a friend I was supposed to meet, when I open my eyes in the morning after a dream that seemed real, even when it was over.

I know their faces so well, better than the faces of anyone else, better than the face of my mother, my father; better than the face of a lover I once gazed at with passion and hope. I know their faces like my own face in the mirror. I have stared and stared at them, searching for clues, begging them to yield up their meanings, to help me. The tilt of a nose, the lift of a chin, the exact way she smiled, teeth gleaming; the exact way she frowned, with that little furrow between her eyes. Every wrinkle, groove, line, shadow, hollow, blemish, hurt.

I never met them, yet I miss them. I never knew them then, yet I know them now, when it’s too late. I know them in a way no one else ever could. They would have known me too. We might not have liked each other, but we are sisters under the skin, for their fear was my fear, their shame was my shame, their rage was mine, and their panic, and their violation, and their sense that there was nothing they could do, and their knowledge that the horror was coming nearer and nearer. I know what they felt. I felt it too.

Others will gradually forget them, or at least they will let them go. That’s how it should be when someone dies. The people who told them they loved them will say the same words to someone else. That’s fine, that’s right; that’s the only way we can cope with life. We’d go mad if we remembered everything-and hung on to it. So they’ll slide away. All their flaws and their irritating habits and their particular ways will fade, and they’ll become vague, less vivid and less human. Too good to be true: blank, shiny surfaces where other people can stare at their own reflections. Their graves will be visited more and more infrequently; soon only on anniversaries and days of special importance. People will tell stories about how they once knew them, for proximity to tragedy makes us feel somehow important. They will use a reverent and hushed voice to talk of them: Oh yes, wasn’t it terrible, what happened to Zoe, to Jenny? Wasn’t it sad?

But I can’t forget them like that. I have to carry them with me wherever I go now; through the life I have got back again, through the years they didn’t have, all the love and loss and change they never knew. Every day I say to them again: Good-bye.