The Devil's Feather

4

IN ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES I wouldn’t have met Jess Derbyshire. She was so reclusive that only a handful of people in Winterbourne Barton had seen inside her house; and the rest were happy to spread the rumour that the local policeman went in once a month to check she was still alive. He didn’t, of course. He was as scared of her dogs as everyone else, and he took the view that the postman would notice if she wasn’t collecting her mail from the American-style box at her gate. She owned and managed Barton Farm, which lay to the south-west of the village, and her house was even more detached from the community than mine.

I discovered very quickly that Jess was both the most invisible resident of Winterbourne Valley, and the most talked-about. The first thing any newcomer learnt was that her immediate family had been killed in a car crash in 1992. She’d had a younger brother and sister, and two thoroughly nice parents, until a drunk in a Range-Rover ploughed into her father’s ancient Peugeot at seventy miles an hour on the Dorchester bypass. The second, that she was twenty when it happened, making her older than she looked; and the third, that she’d turned her family home into a shrine to the dead.

There’s no question she had an uncongenial personality, something she was happy to foster with her pack of thirty-inch high, hundred-and-eighty-pound mastiffs. It showed itself most obviously in her unfriendly stares and curt way of speaking, but it was the close relationship between her immature looks-“arrested development”-and her morbid interest in her dead family-“refusal to move forward”-that most people felt explained her peculiarity. Her “loner” status made them wary, even though few seemed to know her.

My own first impression was no different-I thought her very strange-and when I opened my eyes I was relieved to find she’d gone. I do remember wondering if she’d set her dogs on me deliberately, and what kind of person would abandon another who was so obviously distressed, but it reawakened too many memories of Iraq and I pushed her from my mind. It meant I wasn’t prepared for her return. When she drove her Land Rover through Barton House gates fifteen minutes later and deliberately blocked my exit, alarm immediately coursed through my system again.

In my rear-view mirror I watched her climb out with a metal toolbox in her hand. She walked to the front of the Mini and examined me through the windscreen, apparently to satisfy herself that I was still alive. Her flat, narrow face was so impassive, and the intrusive stare so unwelcome, that I closed my eyes to blot her out. I could cope with anything as long as I couldn’t see it. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

“I’m Jess Derbyshire,” she said, loud enough for me to hear. “I’ve called Dr. Coleman. He’s with a patient but he’s promised to come straight on when he’s finished.” There was a hint of a Dorset burr in her voice, but it was the deepness of her register that struck me the most. She seemed to want to sound like a man as well as dress like one.

I thought if I didn’t reply she might go away.

“Shutting your eyes won’t help,” she said. “You need to open your window. It’s too hot in there.” I heard something tap against the glass. “I’ve brought a bottle of water for you.”

Desperate for something to drink, I opened my eyes a crack and met her unwelcome stare again. The sun was beating relentlessly down on the roof and my hair was plastered to my scalp with sweat. She waited while I lowered the window four inches, then passed the bottle through before nodding towards the door of the house. She twisted her hand as if to indicate that she was going to unlock it, then moved away to kneel on the doorstep. I watched her take a can of WD-40 from her toolbox and spray a fine mist into the lock before sitting back on her heels.

In a funny sort of way she reminded me of Adelina, small and neat and competent, but without the Italian’s expressiveness. Jess’s movements were economical and spare, as if the method of releasing a key was something she’d practised for years. And perhaps she had.

“It always sticks,” she said, stooping to talk through the window. “Lily never used it…she bolted the door inside and came in and out through the scullery. The oil takes about ten minutes to work. Were you given any other keys? There should be a mortise and a Yale for the back door.”

I glanced at an envelope on the passenger seat.

She followed my gaze. “May I have them?” she asked, holding out her hand.

I shook my head.

“Try counting birds,” she said abruptly. “It always worked for me. By the time I got to twenty, I’d usually forgotten why I’d started.” Her dark eyes searched my face for a moment before, with a shrug, she went back to the doorstep and squatted on her haunches in front of it. After a while she took a pair of pliers from her toolbox and used them to tease the key back and forth. When she finally managed to turn it, she twisted the handle and disappeared inside. A few seconds later, a light came on in the hall. After that, she moved along the ground floor, opening windows to let in the fresh air.

I wanted to get out and shout at her. Stop interfering. Who’s going to close the place up again after I’ve left? But I’d become so comfortable with doing nothing that that’s what I continued to do. I did watch the birds, however. I couldn’t avoid it. The garden was alive with them. Flocks of house-sparrows, endangered in the cities, chattered and darted about the trees, while swallows and house-martins flashed in and out of nests beneath the eaves.

When Jess reappeared, she hunkered down beside my door to put herself on the same level as me. “The Aga needs lighting. Do you want me to show you how to do it?”

I might have gone on ignoring her if I’d cared less about seeming rude or looking foolish, so perhaps counting birds did work. I ran my tongue around my mouth to produce some saliva. “No, thank you.”

She tipped her chin towards the envelope. “Are there any instructions in there?”

“I don’t know.”

“If Madeleine wrote them, you won’t be able to light the Aga yourself. She doesn’t even know how to spark the ignition, let alone prime the burner.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask who Madeleine was, or even Lily, the name she’d mentioned earlier, but there was no point. “I’m not staying,” I told her.

She didn’t seem surprised. “You’ll need your car keys then.”

I nodded.

She fished them out of her pocket and held them up. “I took them from your bag when I was looking for an inhaler. It was close to where you dropped your mobile.”

“I’m not asthmatic.”

“I guessed.” She curled her fingers round the keys. “I’m going to hang on to them to stop you driving. You can’t leave yet…not behind a wheel, anyway. If you want them back, you’ll have to come into the house and get them.”

Her assumption that I would tamely do as she said annoyed me. I still thought of her as younger than she was, but there was a rigidity about her slight frame that suggested a strength of purpose I didn’t have. “Are you a policeman?”

“No. Just playing safe. You’ll damage yourself as well as other people if I let you go now.” She searched my face again. “Was it the dogs?”

I recalled how long it had taken me to drive through the entrance. “No.”

She gave a satisfied nod before tucking the keys back into her pocket. “The doctor who’s coming-Peter Coleman-knows nothing about panic attacks,” she said bluntly. “He’ll probably tell you to take tranquillizers and write out a shopping list of anti-depressants to lift your mood. I only phoned him to cover my arse in case you tried to sue. You’d do better to put your faith in paper bags and break the cycle.”

A small laugh floated round my head. “Are you a psychiatrist?”

“No, but I had a few panic attacks when I was twenty.”

“What were you afraid of?”

She thought for a moment. “Not being able to cope, I suppose. I was left with a farm to run, and I didn’t know how to do it. What are you afraid of?”

Suffocation…drowning…dying…

“Not being able to cope,” I echoed flatly.

It was a truth of sorts but she didn’t believe it. Either my tone was wrong or my face was telling her something else. I wondered if she was offended that I hadn’t confided in her, because she pushed herself to her feet and disappeared back into the house again. Some while afterwards, the doctor arrived.

He drew up alongside Jess’s Land Rover and I watched him ease himself out of the driver’s door. He was a tall, dark-haired man, dressed in a linen jacket and cavalry twills, and I could see a golf bag propped on the front seat of his BMW. He stooped to check his tie in the driver’s window before walking past me and into Barton House. I heard him call, “Where the hell are you, Jess? What’s this all about?” before his voice was swallowed by the walls.

If anything was guaranteed to set me panicking again it was the thought of all the fuss that was going to follow. Ambulances…psychiatrists…hospitals…the press. I could predict the tabloid headlines: “Distressed Connie Has Breakdown.” It was the stimulus I needed to get out of the car because I knew I couldn’t face the shame of disclosure again. I should have been as brave as Adelina.

Did you try to resist? No.

Did you ask the men who they were? No.

Did you ask them why they were doing it? No.

Did you talk to them at all? No.

Can you tell us anything, Ms. Burns? No.

I eased my fingers out of a fist to reach for the door handle, and found I’d been gripping the paper bag so hard that it had begun to disintegrate in the sweat of my palm. It’s the little things that frighten. I had a sudden, terrible fear that this was my last bag.

It wasn’t. My stash was still in the pocket to my right, a heap of folded brown paper that represented a lifeline. It’s a trick I discovered on the Internet. If you inhale your own carbon dioxide, the symptoms of panic begin to lessen. The brain understands that the body isn’t going to die of asphyxiation, and the vicious cycle of terror is temporarily broken. As I learnt later, the means of managing her attacks had been Jess’s key to stopping them, but, for me, paper bags were merely a last resort before I died of suffocation.

I wiped my hands fiercely against each other to rid myself of the shreds. It was Lady Macbeth stuff. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say! Hell is murky!” But how did Shakespeare know that troubled women need to clean themselves obsessively? Is it something we’ve done for centuries to purge ourselves of filth?

I remembered reading in the web description of Barton House that there was a fishpond in the garden. It wasn’t visible from my car, so logic said it was round the back. It doesn’t matter what drove me there to wash my hands, but I’ve often wondered since if the reason I became interested in Lily Wright’s story was because I knelt to wash my hands where Jess Derbyshire had found her dying.

5

FROM WHAT I learnt later, I don’t believe Lily and I would have been friends. She had old-fashioned views about a woman’s place, and would certainly have frowned on an unmarried war correspondent who put job before family. Her position in life was to play “grande dame” to Winterbourne Barton because Barton House was the oldest and largest in the valley and her family had lived in it for three generations. While her husband was alive, and before the demography of the village changed with an influx of outsiders, she took an active part in community life, but after his death she became increasingly detached from it.

It was a slow process that went largely unnoticed, and most people assumed that her regular mentioning of close connections with Dorset’s aristocracy meant she preferred her old associates to Winterbourne Barton’s newcomers. Her daughter, Madeleine, who visited irregularly from London, reinforced this view by talking about her mother’s social standing; and, since Lily glossed over her deceased husband’s squandering of her fortune on the stock market and made a pretence of being wealthier than she was, it was generally accepted that her friends were outside the community.

She survived on a state pension and some small dividends that she’d managed to keep from her husband, Robert, but poverty was always lurking round the corner. It meant that Barton House was in a terrible state of repair-something I discovered as soon as I moved in-with bowed ceilings and damp walls, but as few visitors were allowed beyond the hall and drawing-room this wasn’t generally known. Stains on carpets and walls were hidden beneath rugs and pictures, and wisteria was coaxed across the peeling paintwork on the windowsills outside. She dressed elegantly in tweed skirts and jackets, with her white hair twisted into a loose chignon at the back of her neck; and she remained a handsome woman until Alzheimer’s stopped her caring.

Her garden was her passion and, though it was running wild by the time I arrived, the care she’d lavished on it was still obvious. The house remained much as it had been in her grandfather’s time. There was no central heating and any warmth came from the Aga in the kitchen or had to be provided by log fires. Upstairs, the damp made the bedrooms cold, even in summer, and there was never enough hot water to fill the big, old-fashioned bath. Showers were non-existent. There was an antiquated twin-tub washing-machine, a small fridge-freezer, a cheap microwave and a television in the back room where Lily spent most of her time. During the winters she wrapped herself in a great coat and blankets, which she discarded if anyone came to the front door in order to pretend she’d been sitting in front of an unlit fire in the draughty drawing-room.

Like much of Dorset, Winterbourne Barton had changed radically over the previous twenty years with house prices soaring and local people selling up in order to realize their most valuable asset. Two or three of the properties became second homes and remained empty for large parts of the year, but most of the newcomers were city retirees on good pension schemes who bought into Winterbourne Barton for its picture-postcard quality and proximity to the sea.

The village began life in the eighteenth century when a previous owner of Barton House used some unproductive land to erect three cottages for his workers. Built in Purbeck stone with thatched roofs and casement windows, these picturesque houses set the pattern for the hundred or so that followed until West Dorset council designated Winterbourne Barton a conservation area and further development was banned. It was this restriction on new building, as much as the roses and honeysuckle climbing up the pretty stone façades, that attracted pensioners. It seemed there was a cachet to exclusivity, particularly when a village was among the most photographed (and envied) in the county.

The explanation for Lily’s continued isolation was her own refusal to socialize. She invited anyone in who called, but the reception was as cool as her drawing-room, and the conversation was invariably about her “chums”-the great and good of the West Country-and never about the newcomers in front of her. According to Jess, she was too proud to admit she’d fallen on hard times, which would have become obvious if she’d developed close friendships with her neighbours, but I think it more likely she shared Jess’s indifference to people.

Her only regular visitor was Jess, whose grandmother had been a maid at Barton House during and after the war years. This servant/mistress relationship appeared to have been handed down through the Derbyshire family, first to Jess’s father, and on his death to Jess herself. Although neither was paid for what they did, it seemed they were at Lily’s beck and call whenever anything went wrong, and even supplied her with free food from the farm to eke out her pension.

It was a state of affairs that Lily’s daughter, Madeleine, apparently took for granted. Busy in London with a husband and an eleven-year-old son, she relied on Jess to perform a service that she couldn’t do herself. Yet she made no secret of her dislike of Jess; nor did Jess hide hers in return. The reasons for the rift were unknown, but Winterbourne Barton’s sympathies were definitely with Lily’s daughter. Madeleine was an attractive forty-year-old who, unlike her mother and Jess, had an open, friendly personality and was popular in the village. There was also a general suspicion that Jess’s motives in making herself indispensable to a wealthy woman were questionable.

Lily was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in June of 2003. She was seventy years old, which made her comparatively young for the disease, but it was still in its early stages and, barring brief bouts of forgetfulness, there was no reason why she shouldn’t remain independent for some time to come. Confusion led her to stray during the autumn, and several of her neighbours found her wandering in Winterbourne Barton. As no one had been told she had Alzheimer’s, and she spoke quite sensibly when they pointed her in the direction of where she lived, they assumed it was mild eccentricity-only bad when the wind was north-northwest.

Her condition deteriorated markedly over Christmas and the New Year. On four occasions in January she let herself in through unlocked back doors while householders were watching television in the evening, and tiptoed upstairs. She used their towels and toothbrushes to wash her face and hands and clean her teeth at their basins, then climbed, fully clothed, between their sheets and fell asleep. She reacted aggressively when she was discovered, but was quickly calmed by a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Still claiming to be unaware that Lily was seriously ill-despite her dishevelled appearance and bizarre behaviour-the four householders drove her home each time and took it no further. They described her as rude and unpleasant, and said she insisted on being returned immediately to Barton House, claiming the only help she wanted was Jess Derbyshire’s or Dr. Peter Coleman’s. She dismissed her rescuers as soon she reached her back door.

The incidents were discussed in the village, but the consensus appeared to be that it was better not to interfere. If they didn’t get the rough edge of Lily’s tongue, they’d certainly get the rough edge of Jess Derbyshire’s. Had Peter Coleman been around, they’d have raised the matter with him, but he was on holiday and wasn’t expected back till the end of January. A message was left on Madeleine’s answerphone, but she, too, was away, and no one felt confident about suggesting to Peter Coleman’s locum that Mrs. Wright was behaving oddly.

Afterwards, the finger of blame was pointed firmly at Jess. How could Winterbourne Barton know that she hadn’t been near Lily since November? She’d fawned over the woman for years, knew better than anyone that Lily’s mental condition was fragile, then abandoned her without a word when the consequences of Alzheimer’s became too demanding. Why hadn’t she told anyone?

Yet it was Jess who saved Lily’s life. At eleven o’clock at night on the third Friday in January, she found her barely alive and dressed only in a nightdress beside the Barton House fishpond. Not strong enough to carry Lily to the back door, and with no mobile signal to call for help, she reversed her Land Rover across the lawn, hoisted Lily into the back and drove her back to Barton Farm, where she phoned for a doctor.

There were no plaudits, only more suspicion. What was Jess doing in Lily’s garden at that time of night? Why didn’t she use the landline in the house? Why had she driven Lily to Barton Farm instead of the hospital? Why call in social services so quickly? Why accuse everyone else of neglect when it was she who’d neglected Lily the most shamefully? Conspiracy theories abounded, particularly when it became clear that Lily had secretly reassigned enduring power of attorney from her daughter to her solicitor. Jess was assumed to have been behind the decision.

In Madeleine’s absence, Lily was sectioned for her own safety and placed in care over the weekend while efforts were made to contact her solicitor. Madeleine rushed down the following week on her return from holiday, only to discover that her mother’s fate was out of her hands. Lily’s solicitor had wasted no time in moving her to an expensive nursing-home, nor of announcing his intention to sell Barton House and the family heirlooms to cover the fees.

Depending on whom you believed, Madeleine was either a cold-hearted bitch who wanted her mother dead in order to inherit the house before it was sacrificed to Lily’s care, or she was so uninformed about her mother’s condition and precarious financial position that Lily’s catastrophic decline and subsequent revelations of poverty came as a terrible shock. Being cynical, I found such ignorance hard to accept, although Winterbourne Barton pointed to the weekly allowance that Lily had been paying her daughter since she turned eighteen. Why go on with it if she hadn’t wanted Madeleine to believe she was better off than she was?

In Lily’s case, poverty was relative to the sale of Barton House. While it remained in her estate, her income was insufficient to meet her needs. Sold, it would realize upwards of £1.5 million. Not unreasonably, Madeleine resisted the sale. Her mother could die tomorrow or live for another twenty years, but to sell the family home on a gamble of twenty years was precipitate. A battle for control ensued between Madeleine and Lily’s solicitor. The solicitor offered a compromise. If the house was let, and all the income from the remaining stocks and shares was diverted to Lily’s care, then he would postpone the sale.

Which was where I came in as Barton House’s first tenant. I knew nothing of its recent history as I stooped to wash my hands, and if I had I wouldn’t have stayed. It was a place of anguish…

Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16-19/05/04”

…I remember a woman in Freetown who roamed the street outside my compound and shouted at herself. I thought she was deaf as well as deranged until I was told that she’d hidden under her house when a band of rebels came to her village. The dozen fighters massacred everyone, including the woman’s husband and children, and only left when the smell of the rotting bodies became unbearable. The mother’s response was to berate herself publicly for being alive.

…I often think of her. The length of time she lay under her house-motionless, terrified, silent-was about as long as I spent in the Baghdad cellar. Did she talk to herself to stay sane? And, if so, what about? Did she argue the merits of saving her own skin against leaving her children to perish? Is that when her loop of madness began?

…There’s a scream inside my head that won’t go away. Perhaps it’s in everyone’s head. Perhaps it’s what made the woman in Freetown shout. Why does no one care about me?

6

THE HALL WAS dark and cool after the brilliant sunshine outside. Doors on either side opened into rooms that didn’t appear to lead anywhere, and a branching staircase rose in front of me. It was only when I heard a murmur of voices coming from somewhere to my right that I noticed a green baize door at the back. It was operated by a self-closing hinge and when I eased it open six inches, I could make out words.

“I still don’t understand why I had to park beside your filthy old jalopy,” said the man’s voice. “Don’t you think it’s a little over the top to steal her keys and block her exit?” He spoke in a light, bantering tone as if teasing this woman-child came naturally to him.

Jess, by contrast, sounded irritated, as if his patronizing approach got on her nerves. “She might have had a spare set in the car.”

“In which case she’d have left while you were phoning me from the farm,” he pointed out reasonably.

“Then it’s a pity I can’t see into the future,” she snapped. “If I could, I wouldn’t have bothered you at all. I was afraid she’d invoke the dangerous dogs’ act if I didn’t make a pretence of caring.”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know…she has keys to the house so I assume she’s a tenant. I thought it was the dogs that frightened her, which is why I drove them home.” She gave a brief account of what had happened.

“Did you consider that she might be to allergic to fur?”

“Of course, but I asked her if it was anything to do with the dogs, and she said no.”

“OK.” He must have been sitting down because I heard the sound of chair legs scraping across the floor as he prepared to stand up. “I’ll go and talk to her.”

“No!” said Jess sharply. “She needs to come in of her own accord.”

Peter Coleman sounded amused. “What’s the point of my being here if you’ve already decided on the treatment?”

“I’ve already told you. I didn’t want to be sued.”

“Well, I can’t sit around all afternoon,” he said with a yawn. “I’m on the golf course in half an hour.”

“There are other sorts of treatment besides pills, you know. You wouldn’t think twice about cancelling your golf if one of your old ladies wanted a chat. It might tarnish your halo.”

Surprisingly, Peter laughed. “My God! Do you ever give up? It’s a shame no one’s invented a cure for grudge-bearing…I’d have put you on a drip and pumped you full of it twelve years ago. Just for the record-again-you hadn’t slept in five days and your heart was going like a hammer.” He paused as if waiting for a response. “You know the sedatives worked, Jess. They gave you some respite, which was what your body needed.”

“They turned me into a zombie.”

“For all of a week, while your grandmother shouldered the burden. Don’t you think I’d have given you a paper bag myself if that was all you needed?”

Jess didn’t answer.

“So what’s your prescription for the woman out there?”

“Slowlee, slowlee, catchee monkee.”

“What about my golf? I do have a life outside medicine, you know.”

But Jess wasn’t interested, and a silence fell between them. I suppose I should have announced myself but it was a situation that was doomed to embarrassment whatever I did. Half of me hoped they’d up stumps and leave if I delayed long enough; the other half recognized that the longer the delay the more difficult the explanations. What was I going to say, anyway? That I was leaving? That I wasn’t leaving? And what name was I going to use in front of the doctor? If he applied for Marianne Curran’s medical records, they would show me as sixty-three.

I think it was standing in Lily’s hall during that long hiatus that persuaded me to stay. It was impossible to ignore the tattiness-in one place three feet of wallpaper near the ceiling had come away from the Blu-Tack blobs that had been holding it in place-but in an odd sort of way it appealed to me. Apart from my stint in Iraq I’d spent the last two years in a minimalist flat in a high-rise block in Singapore, where space was limited, cream was the predominant colour and none of the furniture reached above my knees. It was hideously impractical-red wine was a nightmare-and hideously uncomfortable-I couldn’t move without barking my shins-but everyone who saw it had commented on the designer’s flair.

This was the opposite. Spacious, lofty and red-wine-friendly. The faded wallpaper in blues and greens, of Japanese pagodas, feathery willow fronds and exotic pheasant-style birds, was a good fifty years old, while the furniture, big and lumbering, was utilitarian Victorian. There was a battered chest of drawers under one branch of the stairs, a leather grandfather chair, sprouting horsehair from its seat, under the other, and an ugly oak table in the middle carrying a plastic pot plant. Perhaps the threadbare Axminster rug underneath it added a sense of recognition, because it reminded me of the one we’d had in Zimbabwe. My grandfather had imported it with great ceremony and then refused to allow anyone to walk on it.

The doctor’s voice broke the silence. “Does it never occur to you that you might be wrong?”

“About what?”

“At the moment, that woman out there. You’re assuming she can pull herself together enough to come inside…but supposing she can’t?” He paused to let her answer, but went on when she didn’t. “Perhaps her fears are real, perhaps she’s frightened of something tangible? How much do you know about her?”

“Nothing, except that she talks with a South African accent and knows the paper bag trick.”

“Ah!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It explains why you think she’s going to come in. Paper bags are to you what leeches were to sixteenth-century quacks…the cure to everything.”

“They’re a damn sight less harmful than Valium.”

Peter gave a snort of derision. “It wasn’t paper bags that cured you, Jess, it was getting to grips with running the farm. You conquered a steep learning curve through sheer bloody guts and an above-average intelligence. Show me the paper bag that taught you how to shove your hand up a cow’s backside to help deliver a calf.” He paused.

“What would you know about it?” I heard a door crash open angrily. “I’m going out to see if she’s still in her car.”

“Good idea.” There was another long silence.

I looked towards the front door, expecting Jess to come in that way, but I heard her voice in the kitchen again. “She’s not there. She must be in the house.”

“So what happens now?”

For the first time she sounded unsure of herself. “Perhaps we should make a noise so she knows where we are. If we go to meet her she might take fright.”

“All right,” he teased. “What do you want me to do? Sing? Tap dance? Bang some saucepans together?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

His tone softened as if he was smiling at her. “If she’s made it to the front door, I think you can safely welcome her in. I’ll put the kettle on while you’re doing it. Let’s pray she’s brought some tea bags with her. If Madeleine left any of Lily’s behind they’ll have grown mould by now. Go on, do your stuff. You never know, she might surprise you.”

It was only afterwards, when I found a mirror in the bathroom, that I realized how dreadful I looked. My T-shirt and long flimsy skirt did me no favours at all, clinging as they did to every angular bone and showing how skinny I was. My eyes had dark rings round them, my hair looked as if it had been doused in Brylcreem and my face was covered in blotches. I’d have taken myself for a depressed mental case, so it wasn’t surprising that Jess and Peter both showed concern when they saw me.

I must have looked angry, too, because Jess’s first instinct was to apologize when she came through the baize door and found me beside the table in the hall. “I’m sorry,” she said after a small hesitation. “I just wanted to let you know that we’re in the kitchen.”

“Right.”

She nodded to the mobile, which I’d retrieved from the Mini’s bonnet and still held in my hand. “If you’re looking for a signal there isn’t one, I’m afraid. It’s the same in my house. I can get one in the attic but that’s about it. We’re too low down the valley.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “The landline works if that’s any help. I’ve checked it. There’s a cordless phone beside the fridge.”

“Right.”

My one-word answers seemed to disconcert her and she stared at the floor. Not knowing her, I assumed she expected gratitude for her intervention, and it was only later that I discovered how much she relied on other people to make conversation. Peter blamed her introverted nature, but I always felt there was a level of arrogance in it as well. She was above the common courtesy of small talk, and it was left to others to struggle with her silences.

We were rescued by Peter, who appeared out of the corridor behind her and advanced on me with a smile on his face. “Hi, there,” he said, reaching for my hand. “I’m Peter Coleman. Welcome to Winterbourne Barton. I gather Jess’s dogs gave you a bit of a fright.”

I tried to step back but his fingers had already swallowed mine. “Marianne Curran,” I said, eyes widening as my skin crawled under his.

He released me immediately and stood aside to gesture me towards the corridor. “I can’t get it into Jess’s head that the average person doesn’t appreciate being slobbered over by those ugly great brutes. Their bark’s a lot worse than their bite, of course-rather like their mistress.” His eyes lit with ironic humour as he ignored Jess’s glare and shepherded me towards the kitchen. “How far have you driven? If you’ve come from London, you must be exhausted…”

He sat me at the table and kept up an innocuous monologue until I relaxed enough to answer, although I was guarded in what I said, giving half truths rather than outright lies. I told him I’d been born and brought up on a farm in Zimbabwe, that I’d fled with my parents to London when our neighbour was murdered in a racist attack and that I’d rented Barton House for six months to write a book. I expected to be quizzed on details but Peter appeared entirely indifferent to what type of book I was planning or whether I’d written one before. Nor did he visit the reasons for my panic attack.

Jess took no part in the conversation but stood by the door to the scullery, chewing at her bottom lip. She wouldn’t look at either of us and I did wonder if she had a soft spot for Peter and was angry that he was giving his attention to me. It made for an uncomfortable atmosphere and I wished the pair of them would go. I’d like to have told Jess she had nothing to worry about-a tactile doctor with perceptive eyes was of no interest to me at all-but I didn’t, of course.

Instead, I searched for a form of dismissal that wouldn’t sound too rude when Peter said in a warning tone: “Don’t even think about leaving, Jess. You’re the only person here who knows how to light the Aga.”

Her hand was on the doorknob. “I thought it’d be better if I came back later.”

He was watching me as he spoke. “I’m the one who has to go,” he said, rising to his feet. “I have a surgery at four-thirty and I haven’t had anything to eat yet.” He took out his wallet and removed a card. “I’m part of a rural practice that covers a wide area,” he told me, placing the card on the table. “There are three practitioners and our main clinic’s about eight miles away. Jess can give you directions. But you’ll have to take out a temporary registration to use it”-he held my gaze for a moment-“and that means you’ll need an NHS number or some proof of identity.”

I ran my tongue nervously across my lips.

“The alternative is to call me on my private line”-he tapped the card-“this one. I live five minutes away at the western end of the village. If I’m at home, I’ll come out…if not the call will be diverted to the clinic. Just give your name and ask for me personally, and the receptionist will put you straight through.”

Why was he making up excuses to go? It was only twenty minutes since he’d talked about playing golf. What had he guessed about me? What was he planning to do?

He knew I wasn’t Marianne Curran, I thought, but did he know I was Connie Burns? My bureau chief, Dan Fry, had told me he’d released a photograph to the international press, but he’d promised it was an old one, taken when I first joined Reuters. Shorter hair, rounder face, and ten years younger. I folded the card into my palm. “Thank you.”

Peter nodded. “I’m leaving you in good hands. Jess’s only weakness is that she assumes everyone is as capable as she is.” He turned towards her so that I couldn’t see his expression or his hands, and I wondered what he was signalling. “Take it gently, eh? You know where to find me if you need me.”

I LEARNT LATER that it was my mention of Zimbabwe that had jogged Peter’s memory. The Times had run a piece the day after my abduction which gave details of my childhood in Africa and my parents’ enforced decision to quit the farm. He felt it was too much of a coincidence that an author with the same background, and roughly corresponding to Connie Burns’s description, should turn up in Winterbourne Barton showing signs of acute anxiety. He confirmed it by searching archive coverage on the Internet when he got home, where he learnt that my mother’s name was Marianne.

Jess had no such recognition. All she could see was a similarity in looks between me and Madeleine. Tall, blue-eyed, blonde and pushing forty. Even my name-Marianne-was similar. When she felt more comfortable with me, she said my only saving grace was that I didn’t appear to have Madeleine’s vanity about my appearance. Even in extremis, Madeleine would have been at the face powder long before she reached the boiled lobster stage. She would certainly never have allowed Peter to see her looking less than perfect.

“She was all over him like a rash when he first came to Winterbourne Barton. My mother said it was embarrassing. Madeleine was twenty-five and desperate to get married, and she wouldn’t leave Peter alone.”

“How old was he?”

“Twenty-eight. It was fifteen years ago.”

“What happened?”

“He conjured a fiancée out of a hat.” She smiled slightly. “Madeleine threw a few tantrums, but it was Lily who was the most upset. She adored Peter, said he reminded her of the family doctor when she was a child.”

“In what way?”

“Breeding. She said doctors were a better class in those days. I told her it was a pretty stupid criterion-all I’m interested in is whether Peter knows what he’s doing-but Lily trusted him because he’s a ‘gent.’ ”

It was part of Peter’s charm, I thought, secretly sympathizing with Lily. “He gives a good impression of knowing what he’s doing,” I said cautiously, waiting to have my head bitten off. Jess’s ambivalence about Peter meant I had no idea what she really thought of him. Any more than I knew what he thought of her. She’d hinted several times that she didn’t trust him over Lily’s Alzheimer’s, suspecting Madeleine’s hand behind his willingness to leave Lily to cope alone.

“He bloody well ought to know what he’s doing,” she said sarcastically. “He’s a qualified doctor.”

“Why are you so hard on him?”

She shrugged.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing…apart from fancying himself something chronic.”

I smiled. “He is quite attractive, Jess.”

“If you say so.”

“Don’t you like him?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted, “but Winterbourne Barton’s stuffed with women who find him irresistible. They’re all in their seventies and their favourite pastime is massaging his ego. You’ll be at the back of a very long queue if you want to join in.”

“Is he married?”

“Was.”

“Kids?”

“Two…a boy and girl…they live with their mother in Dorchester.”

“What’s she like?”

Jess had a way of looking at me that was unnerving, a little like having a scalpel slicing into my brain. “Weepy, clingy and wet,” she said, as if that were also her description of me. “He wouldn’t have strayed if she’d beaten him up a bit more, or found herself a job. She’s the fiancée he produced to get rid of Madeleine…and she took him to the cleaners when she discovered he was rogering a couple of nurses behind her back.”

“You mean two in a bed?” I asked in surprise.

It was the first time I saw Jess laugh. “God! That would have been funny! He’s a gent, for Christ’s sake. He took them one at a time and sent them flowers if he couldn’t make it…and now all three of them feel abused. I feel marginally sorry for the wife-except she brought it on herself-but the nurses haven’t got a leg to stand on. They knew they were sharing him with one woman so why make waves about another?”

I thought rather guiltily of the married men I’d bedded. Particularly Dan. What kind of relationship was that? “It’s easier to compete with a wife. You know what you’re dealing with. Another lover suggests you’re as boring as the woman you’re trying to depose.”

IT WAS A GOOD FEW MINUTES after we heard Peter’s car drive away before either Jess or I spoke. I couldn’t think of anything to say, other than “Go,” but she was staring at the floor as if looking for inspiration in the quarry tiles. When she finally opened her mouth, it was to express disapproval of Peter. “I don’t know why he did that. If you phone his private line you’ll have to pay for treatment. I’ll give you directions to the clinic so that you can get it for free.”

“Perhaps I’m not entitled.”

She frowned. “I thought you said you and your parents had been given asylum.”

I reached for my keys from the other side of the table so that I didn’t have to look at her. “Ja, well, I still hold a Zimbabwean passport so I don’t know what my status is. I think Dr. Coleman was just trying to be helpful.” Over the years I’ve developed a mid-Atlantic accent that doesn’t specify where I come from, but under stress my South African intonation takes over. I heard the “Zim” of “Zimbabwean” come out as “Zeem,” the “think” as “thunk,” and the “C” of Coleman as a hard “G.”

Jess picked up on it immediately. “Is it me that’s worrying you? Do you want me to go?”

“I’m sure I can manage on my own.”

She shrugged. “Are you planning on staying?”

I nodded.

“Then you’d better let me light the Aga first because you won’t be able to cook without it.” She jerked her chin towards the door to the corridor. “You might as well have a wander while I’m doing it…see if there’s anything else you need help with. It’ll be your last chance. I’m even less keen to be here than you are to have me.”

Looking back, it’s odd that neither of us took these remarks personally. They were simple statements of fact: we preferred our own company. It hadn’t always been so for me but for Jess it was natural. “I get it from my father. He could go days sometimes without speaking a word. He used to say we were born into the wrong century. If we’d been around before the industrial revolution our skills would have counted for something and our reticence would have been taken for wisdom.”

Her mother had tried to teach her to be more forthcoming. “While she was alive, she could always get me to smile-my brother and sister, too-but I reverted to type after they died…or forgot how to do it. I don’t know which. It’s a learnt skill. The more you do it, the easier it comes.”

“I thought smiling was an automatic response.”

“It can’t be,” said Jess bluntly, “otherwise Madeleine wouldn’t be able to do it. Her smile’s about as genuine as a crocodile’s…and she shows more teeth.”

ALL THIS TOOK TIME to make sense. That day, I was just an explorer. I remember standing in front of a poster-size photograph on the wall at the end of the upstairs landing with “Madeleine” printed underneath it. The name registered because Jess had asked me if she and I were related, but still I didn’t know who she was. It was a black-and-white shot of a young woman leaning into the wind with a turbulent sea behind her, and, but for the name, I’d have assumed it was an Athena print. It was striking, both for the girl’s looks and the way the photograph was lit.

Madeleine was stunning. She was dressed in a long coat and trousers with a black cloche hat pulled over her head. Her face was turned towards the camera and the definition of every feature was extraordinary. Her perfect teeth showed in the sort of triangular smile that American pageant queens practise for hours, but to me it looked genuine, reaching to eyes that danced with mischief. I came to understand why Jess didn’t like her-there was no contest between Madeleine’s Venus and Jess’s Mars-but it was a mystery why Peter Coleman had turned her down.

I had no idea at that stage that Madeleine had been responsible for preparing Barton House for letting, but I do remember thinking that whoever owned the place had a very low opinion of tenants. It could have been so imposing-commanding ten times what I was paying-but instead it was hideously tacky. Every room showed evidence of cheaper, smaller furniture taking the place of something grander. Mean, narrow wardrobes had the imprint of a larger brother on the wall behind them, and indentations in the carpets showed where great beds and heavy dressing-tables had stood before their flimsier replacements had been imported.

To anyone with an ounce of creativity, the house screamed for a makeover. Given freedom, I’d have taken it back to its eighteenth-century origins, stripping the walls of their twentieth-century coverings and removing the fussy curtains to show, and use, the panelled shutters. Simplicity would have suited it, where frills, furbelows and vulgar furniture made it look like an ageing tart with thick make-up covering the blemishes. I discovered later that it was as it was because Madeleine refused to allow Lily’s solicitor to squander her inheritance on improvements, but it did set me wondering about the owner. It seemed so obvious to me that any money spent now would pay for itself again and again through higher rent.

I was most puzzled by the sketches and oil paintings that hung in every room. They were a mish-mash of styles-abstracts, life drawings, eccentric representations of buildings with roots anchoring them to the ground and foliage growing from their windows-but they were all signed by the same artist, Nathaniel Harrison. Some were originals and some-the sketches-were prints, but I couldn’t understand why anyone would collect so much of a single artist’s work simply to hang it in a rented house.

When I asked Jess about it, her mouth twisted into a cynical smile. “I expect they’re only there to hide the damp.”

“But who’s Nathaniel Harrison? How come Lily bought so much of his work?”

“She didn’t. Madeleine must have imported them after she stripped the house of her mother’s paintings. It would have been cheaper than having the house redecorated.”

“How did Madeleine get them?”

“The way she gets everything,” she said caustically. “Sex.”

Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16-19/05/04”

…I can’t separate specific events anymore. I’m not sure if I’ve shut my memory down or if I was too disorientated for it to function properly. Everything’s fused into time inside the cage and time out of it. I described the cage to Dan and the police, and I said it was in a cellar, but the rest…

…The police thought I was being deliberately evasive when I said I couldn’t tell them anything else. But it was the truth. When Dan asked me what happened, I couldn’t tell him either. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway. The police weren’t going to arrest a man on the evidence of smell. What sort of identification is that?

…The artist Paul Gauguin once said, “Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.” I dream of revenge. All the time.

7

THE ONLY INFORMATION Jess gave me about the Aga was that the oil tank was outside and needed to be kept at least a quarter full. She took me to the back door and pointed to a wooden lean-to at the side of the garage. “The tank’s in there and there’s a glass gauge that shows the level. There’s also a valve that controls the flow, but I’ve turned it on and you shouldn’t need to touch it. If you allow the oil to drop too low, you could run into trouble. The supplier’s phone number is stuck to the side of the tank but if they’re busy they may not come for a few days. It’s better to order a refill early rather than later.”

“How full is it at the moment?”

“Up to the top. It should last a good three to four months.”

“Do I have to close the valve if I want to turn off the Aga?”

“You’ll have cold baths if you do,” she warned. “There’s no immersion heater in this place. It means the kitchen’s fairly unbearable in the summer but the Aga’s the only way to heat the water. The house is pretty antiquated. There’s no central heating and no boiler, and if you’re cold at night you have to light a fire.” She indicated a wood store to the left of the outhouse. “You’ll find the number for the log supplier on the tank under the oil company.”

I think Jess was disappointed that I took all this in my stride, but it wasn’t so different from the way I’d grown up in Zimbabwe. Wood was our primary fuel rather than oil, but we didn’t have central heating, and hot water had been at a premium until a day’s sunshine had heated the tank on the roof. Our cook, Gamada, had coaxed wonderful meals out of the wood-burning stove, and, having learnt from her, I’d never been comfortable with electric ovens that offered more touch controls than the flight deck of the Concorde.

I was a great deal less complacent about the single telephone point in the kitchen. “That can’t be right,” I said when Jess showed me the wall-mounted contraption beside the fridge. “There must be phones somewhere else. What happens if I’m at the other end of the house and need to call someone?”

“It’s cordless. You carry it with you.”

“Won’t the battery run down?”

“Not if you hook it up at the end of the day and recharge it overnight.”

“I can’t sleep without a phone beside my bed.”

She shrugged. “Then you’ll have to buy an extension cable,” she told me. “There are places in Dorchester that sell them, but you’ll need several if you want to operate a phone upstairs. I think thirty metres is the longest DIY cable they make but, at a rough guess, it’s a good hundred metres to the main bedroom. You’ll have to link them in series…which means adaptors…plus another handset, of course.”

“Is it a broadband connection?” I asked, dry-mouthed with anxiety as I wondered how I was going to be able to work. “Can I access the Internet and make phone calls at the same time?”

“No.”

“Then what am I going to do? Normally I’d be able to use my mobile as well as a landline.”

“You should have gone for a modern house. Didn’t the agent tell you what this one was going to be like? Send you any details?”

“A few. I didn’t read them.”

I must have looked and sounded deeply inept because she said scathingly: “Christ! Why the hell do people like you come to Dorset? You’re frightened of dogs, you can’t live without a phone-” she broke off abruptly. “It’s not the end of the world. I presume you have a laptop because I didn’t see a computer in the car?” I nodded. “What sort of mobile do you have? Do you have an Internet contract with your server?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not going to work without a signal, is it?”

“How do you connect? By cable or Bluetooth?”

“Bluetooth.”

“OK. That gives you a range of ten metres between the two devices. All you have to do is raise the mobile high enough-” she broke off abruptly in face of my scepticism. “Forget it. I’ll do it myself. Just give me your bloody phone and bring your laptop upstairs.”

She refused to speak for the next half hour because I hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm for groping around the attic every time I wanted to send an email. I squatted on the landing beside a loft ladder, with my laptop beside me, listening to her stomping about the attic before she came down the steps and repeated the exercise in the bedrooms. After a while she started shifting furniture around, angrily banging and scraping it across the floors. She sounded like an adolescent in a sulk and I’d have asked her to go if I hadn’t been so desperate for Internet contact.

She finally emerged from a bedroom at the end of the landing. “OK, I’ve got a signal. Do you want to try for the connection?”

It was a Heath Robinson set-up-a stepped pyramid built out of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers and some chairs-but it worked. It meant crouching under the ceiling to make the link but, once established, I was able to operate the computer at floor level.

“The signal’s stronger in the attic,” said Jess, “but it’ll mean climbing up there every time the battery runs down or you want to log off. I didn’t think you’d want to do that…and you’d probably get lost, anyway. It’s not very obvious which room you’re above.”

“How can I thank you?” I asked her warmly. “Perhaps you’d like a glass of wine or a beer? I have both in the car.”

She showed immediate disapproval. “I don’t drink.” And neither should you, was the firm rebuke that I took from her expression. She was even more disapproving when I lit a cigarette as we went back downstairs. “That’s about the worst thing you can do. If you get bronchitis on top of a panic attack, you’ll really be struggling.”

Delayed maturity and pointy-hat puritanism made a lethal combination, I thought, wondering if she’d cast me as dissolute Edwina from Absolutely Fabulous with herself as Saffy, the high-minded daughter. I was tempted to make a joke about it, but suspected that television was a focus of disapproval as well. I had no sense that there was room for fun in Jess’s life or, if there was, that it was the sort of fun anyone else would recognize.

Before she left, I asked her how I could contact her. “Why would you want to?” she asked.

For help… “To thank you.”

“There’s no need. I’ll take it as read.”

I decided to be honest. “I don’t know who to call if something goes wrong,” I said with a tentative smile. “I doubt the agent could have lit the Aga.”

She smiled rather grudgingly in return. “My number’s in the book under J. Derbyshire, Barton Farm. I suppose you want help with the extension cables for the landline?”

I nodded.

“I’ll be here at eight-thirty.”

THIS WAS THE PATTERN of the days that followed. Jess would make a reluctant offer of help, come the next morning to fulfil it, say very little before going away again, then return in the evening to point out something else she could do for me. On a few occasions I said I could manage myself, but she didn’t take the hint. Peter described me as her new pet-not a bad description, because she regularly brought me food from the farm-but her constant intrusions and bossy attitude began to annoy me.

It’s not as if I got to know her well. We had none of the conversations that two women in their thirties would normally have. She used silence as a weapon-either because she had total insight into the reaction it inspired, or none at all. It allowed her to dictate every social gathering-and by that I mean her and me, as I never saw her in a larger group except on the rare occasions when Peter dropped in-because the choice was to join in her silences or trot out a vacuous monologue. Neither of which made for a comfortable atmosphere.

It was difficult to decide how conscious this behaviour was. Sometimes I thought she was highly manipulative; other times I saw her as a victim, isolated and alienated by circumstance. Peter, who knew her as well as anyone, compared her to a feral cat-selfsufficient and unpredictable, with sharp claws. It was a fanciful analogy, but fairly accurate, since the goal of Winterbourne Barton appeared to be to “tame” her. Nonconformists may be the bread-and-butter of the media, and loved by the chattering classes, but they’re singled out for criticism in small communities.

Over time I heard Jess described as everything from an “animal rights activist” to a “predatory lesbian”-even “having an extra chromosome” because of her flat features and wide-spaced eyes. The Down syndrome charge was clearly nonsense, but I was less sure about the animal rights and lesbian tags. She was at her most animated when I asked her about the birds and wildlife in the valley, always able to identify animals from my descriptions and occasionally waxing lyrical on their habitats and behaviour. I also wondered if her twice-daily visits were a form of courtship. To avoid wasting her time, I made it abundantly clear that I was heterosexual, but she was as indifferent to that as she was to hints about leaving me alone.

After a couple of weeks, I was close to locking the doors, hiding the Mini in the garage and pretending to be out. I’d learnt by this time that I’d been singled out for special favours, since she never visited anyone else, not even Peter, and I began to wonder if Lily had found her as oppressive as I did. One or two people suggested that Jess’s attachment was to Barton House, but I couldn’t see it myself. I thought Peter’s suggestion that she saw me as a wounded bird was a more likely explanation. In her strangely detached way, she appeared to be monitoring me for signs of renewed anxiety.

Surprisingly, I didn’t show any. Not at the beginning, at least. For some reason, I slept better alone in that echoing old house than I had in my parents’ flat. I shouldn’t have done. I should have jumped at every shadow. At night the wisteria tapped on the window-panes and the moon silhouetted finger-like tendrils against the curtains. Downstairs, the numerous French windows invited anyone to break in while I slept.

My way of dealing with that threat was to leave the internal doors open and keep a powerful torch beside my bed. The beauty of Barton House was that every bedroom had a dressing-room with its own door to the landing, which meant I had a second exit if a prowler came along the corridor. It also had two staircases, one at the front and one at the back leading down to the scullery. This gave me confidence that I could outwit any intruder. I sprayed Jess’s WD40 into every external lock on the ground floor, and embraced the doors and windows as escape routes rather than entry points.

Nevertheless, it was Winterbourne Valley that was the real healer. The contrast between the noise and chaos of Baghdad and these peaceful fields of ripening corn and yellow rapeseed couldn’t have been greater. Passing cars were few and far between and people even scarcer. From the upstairs windows I could see all the way to the village in one direction and to the Ridgeway-a fold of land behind Dorset’s coastline-in the other. This gave me a sense of security for, even though the hedgerows and darkness would screen a trespasser, those same concealments would hide me.

JESS WAS A DEDICATED CONSERVATIONIST. Apart from her hostility to social change, she farmed her land in much the same way as her ancestors had done by scrupulously rotating her crops, rationing pesticides, stocking rare breeds and protecting the wild species on her property by conserving their natural habitats. When I asked her once what her favourite novel was, she said it was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was a rare piece of irony-she knew I’d identify her immediately with the difficult, unloved orphan of the story-but the landscape of the hidden wilderness was certainly one she liked to inhabit.

By contrast, Madeleine liked her landscapes populated. She was at her best in company, where her easy charm and practised manner made her a popular guest. Peter described her as the typical product of an expensive girls’ boarding-school, well-spoken, well-mannered and not overburdened with brains.

I thought her extraordinarily attractive the first time I met her. She had the sweet face and cut-glass English accent of the elegant British movie stars of the forties and fifties, like Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver or Virginia McKenna in Carve Her Name with Pride. It was the second Sunday of my tenancy. Peter had asked me along to meet some of my new neighbours over drinks in his garden. It was very casual, about twenty people, and Madeleine arrived late. I believe she came uninvited, as Peter hadn’t mentioned her beforehand.

Despite the photograph on the landing at Barton House, I had no idea who she was until we were introduced. Indeed, I’m sure I assumed she was Peter’s girlfriend, because she tucked her hand through his elbow as soon as she arrived and allowed him to lead her about the garden. His guests were genuinely pleased to see her. There was a lot of hugging and kissing, and cries of “How are you?” and I was slightly taken aback to discover this was Lily’s daughter.

“Your landlady,” Peter said with a wink. “If you have any complaints, now’s the time to make them.”

I’d been doing rather well up until then-with only the odd flicker of anxiety when I heard a male voice behind me-but I felt a definite lurch of the heart as I shook Madeleine’s hand. If Jess was to be believed, she was a callous bitch who had driven her mother into penury and then neglected her. My personal view was that Jess’s unaccountable hatred clouded her thinking, but the doubt was there, and Madeleine read it in my face.

Her immediate response was contrition. “Oh dear! Is the house awful? Aren’t you happy?”

What could I do, other than reassure her? “No,” I protested. “It’s beautiful…just what I wanted.”

There was nothing artificial about the smile that lit her face. She removed her hand from Peter’s elbow and tucked it into mine. “It is beautiful, isn’t it? I adored growing up there. Peter tells me you’re writing a book. What’s it about? Is it a novel?”

“No,” I said cautiously. “It’s non-fiction…a book on psychology…not very exciting, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is. My mother would have been so interested. She loved reading.”

I opened my mouth to dampen her enthusiasm but she was already talking about something else. I don’t remember what it was now, a reference to Daphne du Maurier, I expect-“an old friend of Mummy’s”-whom she trotted out to new acquaintances as a close family connection. This seemed a little unlikely to me, as there was a considerable age difference between the novelist and Lily, and du Maurier had been dead for fifteen years, but Madeleine brushed such details aside. In the world she inhabited, meeting a person fleetingly at a party amounted to friendship.

She dropped names for effect in the same way that her mother was said to have done. I began to understand this when I commented on the paintings at Barton House and learnt that Nathaniel Harrison was her husband. It made sense of Jess’s remark that Madeleine had acquired the collection by sleeping with the man who owned them-even if “married to the artist” would have been more illuminating-but it led to a definite withdrawal on Madeleine’s part.

She spoke of Nathaniel as if he were up with greats, and to cement the impression she quoted David Hockney, suggesting he was a close acquaintance and a great admirer of her husband’s work. To listen to her, Hockney was a regular visitor to Nathaniel’s studio and always singing his praises to critics and dealers. I was genuinely interested, not just in how they knew Hockney, but in why he would champion an artist whose style and approach to painting were so different from his own.

“I didn’t realize he spent so much time in England,” I said. “I thought he was permanently based in America now.”

Madeleine smiled. “He comes when he can.”

“So how did you meet him?”

“The painting world’s a small one,” she said rather coolly, looking for someone else to speak to. “Nathaniel’s invited to all the openings.”

I should have left it there. Instead I asked her which other contemporary artists she and her husband knew. Lucian Freud? Damien Hirst? Tracey Emin? And where did her husband fit into the Brit art scene? Had Saatchi bought any of his work? She continued to smile but it fell far short of her eyes, and I knew I’d overstepped some invisible line in etiquette. I was supposed to revere the absent Nathaniel, not demonstrate knowledge of other artists or question Nathaniel’s close friendship with them.

It was all very childish, and I was amused at how she avoided me until Peter brought us together again. “Did Marianne tell you Jess Derbyshire’s been helping her settle in?” he asked, steering her towards me with a hand in the small of her back. “Jess has built a hoist so that Marianne can access the Internet via her mobile.”

I watched Madeleine’s expression close at the mention of Jess. “It’s fairly ramshackle,” I said. “We’ve discovered a signal near the ceiling in the back bedroom that allows me to operate my laptop underneath it. But it’s not ideal, and I wondered if you’d have any objections to my installing broadband. It’s available through the Barton Regis exchange and it would make life a lot easier. I’ve asked the agent and he says he can’t see a problem as long as I pay for it. I’ll happily leave the ADSL modem behind when I go.”

Peter placed a teasing hand on my shoulder. “It’s no good talking gobbledy-gook to Madeleine. She still uses a quill and parchment. It’s a little box,” he explained to her, “that separates voices from online connection…means you can use the phone at the same time as the computer. If Marianne’s prepared to pay for it then my advice is to give her the go-ahead immediately.” He laughed. “It’ll make that old ruin of yours more attractive to the next tenant, and it won’t cost you a thing.”

Madeleine’s smile would have frozen the balls off a brass monkey, but it wasn’t directed at Peter. It was directed at me. I had a strong sense that it was his hand on my shoulder that offended her, and not what he said.

I WAS SURPRISED, therefore, when she came to Barton House, full of smiles, the next morning. “I realized last night that I never gave you an answer to the broadband question,” she said gaily, as I opened the front door. “Goodness! Is the key working properly now? Mummy only ever used the bolts because the lock was so stiff.” She walked past me into the hall. “I paid a man to grease it but he didn’t think it would last.”

I shut the door behind her. “Jess lent me some WD-40. I give it a spray every day which seems to be doing the trick.” I gestured towards the sitting-room. “Would you like to go in here? Perhaps you’d rather be in the kitchen?”

“I don’t mind,” she said, looking around to see if I’d made any changes. I saw her eyes flicker towards the piece of wallpaper that had peeled away from its Blu-Tack and was now, courtesy of Jess, firmly reattached with paste. “Mummy was always very pukka about entertaining guests in the drawing-room. She thought it was non-U to expect her friends to put up with dirty crockery and vegetable peelings. Did you manage to light the Aga all right?”

“Jess did.”

Madeleine’s mouth thinned immediately. “I expect she made a song and dance of it.”

“No.” I opened the door to the sitting-room. “Shall we go in here?”

Despite its size and sunny aspect, the room was too dreary to qualify as a drawing-room, and I hadn’t been into it since my first day. Jess had told me it used to be full of antiques until Madeleine replaced them with junk from a second-hand furniture shop.

The carpet, a threadbare plush pile in muted pink, showed multiple evidence of dog accidents from when Lily had mastiffs of her own. According to Jess, she’d never exercised them enough, and had covered the marks with Persian rugs. Now packed away in storage, they were probably going mouldy, if the musty smell of damp in the room was any indication of their state when they were removed. The walls were worse. They hadn’t been decorated in years and the plaster was flaking above the skirting boards and beneath the coving round the ceiling. Irregular patches showed where Lily’s paintings had been.

In an effort to distract the eye, Madeleine had hung two of her husband’s originals and three Jack Vettriano prints on the inside walls-The Singing Butler, Billy Boys and Dance Me to the End of Love-but all you could see of the prints was the sunlight reflecting on their glass. I couldn’t understand why she’d put them there as Vettriano’s film-noir style sat very uncomfortably with Nathaniel’s fantasy pictures of rooted and foliage-laden buildings, and I assumed she’d bought them cheap as a job lot. It wasn’t a subject I had any intention of discussing with her, however, as our tastes were clearly different.

“What do you think of Vettriano’s work?” she asked, lowering herself to the vinyl sofa and spreading her skirt. “He’s very popular. Jack Nicholson owns three of his originals.”

“I prefer Hockney and Freud.”

“Oh, well, of course. Doesn’t everyone?”

I produced my friendliest smile. “Can I make you a coffee?”

“I couldn’t. I’ve just had one with Peter. He has an espresso machine. Have you tried it yet?”

I shook my head as I took the chair beside her. “Yesterday’s the first time I’ve been to his house. He wanted to introduce me to some of the neighbours.”

She leaned forward. “What did you think of them?”

“Very nice,” I answered. It happened to be a true reflection of my views but Madeleine wasn’t to know that. In the circumstances, I could hardly say anything else without appearing rude.

She looked pleased. “That’s a relief. I’d hate to think Jess had turned you against them.” She paused before going on in a rush. “Look, I hope you won’t take this wrongly-I know it’s none of my business-but you’ll have a happier time here if you look to the village for friends. Jess can be very peculiar if she takes a liking to someone. It’s not her fault…I’m sure it’s the result of losing her family…but she latches on to people and can’t seem to see how irritating it is.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say it had already happened but it would have felt like a betrayal. I needed to resolve my issues with Jess face to face, not add to the gossip about her by fuelling Madeleine’s curiosity. “She helped me with a few things when I first arrived,” I said. “I was grateful. I hadn’t realized there was only one phone socket here, or that the mobile signal was so bad. That’s why I need broadband.”

But she was only interested in Jess. “Peter should have told you,” she said earnestly. “The trouble is he’s paranoid about breaking patient confidences. It’s not just the latching-on that’s a problem…it’s what she does when she thinks she’s being rejected. It’s obviously a legacy from the car accident-a need to be loved, I suppose-but it can be quite frightening if you’re not ready for it.”

I found myself staring at her in the same detached way that Jess stared at me. For no better reason than that I didn’t know how to respond.

“I expect you think I’m awful,” Madeleine went on apologetically, “but I’d hate you to find out two months down the line that I’m right. Ask anyone.”

I shifted my attention to my hands. “What am I supposed to ask them?”

“Oh dear! I’m not doing this very well. Perhaps I should have said listen. Listen to what they say.”

“About what?”

“The stalking. It starts with her turning up on the doorstep when you first arrive, then she’s in and out all the time. She usually comes with presents or offers of help, but it’s difficult to get rid of her afterwards. She plagued my poor mother for years. In the end, the only way Mummy could avoid her was by hiding upstairs every time she heard the Land Rover on the drive.”

“Peter doesn’t seem to have any problems with her.”

“Only because she doesn’t like him. She’s convinced he tried to turn her into a Valium addict after her parents died. It’s when she fixates on someone that the problems start…and that’s usually a woman.” She examined my face. “I’m not being unkind, Marianne. I’m just trying to warn you.”

“About what? That Jess is inept at making friendships…or that she’s a lesbian?”

Madeleine shrugged. “I don’t know, but she’s never shown any interest in men. Mummy said she was close to her father, which may have something to do with it. Most people take her for a teenage boy the first time they see her…she certainly sounds like one. Mummy said her hormones went awry when she took on the mantle of farmer.”

Her use of “Mummy” was getting on my nerves. I’ve never really trusted middle-aged women who choose that diminutive. It suggests their relationship with their mother has never developed beyond dependence, or they’re pretending a closer and sweeter affection than actually exists. “The only reason she showed up on my doorstep was because her dogs saw my car in the drive. She called them off when they surrounded me, otherwise we’d never have met.”

“How did they see your car?”

“Presumably she was exercising them along that stretch of road when I first arrived. Perhaps they saw me turn into the drive?”

“Is that what she told you?” She took my silence for assent. “Then she was lying. She breeds from those mastiffs, so she’s hardly likely to jeopardize them in traffic.” She propped her elbows on her knees. “All I’m saying, Marianne, is be a little wary. Even Peter thinks it’s strange that she happened to be passing that day.”

I gave a small nod which Madeleine could interpret how she chose. “You said it was worse when she feels rejected. What does she do then?”

“Prowls about your house in the middle of the night…stares through your windows…makes nuisance phone calls. You should talk to Mary Galbraith about it. She and her husband live in Hollyhock Cottage, and they had a terrible time after Mary made it clear she’d lost patience.” She held out her hands in supplication. “You must have asked yourself why people are so wary of Jess. Well, that’s why. Everyone starts with good intentions because they feel sorry for her, but they always end up wishing they hadn’t. Ask Mary if you don’t believe me.”

I did believe her. I’d already experienced a lot of what she’d described. “I’ll bear it in mind,” I promised, “and thank you for the information.” I reintroduced the subject of broadband. “I’m very conscious of how isolated I am here…particularly at night. I’d feel a lot happier with a more efficient telephone line.”

Madeleine agreed to it immediately, adding: “Jess’s solutions never last very long. She was always rigging things up for Mummy that failed a couple of days later. I remember her trying to make a television work in the bedroom, but the picture was never good enough.”

At least she tried, I thought, wondering what practical help Madeleine had ever given Lily. I took a pack of cigarettes from my pocket. “Do you?”

She looked as offended as if I’d offered her heroin. “Didn’t the agent make it clear this was a no-smoking tenancy?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said, popping a cigarette between my lips and flicking my lighter to the tip. “I think he was so desperate by the time I showed an interest that he’d have handed the keys to an axe murderer as long as the deposit was paid.” I rested my head against the back of the chair and blew smoke into the air. “If it’s a problem for you, I’m happy to vacate immediately in return for a full rebate. Your agent’s advertising a terraced house in Dorchester in his window that already has broadband.”

Her mouth turned down in irritation, as if my “broadbands” were having the same effect on her as her “Mummy’s” were having on me. “As long as you’re careful about putting your cigarettes out. This is a Grade Two-listed building,” she said rather pompously.

I assured her I was always careful. “You must have been worried every time your mother lit a fire,” I murmured, glancing towards the hearth, “particularly when her concentration started to go.”

Madeleine pulled a wry expression. “Not really…but only because I didn’t know how bad she was. She always seemed in such command when I came down…a little forgetful about small things, perhaps, but totally compos mentis about running the house. I’d have been worried sick if I’d realized she wasn’t coping. This house has been in my family for generations.”

I expect I should have let that go as well, but generations suggested aeons instead of the seventy-odd years of actual ownership. “Wasn’t it your great-grandfather who bought the property? I was told he was big in armaments during the First World War…and bought the whole valley in nineteen-thirty-five when he retired.”

“Did Jess tell you that?”

“I can’t remember now,” I lied. “Someone yesterday, I think. How did your family lose the valley?”

“Death duties,” she said. “Grandfather had to sell it off when his father died. He got virtually nothing for it, of course, but the developer who bought it made a fortune.”

“The one who built the houses at Peter’s end of the village?”

“Yes.” It was obviously a sore point with her. “That used to be our land until Haversham was given permission to build on it. Now his family owns one of the biggest building firms in Dorset while we’re left with an acre of garden.”

“Did Haversham buy the whole valley?”

She nodded. “Grandfather was lazy. He couldn’t be bothered to farm himself, or even find tenants, so he let Haversham take the lot and sell the agricultural land in piecemeal plots for twice what he’d paid for it.”

“Who did he sell to?”

“I don’t know. It happened in the late forties. I think my mother said it was split between four of the local farmers, but it’s changed hands several times since. The north acreage was bought by a cooperative from Dorchester about three years ago.”

“What about the Derbyshires? Did they buy any?”

“Of course not. They couldn’t have afforded it.”

“Except Barton Farm’s quite big, isn’t it? Peter told me it’s one and a half thousand acres.”

Madeleine shook her head. “She’s a tenant…owns about fifty acres and the rest is rented. Jess’s family were humble people. Her grandmother worked as a maid in our house after the war.” She looked at the fireplace. “Old Mrs. Derbyshire used to clean out that grate every day. Mummy said she had a squashed nose and flat face and looked like a mongol or someone with congenital syphilis.” She caught my eye. “She wasn’t either, of course, but it’s obviously genetic or Jess wouldn’t have the same problem.”

I blew smoke in her direction. “And it was this lady’s husband who owned Barton Farm in the fifties?”

I could almost hear the words “She was no lady” forming in Madeleine’s head. “No, it skipped that generation. The husband contracted polio during the war and died of it shortly after he returned home-and there was a younger brother who died in Normandy, I think. Jess’s father inherited it from his grandfather. Then he died, and Jess took it over…although what’s going to happen when she goes is anyone’s guess.”

“Perhaps she’ll have children.”

She threw me a scornful glance. “They’ll be virgin births, then. She’d sooner lie with her mastiffs than a man.”

Ss-ss-ss! “So what happened to Jess’s grandmother?”

“When her son took over, she went to Australia to live with her brother. Before that she kept house for her father-in-law. He was a drinker…drove his wife to an early death and then made his daughter-in-law’s life a misery. According to Mummy, it soured her relationship with her son-which is why she emigrated-although I expect the hope of a better life had something to do with it as well.”

“Did you ever meet her?”

“Only when she came back to help Jess through the funerals. She stayed about three months, but the whole thing was too much for her and she died of a stroke soon after she returned home.”

“That’s sad.”

Madeleine nodded. “Mummy was upset by it. She saw quite a lot of Mrs. Derbyshire while she was over. They were different generations…and from very different backgrounds, of course…but she said it was fun reminiscing about the old days.”

“It must have been terrible for Jess.”

“It was,” she agreed, holding my gaze for a moment before looking away. “She came up here with a carving knife and slit her wrists in front of Mummy. There was blood everywhere…although the doctors said it was a cry for attention rather than any serious attempt to harm herself. The cuts weren’t deep enough to do any real damage.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Poor Mummy was petrified,” Madeleine went on with a hint of apology in her tone as if she regretted having to tell me. “She thought the knife was meant for her. It was such an odd thing to do…come all the way to Barton House to kill herself in front of an audience.” She paused. “It’s why I was so appalled yesterday when Peter said Jess was helping you settle in. He should have warned you about her mental state instead of encouraging her to fasten on you the way she fastened on to my mother.”

Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16-19/05/04”

…I can’t eat anymore. I force myself to try but everything tastes the same…

From: Dan@Fry.ishma.iq

Sent: Sun 11/07/04 14:05

To: connie.burns@uknet.com

Subject: Thank God!

Where the hell have you been, Connie? You promised you’d keep in touch as long as I put you on the plane, but all I’ve had is silence for nearly two months-zilch…00000000-until a miserly 15-word email 2 hrs ago. I’m so damned angry with you. I’ve been sick to my stomach with worry since you left.

FYI: I’ve been bombarding London for info, only to be told they know less than I do. Harry Smith had to ask a colleague on a tabloid for your parents’ address because your next-of-kin details are out of date. All your father will say is that you’re “out of London” and he’s passing on messages. So why haven’t you answered any of them? Where are you? What’s going on? Have you seen a doctor? I wouldn’t have kept my mouth shut if I thought you were planning to deal with this on your own. Have you any idea of the stick I’m getting?

I assume you used my private address to avoid the office finding out. Well, OK, except you’ve told me nothing apart from your new e-address and the fact that you’re “fine.” I can’t/don’t believe that. You must talk to someone. London had a counsellor lined up for you-they were willing to give you all the protection you wanted-but you blew them away. Why? Don’t you realize what the consequences are likely to be? I still have nightmares about Bob Lerwick being shot in front of me, and that was ten years ago.

At the moment I’m beating myself up for not forcing you to accept help here. I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping it quiet, but now…

It’s turning into a hell of a mess, frankly. I’ve been interviewed three times by a cynical US cop working with the Baghdad police (Jerry Greenhough) who’s concluded the whole “abduction” was a scam. He seems to think you’re planning to demand huge sums in compensation or write a best-selling “fiction” about something that never happened.

Write to me, Connie. Better still, phone. My number’s the same.

Love, Dan

Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16-19/05/04”

…Obedience comes quite easily after a while. Do this. Do that. Inside my head, I rebelled. If you let me live, then you will die. It was a way of staying sane…

…The truth was different. You belong to me. You die when I say so. You speak what I tell you to speak. You smile when I tell you to smile…

…At what point did I decide to be controlled forever? When I realized that every shameful thing I did was being videoed? Why didn’t I refuse? Was death by suffocation so bad that I’m prepared to live like this?

…There were no marks that would say what had happened. I bled inside but not outside…

…I’m lucky. I’m alive. I did what I was told…

From: alan.collins@manchester-police.co.uk

Sent: Mon 19/07/04 17:22

To: connie.burns@uknet.com

Subject: Keith MacKenzie

Attachments: AC/WF.doc (53KB)

Good to hear from you, Connie. After your release, I tried to contact you via your mobile and old address but without success, so presumably some thief in Baghdad has them? I was shocked to read about your abduction, particularly as it happened so shortly after your email in May re MacKenzie. You say there was no connection between the two events, but, yes, you’re quite right, I did wonder. To the extent that I contacted Bill Fraser in Basra and suggested he look into it. In the event, you reappeared, unharmed, before he was able to take it further.

You say your boss in Baghdad is interested in picking up the O’Connell/MacKenzie story where you had to leave it. I’m attaching my correspondence with Bill in full, as you requested, although some of it may not make pleasant reading for you. Bill tells me the situation in Baghdad is out of control. Foreigners have become a commodity, with most abductions being carried out by professional gangs who sell their hostages on to the highest bidder. As you say, you were “fortunate” to be released when you were.

As you will see, Bill has spoken to his US opposite number in Baghdad re the two cases you found in the Iraqi newspapers. He has also had some email correspondence with Alastair Surtees re O’Connell/MacKenzie. Nothing conclusive, but interesting evasion from Surtees.

You asked if I kept a copy of my report on the Sierra Leonean murders. I did and I’m attaching it. I’ve also forwarded it to Jerry Greenhough (Bill’s oppo in Baghdad) if only to point out similarities in the killer’s/killers’ MO. Finally, I’ve been given a contact in the Kinshasa police who’s agreed to check for similar murders there in1998. It’s a long shot-Kinshasa has 15,000 street children who die/go missing all the time-and teenage girls are particularly vulnerable. I’ll let you know if I hear from him, but don’t hold your breath. He paid lip service to international cooperation by answering my email, but I suspect my request was shelved. Old cases are hard/tedious work, particularly when there’s no financial incentive.

My wife and family are well. Thank you for asking.

Finally, don’t hesitate to write/call if there’s anything I can help you with. Is there a reason why the only contact detail you’ve given me is your new email address? Or why you’re choosing to act as a middleman between me, Bill Fraser and your boss?

Kind regards,

Alan

DI Alan Collins, Greater Manchester Police

(Extracts from attachments)

Email from Bill Fraser to Alan Collins

…My oppo in Baghdad is an NYPD Captain called Jerry Greenhough. He did a stint in Afghanistan two years ago and was seconded to Baghdad in May. He’s a decent enough bloke but I’m afraid he has reservations about Connie Burns. He wasn’t in on her debriefing, but after listening to the tape he found her “evasive and unconvincing.” On several counts: a) she told police virtually nothing, claiming her blindfold as the reason for her ignorance; b) she insisted that her boss, Dan Fry, sit in on the questioning with instructions to halt proceedings if she showed signs of distress-which she never invoked; c) she was examined by a doctor who found no evidence of rough handling or forceful restraint. This has led to some scepticism about the whole episode, particularly as her imprisonment was only 3 days’ duration.

It’s a difficult one, Alan. I don’t necessarily share the scepticism-I can think of a number of reasons why a woman wouldn’t want to talk about an experience like that-but, according to Jerry, there were too many inconsistencies in her answers. Nor did the abduction follow a recognized pattern. I passed on your suggestion re MacKenzie, but that has no takers either. Connie was “self-possessed” and “in control” throughout the interview, and adamant that nothing untoward had happened during her captivity. This seems to be backed by the doctor giving her a clean bill of health. I hear what you say about MacKenzie’s MO, but releasing a woman unharmed isn’t his recognized pattern of behavioureither.

Interestingly, I’ve had more success re Connie’s suggestion that the two murders in Baghdad were a) linked; b) linked to similar murders in Sierra Leone; and c) might be the work of Keith MacKenzie aka John Harwood aka Kenneth O’Connell. Jerry has worked with the FBI on two serial rape cases and is at least willing to embrace the possibility. Any chance of sending him your report on the Sierra Leone victims? The downside is that investigations like this are complex and sophisticated, and I can’t see raw recruits coping unless they have continuity and commitment at the top. FYI: I have less than six weeks left of my tour and Jerry goes home at the end of September, and even the most able Iraqis won’t have the finances to conduct a cross-border inquiry.

I’m attaching a couple of emails from Alastair Surtees (Baycombe Group). I haven’t met the guy but BG have about 500 security personnel on the ground and their reputation’s better than some. My gut feeling inclines to Connie’s view that Surtees is “slippery.” His second email is more conciliatory than his first, following my request for copies of O’Connell’s documentation/photo. To date, these haven’t materialized, but I’ll keep pressing for them because I want to know if I have a ringer on my patch. It’s hard enough keeping track of the indigenous population without fake UK passports being thrown into the pot.

It’s a big “if”-but if the murders are linked, if the killer’s a Brit and if he returns to the UK-that puts him on home turf where we do have the resources to nail him. I keep waking up of a night thinking what a perfect bloody crime this is, Alan. Life’s so cheap in these war zones no one gives a damn if a psychopath gets his rocks off by chopping women into little pieces. It’s been another bad day. 3 toddlers died and a 12-year-old kid got his legs blown off by an “unexploded” cluster bomb. I hate this wretched slaughter-house…

Email (1) from Alastair Surtees to Bill Fraser

…I assume your interest has been sparked by Ms. Connie Burns of Reuters, who engineered an interview with me in order to make unfounded and slanderous accusations against Mr. Kenneth O’Connell. She claims to have known him under a different name in Sierra Leone, however it’s now clear that the man she saw was wrongly identified to her. You have my personal assurance that none of our operatives was at the Baghdad police academy on the day Ms. Burns visited it. I trust this settles the matter…

Email (2) from Alastair Surtees to Bill Fraser

…I’m sorry you thought I deliberately evaded some of your requests. I do not and would not condone the use of a false passport by any BG employee, however I thought my personal assurance would be enough to convince you that Ms. Burns was in error. I have questioned O’Connell on two occasions since Ms. Burns made her allegations against him, and I have absolutely no reason to believe that Kenneth O’Connell is an alias for John Harwood or Keith MacKenzie. The Baycombe Group is scrupulous in its vetting procedures and thoroughly examines the records of all its employees.

Kenneth O’Connell came to us with unimpeachable references. His history in brief: Sergeant, Royal Irish Regiment; service duty (multi-deployed) but including: Falklands and Bosnia; left the Army in 2000 (aged 36) to join the London Metropolitan Police (served 3 years); signed up with the Baycombe Group in September 2003. He has held two positions here in Iraq: 1) Lead trainer of restraint techniques at the Baghdad Police Academy from 1.11.03 to 1.02.04; 2) Personal Security Officer to Spennyfield Construction 14.02.04-ongoing. Spennyfield Construction are a UK firm, currently working out of Karbala.

O’Connell’s documentation is held at our Cape Town office. I have requested a copy to be faxed to the number you gave me, with the proviso that his name, next of kin, and present location are blacked out. Faxes go astray or fall into the wrong hands and the safety of our personnel is important to us. I trust this meets your requirements and that any suspicions you have of Mr. O’Connell can be speedily laid to rest…

Email from Bill Fraser to Alastair Surtees

…It is now two weeks since I requested information on Kenneth O’Connell. In the absence of documentary evidence supporting his claim to a legitimate passport, his name will be posted with the British Embassy and all attempts by him to exit this country will be blocked. Furthermore, if I have any suspicion that Mr. O’Connell has left the country under a different name…

From: connie.burns@uknet.com

Sent: Tues 20/07/04 23:15

To: Dan Fry (Dan@Fry.ishma.iq)

Subject: Sorry!

Dear Dan,

I received your first email so you don’t need to keep bombarding me with new ones. I’m sorry you’ve been feeling sick and I’m sorry that my long silences are making it worse. It has nothing to do with not trusting you, it’s just that I’m finding it hard to write anything at the moment. The only reason I haven’t given you a telephone number is because the lines here are hopeless and I’m having to use my mobile to email. As soon as I’ve worked out a better arrangement, I’ll let you know how to contact me.

Please don’t worry. I am fine. I’ve tucked myself away in a valley in the south-west of England where soft winds blow and people are scarce. It’s very pretty and peaceful-rolling fields of golden corn, a chocolate-box village half a mile away and a tumultuous sea just out of sight beyond an upland. I spend most of my days alone, and I really do like it that way. The house is quite big, but very basic. There’s even an old well in the garden-heavily disguised as a woodshed-though thankfully I’m not expected to use it. I do have running water and electricity, although the rest of the mod cons leave a lot to be desired. Hence the telephone problem. I’ve made friends with some sparrows. I’ve found that if I scatter birdseed around my feet, they appear out of nowhere to feed. It’s only now that I realize I never saw a single bird in Baghdad. There’s also a fishpond with no fish. I’m thinking of buying some so that I can sit and watch them in the evening.

As for Jerry Greenhough and the stick you’re getting, can you please keep stonewalling for me? I honestly don’t care what the Baghdad police and an unknown Yank think about me. It’s all so far away and unimportant at the moment. They won’t sack you, Dan, because you’re too important. Also, you have broad shoulders, and I can’t think of anyone better qualified to say “get stuffed” to the men in suits!

I realized on the plane going home that it was going to be worse talking about it than not talking about it. I know you believe counselling worked for you but you’re much stronger than I am and you don’t mind admitting your weaknesses. It’s a form of bravery that you and Adelina have…and I don’t. Perhaps I’ll feel differently in time, although I doubt it. My nightmares are never about what happened, only about the way I’ve gatecrashed other people’s lives in seach of a story. Nothing is ever straightforward, Dan. I’m far more troubled by my conscience than a few forgettable events in a cellar.

I’ll always be pleased to hear from you as long as you stick to other subjects and shelve your concerns about my mental state. If you don’t, I won’t answer! Let me thank you one last time for your care and kindness and end with love, Connie.

8

OF COURSE I looked for scars on Jess’s wrists and of course I found them. They were only obvious if you knew they were there, and I did it as surreptitiously as I could, but she must have noticed my interest because she took to buttoning her cuffs. I compensated with over-friendliness, which made her even more suspicious, and she stopped coming after that. The odd thing is, her absences didn’t register at first. Like a toothache that suddenly stops, it only occurred to me at the end of the week that the niggling irritation had gone.

It should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. I started jumping nervously every time my parents phoned, and peered cautiously out of the windows as soon as darkness fell. For the first time since my arrival I felt anxious about being alone, and my mother picked up on it one evening when I refused to speak until she did. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

I told her the truth because I didn’t want her imagining something worse. She was quite capable of populating Dorset with Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists. She listened without interrupting and, at the end, said simply: “You sound lonely, darling. Do you want me and Dad to come down next weekend?”

“I thought you were going to Brighton.”

“We can cancel.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t do that. You’re coming at the end of the the month, anyway. I’ll be fine till then.”

She hesitated before she spoke. “I expect I’ve got it back to front, Connie-I usually do-but from the way you describe them Jess has been a better friend to you than Madeleine. Do you remember Geraldine Summers…married to Reggie…they had two boys about your age who went to university in America?”

“Vaguely. Is she the fat one who used to turn up out of the blue with cakes that no one ate?”

“That’s her. They lived about thirty miles from us. Reggie was a tobacco planter and Geraldine was a teacher before he married her. They met in England during one of his leaves, and she came home as his wife after only knowing him for a couple of months. It was a terrible mistake. Reggie had never read a book in his life, and Geraldine had no idea how isolated the farm was. She thought she’d be in the middle of a community and able to get a job as a teacher, and instead she discovered that Reggie and the radio were going to be her only source of stimulation.”

“I remember him now,” I said with feeling. “Thick as two short planks, got sozzled on gin and told smutty jokes all evening.”

My mother laughed. “Yes. He was worse after the boys were born. They inherited Geraldine’s brains, and he had trouble keeping up with them. It turned him to drink even more, because he thought alcohol made him witty.” She paused in reflection. “I always felt rather sorry for him. He’d have been much happier with a country bumpkin and two strapping sons who liked driving tractors.”

I wondered why she was telling me this story. “What happened to them? Are they still together? Still in Zimbabwe?”

“Reggie and Geraldine? They went to South Africa. The last I heard, Reggie wasn’t very well. I had a Christmas letter from Geraldine which said he’d been in and out of hospital most of last year. I wrote back but I haven’t had a reply yet.” She returned to the point. “The thing is, Geraldine drove me mad when she first arrived. She saw me and your father as the antidote to Reggie, and she plagued us with visits because she was so discontented. In the end, I had to be quite firm with her and tell her she wasn’t welcome. It was all rather difficult, and she took it very badly.”

“What did she do?”

“Nothing too shocking. I received an unsigned letter about a week later, telling me how cruel I was, and one or two strange phone calls. I didn’t see her again for two years…by which time her first baby had arrived and she’d managed to come to terms with her frustrations. Poor woman. We found ourselves at the same party in Bulawayo and she was terribly embarrassed…apologized profusely for being a nuisance and even owned up to the poison-pen letter and the phone calls.”

“What did you say to her?”

“That it was I who should apologize for being unkind. I felt far worse about rebuffing her attempts at friendship-even if they were annoying-than she could ever have felt about her letter. Geraldine was so thrilled to be back on speaking terms that she took to plaguing us again…and this time we had to put up with it. But you know, darling, she turned out to be the best friend we had. The Barretts and Fortescues-people we’d grown up with-wouldn’t come near us when your father was accused of profiteering, but Geraldine and Reggie drove over immediately and stayed throughout the siege. It was very brave of them.”

I was out of Zimbabwe when this happened, but I’d kept in close touch via telephone. It was in the early days of Mugabe’s push to evict white farmers, and a local Zanu-PF apparatchik laid trumped-up charges of tax evasion and profiteering against my father in a bid to stir up trouble. He had no chance of succeeding in the courts because my father kept scrupulous accounts, but the accusation was enough to incite anger among Mugabe’s war veterans. For a week, a gang of over fifty camped on our lawn and threatened to overrun the house, and it was only the courage of Dad’s own workers, who mounted a permanent picket in front of the veterans and refused to let them pass, that brought the siege to an end.

It was why my mother had been so keen to leave. She knew the intimidation would be worse a second time, and she didn’t want to ask the workforce to intervene again. For Zanu-PF it was tantamount to treason for blacks to support their white employers, and Mum wasn’t prepared to see anyone die for the sake of a few square miles of land. She and my father chose to overlook the Barretts’ and Fortescues’ refusal to help-“they were afraid”-and turned out to support them when their own farms were invaded. But, privately, she never forgave them, and their lifelong friendships ended with my parents’ departure for England.

“So what’s the moral of the story?” I asked with a smile. “Don’t judge a book by its cover?”

“Something like that,” she agreed.

“And if Jess produces a carving knife?”

“Your doctor friend should be struck off for negligence,” said my mother rather dryly. “He shouldn’t have left you alone with a dangerous patient.”

I SUPPOSE I could have checked with Peter, but there didn’t seem much point. I decided my mother’s logic was sound. We make our decisions in life on who we believe as often as what we believe, and I had no reason to think the local doctor would wish a disturbed lunatic on to me. I was a lot less sure about Madeleine’s motives. There was no question she and Jess hated each other, and the old saying “Half the truth is a whole lie” applied to both. If I believed Jess, Madeleine had deliberately abandoned her mother to die of neglect; if I believed Madeleine, Jess was a dangerous stalker.

There was probably a grain of truth in both stories-Madeleine didn’t visit Lily as often as she might and Jess visited too often, which suggested jealousy was at the heart of their hatred-but I was discovering at first hand just how quickly whispers become accepted as fact. According to Dan Fry’s latest email, even Adelina Bianca was hinting that I’d faked my abduction. In an interview with an Italian magazine, she was quoted as saying: “Of course there’s money to be made out of pretending to be a hostage-the public loves horror stories-but anyone who does it belittles what the real victims go through.”

I’ve no idea if she was referring to me-there was a US deserter who faked his kidnapping before fleeing to the Lebanon-but that’s how her words were interpreted. Dan told me that four of the main terrorist groups had denied holding me, and the Arab press was full of articles claiming a foreign correspondent had sought to make money out of passing herself off as a victim. Thankfully, the Western press ignored it-either from fear of a libel suit or because they knew my story hadn’t appeared-but it made me even more reluctant to advertise where I was. It turned me against Adelina. I knew her words had probably been “rearranged” to suit the editor’s take, but I did wonder if the reason she was able to give interviews was because nothing much had happened to her.

When I finally went looking for Jess, she said she could always tell when Madeleine had been spreading her poison. It didn’t matter who the recipient was, or how sensible they were, they never smiled as freely afterwards as they’d done before. She said I’d tried harder than most but I’d made my interest in her wrists too obvious. She took the hint after a couple of days and left me to get on with it. There were some things in life that weren’t worth bothering with, and convincing strangers that she wasn’t planning to knife them was top of the list.

It was an interesting rebuttal, since I hadn’t told her I’d spoken to Madeleine. Was Madeleine so believable that everyone reacted in the same way? If so, it was frightening. I did ask Jess why she allowed half-truths to stand instead of coming out fighting, but she shrugged and said there was no point. “People believe what they want to believe,” she said, “and I refuse to be something I’m not just to prove them wrong.”

I couldn’t follow her logic. “In what way?”

“I despise them,” she said rather dryly, “and I’d have to pretend I didn’t if I wanted to change their minds.”

“You might feel differently if you got to know them.”

“Why? It won’t change the fact that they believed Madeleine.”

This was part of a conversation we had in her kitchen after I plucked up the courage to drive to her house. There was no alternative, since she hadn’t responded to either of my telephone messages, but I was terrified her mastiffs might be roaming free. I drove up the half-mile track to the farm and slowed to a halt in the middle of the yard while I tried to work out where her front door was. I had my window down because it was a rare day of sunshine in an otherwise wet month, and I heard the dogs barking furiously as soon as I put the gears into neutral. The sound was too loud for them to be inside and I looked around nervously to see where they were.

The house was separated from the yard by a beech hedge that was tall enough to mask the ground floor, but there was no obvious gap to suggest an entrance. To my left was a barn, and to my right the track appeared to follow the line of the hedge round a sharp corner at the far end of the house, although flashes of prowling mastiff behind the beech trunks persuaded me that getting out for the purpose of exploration was a bad idea. As I was pondering my options, I heard the sound of a powerful motor and a tractor came roaring around the bend, towing a hay baler behind it.

I had a brief glimpse of Jess’s scowling face before she swerved past me and into the barn. Half a second later, she reversed out again, missing the back of my car by six inches as the baler swung in the opposite direction from the tractor. She performed a neat three-point turn, with the tractor a whisker away from my wing mirror, before she reversed the whole contraption back under cover. She wasn’t taking any prisoners that day, and I’m sure I did look scared as a couple of tons of metal looked like flattening my Mini.

She killed the engine and jumped down from the cab, whistling to the dogs to quit their noise. “You’re in the way,” she told me. “Another time, park up by the hedge.”

I opened my door. “Sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said curtly. “I wasn’t trying to hit you.”

“I realize that. I’d have moved except I couldn’t tell which way you were going to turn…and I didn’t want to make matters worse.”

“The opposite of what you’d expect. I thought you grew up on a farm.”

“I meant the tractor.”

She crossed her arms. “Did you want something?”

“No. I just thought I’d…see how you are. You haven’t been around and you didn’t anwer my messages.”

To my surprise, a slight flush rose in her cheeks. “I’ve been busy.”

I pushed the car door wider. “Is this a bad time? I can come back later.”

“It depends what you want.”

“Nothing. I just came for a chat.”

She frowned at me as if I’d said something peculiar. “I have to unhitch the baler and grease it. You can talk to me while I do that if you like. You’re not dressed for it, though. The barn’s pretty messy.”

“That’s OK. Everything’s washable.” I climbed out of the car and picked my way across the rutted yard in my long wrap-over skirt and leather flip-flop sandals. She eyed me disapprovingly and I wondered what was offending her. “Is something wrong?”

“You look as if you’re going to a garden party.”

“I always dress like this.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. Not on a working farm.” She nodded to some sacks of potatoes inside the barn entrance. “You can sit on one of those. What do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing in particular.”

She eased the baler forward and worked it loose from the tractor tow before pushing it back against the wall. For a small woman, she had extraordinary strength. According to her, anyone could do anything when they needed to. It was mind over matter. Until it came to talking. Her expression said very clearly that if I expected her to start the conversation, I was going to be disappointed. I watched her take a handful of grease and work it into the twine-tying pivots.

“Do you have to do this every time you use it?”

“It helps. The machine’s twenty years old.”

“Is it the only one you’ve got?”

“It’s the only baler.” She jerked her chin at a combine harvester at the other end of the barn. “That’s what handles the crops.”

I turned to look at it. “Dad had one in Zimbabwe.”

“It’s pretty much standard these days. Some people rent them but I bought that secondhand at a farm auction.”

I watched her working. “Why were you using the baler today?” I asked after a while. “I haven’t seen any crops being harvested, so there won’t be any straw yet.”

“I’m taking the hay from the field margins while the weather holds.” She seemed to think it was an intelligent question because she decided to expand on it. “The long-range forecasts are predicting more rain for August so it seemed sensible to bale what we could while we had the chance. We’ll have trouble bringing in the wheat if the forecasters are right…let alone straw.”

We…? “Do you have help?”

She put the lid back on the can of grease and picked up a rag to wipe her hands. “Some. There’s Harry who’s worked here for years and a couple of lady part-timers-one comes mornings, the other afternoons.”

“From Winterbourne Barton?”

“Weymouth.”

“What do they do?”

“Whatever’s on the rota.”

“Ploughing?”

She nodded. “Anything to do with the crops. Harry and I look after the herds, the fencing and the woodland…but we all lend a hand where necessary.” She eyed me curiously as she folded the rag and put it on the grease can. “Don’t they have women farmworkers in Zimbabwe?”

“Thousands.”

“Then why do you look so surprised?”

I smiled. “Because everyone in Winterbourne Barton describes you as a loner, and now I discover you have three people working for you.”

“So?”

“It’s a wrong description of you. I got the impression you lived and worked on your own.”

Her mouth twisted cynically. “That’s Winterbourne Barton for you. They’re completely ignorant about how much work is involved in running a farm, but then most of them have never lived in the country before.” She glanced towards the house. “I’m making some sandwiches for lunch. Do you want to come in while I do it?”

“Will the dogs be there?”

Her dark eyes narrowed slightly, but more in speculation than contempt. “Not if you don’t want them to be.”

I stood up. “Then I’d love to come in. Thank you.”

“You’ll have to move your car in case Harry or Julie comes back. If you park up there”-she pointed towards the left-hand end of the hedge-“you’ll see the path to the back door. I’ll meet you there after I’ve seen to the dogs.”

THE FARMHOUSE WAS a thin, straggling building, constructed in the same Purbeck stone as Barton House and Winterbourne Barton. The core, the rooms around the front door, was seventeenth-century, but the extensions on both sides dated from the nineteenth and twentieth. In floor space it was almost as big as Barton House, but its piecemeal fabrication meant it lacked the clean lines and elegance of Lily’s property.

We entered through the kitchen, which was larger, brighter and better appointed than Lily’s. A plate-glass window gave a view of the garden, which was entirely laid to lawn, without a shrub or flower in sight. Six-foot-high wire fencing ran inside the beech hedge, preventing the mastiffs from escaping, and a large wooden kennel stood in one corner. At the moment, there was no sign of any of them.

“They’re round the front,” said Jess, as if reading my mind. “I’ll let them back into this side when you go. My mother used to have flower borders all the way round but the first puppy I had rooted the plants out. It’s easier like this.”

“Are they always out?”

“If I’m working. When I’m here I have them in the house. If you think of them as overgrown hearthrugs, you might not find them so frightening. Mastiffs are a sociable breed…they love being around people. The only thing they ever do is put themselves between their owners and a stranger, but they won’t attack unless the stranger attacks first.”

I changed the subject rather too abruptly. “This is a nice room, Jess. Much nicer than Lily’s kitchen.”

She watched me for a moment before turning away to open the fridge door. “Do you want to look at the rest of the house while I make the sandwiches? I’m sure you’re curious…everyone else is.”

“Do you mind?”

An indifferent shrug was her only answer.

It was hardly the most fulsome invitation I’d ever had but I wasn’t going to argue about it. The rooms we inhabit say as much about us as how we behave, and Jess was right, I was deeply curious about her surroundings. I’d been told variously that the house was frozen in time, that it was a shrine to her family, full of morbid souvenirs and with an emphasis on death in the shape of stuffed animals. I came across these immediately, to the extent that there were four glass cases in the hall, containing a pheasant, a fox cub, two weasels and a badger.

This was the seventeenth-century heart of the building and I could well believe it had remained untouched for years. The only natural light came from a window halfway up the stairs, but it wasn’t enough to brighten the gloom of the dark oak panelling around the walls. The ceiling was furrowed with ancient beams and the flagstones worn into a visible curvature between the front door and the stairs.

The two rooms leading off the hall dispelled any sense of a house frozen in time. One, which was clearly Jess’s office, had filing cabinets, a desk and a computer, and the other an old sofa and piles of beanbags that smelt powerfully of dogs. Against the longest wall was a steel grey designer hi-fi system with shelf upon shelf of CDs, DVDs, videos and vinyl records framing a plasma screen. I hadn’t thought of Jess as a music, film or television buff, but she clearly was. She was even connected to Sky digital, if the unmistakable black remote on the sofa was any guide. So much for a shrine to the past, I thought enviously, wishing Barton House had more to offer than four terrestrial channels on one miserable little screen in the back room.

I almost stopped there. It’s one thing to be offered free rein of someone else’s house, another to exercise it. I was trespassing out of curiosity or, even worse, a childish desire to put one over on Winterbourne Barton by being able say I’d been invited in. It was the mismatch between what I saw and how it was described that drew me on, for I couldn’t see where the ideas of morbidness had come from until I found a corridor full of photographs of Jess’s family.

There was tier upon tier of the same four laughing people-a man, a woman, a boy and a girl-with variations on the same pictures occurring every two or three feet. Poster-size portraits. Postcard-size snaps. Enlarged headshots extracted from group photographs. Single prints of the children pasted alongside their mother and father to create a laughing group. It was a collage of black, white, sepia and vibrant colour on the continuous canvas of the corridor walls, and it was a glorious expression of life.

I thought of the pictures I had of my parents, the formal ones of their wedding, and holiday snapshots showing awkward smiles or squints of reluctance to be caught on camera. There was only a handful, taken unawares, when they were being entirely natural, and I thought how much better to duplicate the laughing ones than fill the spaces with self-consciousness and solemnity.

“What do you think?” asked Jess’s voice behind me.

I hadn’t heard her approach and turned a startled face in her direction. “Brilliant,” I said honestly. “It’s the way I’d like to be remembered.”

“You don’t look very impressed.”

“Only because you crept up on me. Who took them? You?”

“Yes.” Her dark eyes roamed across the pictures. “Lily hated my gallery. She said it was unhealthy…kept telling me to let my memories go.”

Standard advice, I thought, but I couldn’t see that it applied to pictures. My mother had photographs of her dead parents on her bedside table, and I’d never felt they shouldn’t be there. “Why didn’t you put yourself into any of them?”

“I did. That one.” She pointed to a postcard-size shot at the beginning, showing her parents arm-in-arm with a girl whom I’d taken to be her sister.

I moved back to look at it. “I didn’t recognize you. When was it taken?”

“On my twelfth birthday. Mum and Dad gave me a camera and I let Rory use it to take that photograph.”

“How old was he?”

“Eight then…fifteen when he died. Sally was two years younger.”

“What about your parents?”

“Both in their late forties.” She pointed to a poster-size photograph halfway down the corridor. “That’s the last picture I took of them. It was about three weeks before the accident.”

I walked past her to stand in front of it. It was in colour, there was no sea in the background, but the composition and the way the sunlight lit the sides of the couple’s faces reminded me of the black-and-white image of Madeleine at Barton House. “Was it you who took the picture of Madeleine on my upstairs landing?”

“Maybe.”

“It’s the only thing worth looking at in the whole house. The rest is tacky as hell…including Nathaniel’s paintings.”

It was a compliment but Jess didn’t take it as one. “It looks nothing like Madeleine,” she said crossly. “I only did it to make Lily happy. She needed to believe that something good had come from the Wrights. If it was an honest photograph her bitch of a daughter would look like the portrait of Dorian Gray-ugly as sin.”

“Your mother’s pretty,” I said, in an effort to distract her.

Jess ignored me. “You know, I sometimes wonder if that’s what Madeleine’s at. As long as Nathaniel puts her viciousness into his paintings, she can pass herself off as sweet.”

It was a strange analogy. “Except his paintings aren’t vicious, they’re just not very good. If he had any talent, he’d have sold them and they wouldn’t be gathering dust in Barton House.”

“Then it’s a vicious destruction of talent,” she said flatly. “He used to be good before he married Madeleine. Peter has one of his early paintings. You should look at it.” She opened a door at the end of the corridor. “Did you get this far?”

“No.”

“This is the best room.”

I thought she meant it was best in terms of decor and size, or “best” as in reserved for visitors, so I wasn’t prepared for what I found. There wasn’t a stick of furniture inside. It was a huge shuttered room with a woodblock floor, white walls and a series of slim floor-to-ceiling panels set asymetrically down the centre with mini speakers attached to them. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking at until Jess touched a series of buttons on a panel by the door and the room came alive with moving images and sound.

For a few sickening moments, as the farm appeared on the wall at the end, I thought I was about to see her family go through a series of repetitive loops on video. In that case I’d be agreeing with Lily. What could be more morbid and unhealthy than sitting in the dark, watching dead people perform bursts of activity at long-forgotten parties or school plays?

“It’s the life-cycle of the weasel,” said Jess as different footage played across the screens. “That female was nesting under the house for a season…she moved into Clambar Wood when the dogs sniffed out her entrance. Those are her kittens…she’s teaching them to hunt. It’s probably where the myth of weasel gangs comes from. In fact they’re incredibly territorial and only come together for mating. Look at that. Do you see how beautiful they are? Farmers should encourage them instead of killing them. They’ll go for eggs and chicks if they can get them but their favourite prey is mice and voles.”

“It’s amazing,” I said. “Who took it?”

“I did.”

“Did you set up the room as well?”

She nodded. “I made the panels light enough to move to produce different effects. Some films are more effective if the screens form a continuous arc…like birds in flight. I’ve some great footage of crows leaving their roost in the morning, and it’s stunning to watch them wheel around the arc. The weasels work better in a staggered formation because it shows how territorial they are.”

“Can I see the crows?”

She glanced at her watch. “It’ll take too long to set up. I’d have to realign the projectors as well.” She touched the buttons and plunged the room into darkness before easing me out and closing the door. “I’m working on the soundtrack for the weasels at the moment, but maybe I’ll set up the crows when that’s finished.”

I allowed myself to be shepherded back towards the kitchen. “But what are the films for? Are they for schools? What do you do with them?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

She took some sandwiches, wrapped in clingfilm, from the worktop and tucked them in her pocket. “It’s just a hobby,” she said.

I looked at her in disbelief. “You’re crazy! What’s the point of making films that no one sees? You should be showing them…finding yourself an audience.” I paused. “It would be like me writing columns that no one reads.”

“I’m not like you. I don’t have to be admired all the time.”

“That’s not fair.”

She gave an indifferent shrug.

“What’s wrong with showing you’ve got talent? You’re good, Jess.”

“I know,” she said bluntly, “but what makes you think I need you to tell me? How much do you know about filming? How much do you know about weasels? Anything?” She gave a dismissive laugh when I shook my head.

“I was only saying what I honestly felt.”

“No, you weren’t.” She opened the back door and ushered me out. “You were being patronising-probably because you feel guilty about listening to Madeleine. In future you’d do better to keep your mouth shut.”

It was like walking on eggshells. I couldn’t see what I’d done wrong except compliment her. “Would it have been better if I’d said it was crap?”

“Of course not.” She flicked me a scathing glance. “I hate liars even more than I hate arselickers.”

From: connie.burns@uknet.com

Sent: Wed 21/07/04 13:54

To: alan.collins@manchester-police.co.uk

Subject: contact details

Dear Alan,

Journalists are notoriously jealous of their stories. I don’t trust my boss not to cut me out of the O’Connell/MacKenzie loop and pass off all my research as his! I’ll let you know my address and phone number as soon as I’ve found somewhere permanent to stay. At the moment I’m living out of a suitcase.

It was ever thus!

Best wishes,

Connie

PS. I can’t believe how bad the mobile signals are in this country! I think I’ve signed up to the wrong server!

9

JESS AND I parted on superficially good terms but there was no invitation to return, and she gave a noncommittal nod when I said I hoped to see her at Barton House. It was all very confusing. Rather than go straight home, I drove to the village to see if Peter was home. When I spotted his car in the road, I pulled in behind it and rang his doorbell. I had second thoughts while I waited, mostly to do with rumour-mongering and disloyalty, but I was too curious to give in to them.

“Are you busy?” I asked when he opened the door. “Can you give me ten minutes?”

“Is it a medical visit or a social one?”

“Social.”

He stepped back. “Come in, but you’ll have to watch while I eat my lunch. There’s only enough for one, I’m afraid, but I can rustle up a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.”

I followed him across the hall. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“When did you last eat?”

The question caught me off-balance. “This morning?” I suggested.

He eyed me thoughtfully before pulling out a chair. As always in my company, he was careful to give me space, stepping away before inviting me to sit down. “Take a pew.”

“Thank you.”

He resumed his place at the other side of the table. Lunch was a microwaved pasta meal, still in its plastic container. “I use a plate when I know people are coming,” he said, picking up his fork. “Anyone who rings the bell on spec doesn’t count. Has Jess been bringing you food from the farm?”

I nodded.

“Do you eat it?”

I nodded again.

He didn’t believe me, but he didn’t make an issue of it. “So what can I tell you about Jess? Which particular part of that extraordinarily irritating personality do you want me to explain?”

I smiled. “How do you know it’s Jess I’m interested in?”

He filled his fork. “I was two hundred yards behind you when you turned in through her gate. Did you find her at home?”

“I watched her grease her baler, then she took me inside and showed me around. Presumably you’ve been in the house?”

“Too often to count.”

“So you’ve seen the corridor of family photos?”

“Yes.”

“The big room with the screens?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think?”

He didn’t answer until he’d dealt with the last of his food and pushed the container aside. “I change my mind from time to time but, on the whole, I think it’s a good thing Jess never finished art school. She was at the end of her first year when the accident happened, and she had to jack it in to take on the farm. She still regrets it…but she’d have wasted three years if she’d stayed.”

I was unreasonably disappointed. If anyone could see she had talent it was surely Peter, because he seemed to have more empathy with her than anyone else. “You don’t think she’s any good?”

“I didn’t say that,” he corrected mildly. “I said if she’d stayed at art school she’d have been wasting her time. Either she’d have conformed and lost all her individuality…or she’d have been at permanent war with her tutors and done her own thing anyway. If you’re lucky, she might show you her paintings one day. As far as I know she hasn’t touched a brush since the accident, but the work she did before was exceptional.”

“Did she sell any of it?”

He shook his head. “Never tried. It’s sitting in a studio at the back of the house. I doubt she’d accept money for it, anyway. She’s of the painting-for-profit-is-bad school…thinks any artist who panders to what the buyer wants is a mediocre hack.”

“What sort of subjects did she paint?”

“Landscapes. Seascapes. She has a very individual style-more impressionist than representational-creates movement in the sky and the water with minimal paint and sweeping brushstrokes. It didn’t go down too well with her teachers, which is why she’s so intolerant of other people’s opinions. They told her she was looking back towards Turner instead of embracing the idea of conceptual art, where a piece is created in the mind before it becomes concrete. The sort of artist they liked was Madeleine’s husband.”

My disbelief must have been obvious, because Peter laughed.

“He used to be a lot more interesting than those canvases on Lily’s walls. He conceptualized irrationality in physical form…quite different from the abstracts he’s doing now.”

I tried to look intelligent. “Jess said you have one of his early paintings. Can I see it?”

There was a small hestitation. “Why not? It’s hanging in my office…second door on the right. You shouldn’t have any trouble identifying it. It’s the only painting in there.”

This picture was detailed and busy, like Hieronymus Bosch, with the same nightmarish visions of a world gone mad. Living houses thrust out massive roots with gnarled lianas burrowing through the brickwork. The painting had a high sheen, as if layer upon painstaking layer of paint had been applied to produce it, and the style bore no resemblance to the looser work at Barton House. There was a whirling madness at its heart. None of the houses stood true, but leaned drunkenly in all directions as if gripped by a hurricane. Hundreds of tiny people, quite out of scale with the buildings, populated the rooms behind the windows, and each face was a meticulous replica of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Outside, similarly tiny animals foraged among leaf matter, with no distinction in size made between species, all with the pale, tapered, human faces of the Munch.

I was prepared to accept that it was conceptualized irrationality (whatever that meant-it sounded like an oxymoron to me) but, without a title, I hadn’t a clue if a particular piece of unreason was being expressed or if it was unreason in general. Why living houses? Why so many people trapped inside them? Why animals with human faces? Was it man’s fear of nature? Or was it closer to Hieronymus Bosch-a vision of hell? I had an uncomfortable feeling that if Jess were there she’d say my opinion was subjective, and therefore irrelevant. It didn’t matter how disturbed and powerful I found the vision, the meaning belonged to the artist.

Peter was standing in front of the kettle when I returned to the kitchen. “I hope you like your coffee black,” he said, pouring water into two mugs. “I’m afraid I’ve run out of milk.”

“I do, thank you.” I took the one he offered me, successfully manoeuvring my fingers to avoid his. “Does the painting have a title?”

“It won’t help you. Ochre. What did you make of it?”

“Honestly? Or will you bite my head off like Jess? I felt her breathing down my neck in there, telling me not to be so pretentious.”

Peter looked amused. “Except she hates the thought police more than you do. She calls it the emperor’s-clothes syndrome. If someone like Saatchi’s prepared to pay a fortune for an unmade bed, then it must be good…and it’s only idiots who don’t get it. Try honesty,” he encouraged.

“OK, well, it’s a damn sight better than anything at Barton House, although I haven’t a clue what it’s supposed to represent. It has a surrealist feel to it. What I really can’t get my head around is how Madeleine lives with the artist who painted it. I mean, she’s so middle-class and conformist…and Nathaniel appears to be hovering off the planet somewhere. How does that work exactly?”

He gave a snort of laughter. “Nathaniel painted it before he married her. The stuff he does now is very tame. Jess describes it as marshmallow buildings with window-boxes. Which is about right. He hardly sells at all these days.”

“How much did you pay for yours?”

Peter pulled a face. “Five thousand quid eleven years ago, and it’s worth hardly anything now. I had it valued for the divorce. In terms of investment, it was a disaster…but, as a canvas, it still fascinates me. When I bought it, Nathaniel told me that the clue to what it represents is the repetitive Edvard Munch face-the angst-filled scream.”

I waited. “OK,” I said after a moment. “I recognized it in the faces…but it doesn’t help me much. Is it hell?”

“In a way.” He paused. “I thought you might recognize the emotions. It depicts a panic attack. Munch suffered anxiety most of his life and The Scream is usually described as an expression of intense anguish or fear.”

I lifted a wry eyebrow.

“You didn’t see that?”

“Not really. Why are the houses alive? Why make them unstable? I thought agoraphobics saw them as places of safety. And why put human faces on the animals? Animals don’t suffer anxiety…or not to the extent that humans do.”

“I don’t think you can apply logic to it, Marianne. Panic’s an irrational response.”

The “Marianne” caught me off-guard as usual. I still thought of it as my mother’s name and did a mouth-dropping double-take whenever it was used. I think it was on the tip of Peter’s tongue to admit he knew who I really was but I spoke before he could. “He can’t have painted it during an attack…it’s too detailed and meticulous. At the very least, his hands would have been shaking.”

Peter shrugged. “Who says it was his panic attack? Perhaps he witnessed someone else’s.”

“Whose?”

Another shrug.

“Not Madeleine’s,” I said in disbelief. “She doesn’t have the imagination to worry herself into a box. In any case, if she was his inspiration, wouldn’t he still be painting like that?”

“I don’t know what his themes are now. Madeleine talks about abstract reflections on the human condition…but I don’t know if that’s her or Nathaniel speaking. Whichever, it’s a fairly desperate spin to make up for a spectacular loss of talent. He makes a living from teaching at the moment.”

“How old is he?”

“Mid-thirties. He was twenty-four when he painted the picture I have.”

“And Madeleine’s what? Thirty-nine…forty? When did they marry?”

“Ninety-four.”

Ten years ago. I did a few sums in my head. “Which makes him a bit of a toy-boy. Perhaps she’s not as conventional as I thought. Jess said she has an eleven-year-old son. Is Nathaniel his father?”

“As far as I know. They married a few months after he was born.”

“What did Lily think about that?”

“Exactly what you’d expect,” Peter said with a smile.

“She’d have preferred a wedding and grandchildren in the correct order?”

He nodded.

“Most mothers would.” I gave a rueful shake of my head. “It just shows how wrong you can be about people. I’d have put money on Madeleine marrying a rich older man and popping her baby out after a respectable nine months. So where did she and Nathaniel meet? I don’t get the feeling she’s been hanging around art exhibitions all her life.”

“Here,” said Peter dryly, tapping the floor with his foot. “About where you’re standing. I was having a chat with Nathaniel when Madeleine turned up. He didn’t stand a chance once she found out who he was, although I don’t know what he saw in her…unless it was undiluted admiration. She couldn’t tell one end of a paintbrush from the other, but she certainly knew how to flatter him.”

Once she found out who he was…? “Did he live in Winterbourne Barton?”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?”

Peter stared into his coffee. “Work it out for yourself-it’s hardly quantum mechanics.”

I must have been extraordinarily dense, because I couldn’t see what he was getting at. “Why can’t you tell me?”

“Hippocratic oath,” he said with a good-humoured grin. “I’d lose patients if I couldn’t keep a still tongue in my head…particularly in a place like this where gossip spreads like wildfire. In any case, life’s too short to fight other people’s wars.”

Wars…? “I’ve only met two people who seem to be at each other’s throats-” I broke off as the penny dropped. “Oh, I see! Art school…panic attacks…Did Madeleine take Nathaniel from Jess? Is that why they loathe each other?” I saw from his expression that I was right. “No wonder Jess doesn’t like flattery. It must be a hell of a sore point if Madeleine laid it on with a trowel.”

“It was her own fault,” Peter said unsympathetically. “She was far too free with her criticism of Nathaniel’s work, and that’s not an easy thing to live with. Madeleine’s tea and sympathy was much more attractive.”

“If he’s lost his edge, then maybe he needed the criticism.”

“Without a doubt…but he’s a weaker character than Jess. He sulks when his ego’s not being massaged.”

“He sounds a pain in the arse,” I said bluntly, remembering one or two men in my past who were similar. “How long were they together?”

He didn’t answer immediately, apparently weighing up how much he could tell me with a good conscience. “It’s hardly a secret. Two years. She met him in her first term. It might have lasted if she’d stayed in London, but there wasn’t much hope for it after the accident. She set up a studio for him at the farm but he stopped using it by the summer of ninety-three.” He took a thoughtful sip of his coffee. “The only reason she took his departure badly was because he left her for Madeleine. She wouldn’t have turned a hair if it had been anyone else.”

“What did Lily say?”

His eyes creased with amusement again. “Why are you so interested in Lily’s reactions?”

I shrugged. “I’m wondering why Jess remained so close to her. If Madeleine had stolen a man of mine, I wouldn’t have gone on mowing her mother’s lawn. Supposing Madeleine and Nathaniel had turned up while I was doing it? Imagine the embarrassment. I’d be afraid they were laughing at me behind my back.”

“I’m not sure Jess would care. She’s completely impervious to what people say about her.”

“Now, maybe, but not then. If she was never fazed by anything, she wouldn’t have had panic attacks,” I pointed out.

Peter ran a thoughtful hand around his jaw, as if I’d reminded him of something he’d forgotten. “Lily never spoke about it,” he said, “but she did say once that Madeleine judged worth by how highly something was valued by someone else.”

It sounded like a good description. “So does Nathaniel still get undiluted admiration,” I asked curiously, “or did he lose his shine when his sales dropped off?”

“Pass.”

I laughed. “I’ll take that for a yes. I’ll bet he’s regretting his decision now. Did Lily like him?”

“She never really knew him. Madeleine always visited on her own.”

“You must have some idea.”

“Not really. Lily was a very discreet woman where her family was concerned, which is probably why she got on so well with Jess. I don’t think Jess blamed her for Madeleine’s behaviour, but I doubt they ever talked about it.”

“Except Jess slit her wrists in Barton House,” I pointed out, “which, at the very least, suggests she wanted Lily to know she was hurting.”

The good humour vanished immediately from Peter’s face. “Who told you that?”

“Madeleine.”

He looked angry. “In future I’d advise you to take anything she tells you with a hefty pinch of salt. She rewrites history to suit herself.” He took a breath through his nose. “I hope you haven’t repeated it to anyone.”

“Of course not. Who would I repeat it to?”

“Jess?”

“No.”

He relaxed a little. “If Madeleine heard that story from her mother, she must have misunderstood what Lily was saying.” A carefully evasive statement, I thought.

“It’s not true then?”

He couldn’t bring himself to give a straightforward “no,” so he equivocated. “It’s a ridiculous suggestion. No one looks for an audience in those circumstances.”

They do if they want to draw attention to themselves, I thought. There was a long history of fanatics killing themselves in public for the sake of a cause, and the shock waves were always tremendous. Perhaps that had been Jess’s motive, for I didn’t doubt the suicide bid was true. Even without the scars on her wrists, Peter’s obvious discomfort at my knowing would have persuaded me.

I made some banal remarks in agreement, while wondering if he thought I was the only person Madeleine had told. I had the impression that it was he who had divulged the secret, and not Lily, which is why he was so uncomfortable. I found his question about whether I’d repeated the story to Jess particularly strange. Did he think she was unaware that Madeleine knew about it? Or was he worried that reminders of suicide might push her into trying again? I thought of the casual way she’d referred to my interest in her wrists and her indifference to rebutting accusations of “knifing strangers.”

“You’re living in cloud-cuckoo-land if you think Jess doesn’t know the secret’s out,” I said abruptly. “I didn’t mention it but she did. She talked about the scars on her wrists, and Madeleine spreading her poison, and how she’s given up trying to convince people that she has no plans to knife them.” I paused. “I expect Madeleine’s worked her version up to put Jess in a bad light, but she was bound to gossip about it. There’s no love lost between them.”

“What else did she tell you?”

“Jess or Madeleine?”

“Madeleine.”

“That Jess’s family was poor…that her grandmother immigrated to Australia to get away from her son…that Jess is a lesbian.” I watched the anger gather in his face again. “She also said she was a stalker…that she makes threatening phone calls and takes revenge when she’s rejected. Oh, and she’s appalled that you didn’t warn me how disturbed Jess is.” I smiled slightly. “Should you have done?”

“No.”

“Does she take revenge? Madeleine told me to check with Mary Galbraith at Hollyhock Cottage.”

Peter gave a frustrated shake of his head. “Well, you’ll certainly get confirmation from Mary,” he said. “She’s convinced Jess is out to get her and her husband.”

“Why?”

Another frustrated shake of the head. “Ralph Galbraith drove into the back of Jess’s Land Rover in the middle of the village, and Jess called the police when she smelt drink on his breath.” He nodded at my questioning look. “Three times over the limit, lost his licence and was ordered to retake his test at the end of the ban. Mary was very upset about it. She said there was no reason for the police to be involved-it was a small shunt and no one was hurt-and it’s only because Jess is vindictive that they were called.”

I remembered her confiscation of my car keys. “She has draconian views on dangerous driving.”

“She has draconian views on everything,” he said. “Compromise doesn’t exist in her vocabulary. In this case, a blind eye would have been kind. Ralph Galbraith’s over seventy and never drove more than twenty miles an hour, or farther than Tesco’s and back, so he was a hardly a danger to other drivers. Plus he’s unlikely to pass the test again at his age, so he and Mary have to rely on friends and taxis to take them shopping. I’m afraid most people thought Jess behaved badly…me included. She could have left them their independence.”

I decided to keep out of that argument. Everyone’s feelings would have been very different if Ralph had run over a child at twenty miles an hour when he was three times over the limit. “Why would Jess be out to get them? Shouldn’t they be out to get her?”

He gave an abrupt laugh. “You can’t apply logic to it. The Galbraiths are one of the couples who found Lily in their bed, and Jess accused them of cruelty because they drove her home and abandoned her without offering to help. The car incident was the icing on the gingerbread-gave her the chance to shop Ralph to the police-or that’s how it’s viewed in the village at least.”

“When did it happen?”

“Four or five months ago.”

“How long have the Galbraiths lived here?”

“Eight years. Why do you ask?”

“Just trying to understand where stalking fits in.” I repeated as nearly as I could what Madeleine had said about Jess’s fixations and her vindictive reactions when she was rejected.

“I’m surprised you went to see her,” Peter said with heavy irony. “Weren’t you afraid of being her next victim?”

“I might have been if I’d believed Madeleine. I’d have given her the cold shoulder…which is what everyone else seems to do.” I watched him. “Except you. Is that because you’re her doctor or because you’re better informed?”

“About what?”

I shrugged. “Nathaniel? Does anyone else know he used to be with Jess?”

He moved back to his chair and folded his tall frame on to the seat. “Presumably anyone who was around at the time does…but it was a fairly private thing. If Jess had worn her heart on her sleeve, it might have created a few waves, but she couldn’t have shown less interest at losing him. Which is why you shouldn’t place too much weight on Lily’s remark about value…or not where Jess is concerned at least. Boyfriends come and go at that age. Do you even remember the names of the ones you had at twenty?”

“I do, as a matter of fact, even though none of mine lasted longer than three months. I’d certainly remember a man I spent two years with.” I eyed him with amusement. “Your experience might be different, though. Perhaps you never knew the girls’ names in the first place.”

“Ouch!”

“What other reason is there for Jess and Madeleine to hate each other?”

He rested his chin on his hands. “I’ve no idea, but whatever it is existed long before Nathaniel jumped ship. He was just a bone in an endless dogfight. It’s Lily they’ve been squabbling over…not Nathaniel.”

“Perhaps it’s sibling rivalry,” I suggested ironically. “They’re not half-sisters, are they? Could Lily have slept with Jess’s father?”

Peter gave a snort of laughter. “Not unless she was drunk. His mother was her maid, for God’s sake. It’d be like touching pitch.”

“It happens.”

“Not in this case,” he said positively. “Frank Derbyshire wouldn’t have done anything so crass. He was far too fond of his wife.”

“What about the other way round…Madeleine’s father and Jess’s mother?”

He shook his head. “Jenny Derbyshire had better taste. In any case, it would only be sibling rivalry if Lily was Jess’s mother…and she wasn’t. I can guarantee that Jess is a Derbyshire through and through.” He said it firmly, as if the idea of anything else offended him. “The jealousy’s mostly on Madeleine’s side. She had no time for her mother until Jess took an interest, then suddenly she was all over her…and Lily wouldn’t play. I’m sure the remark about value was in reference to herself. Madeleine was never so fond of Lily as when Jess took to visiting Barton House after her parents’ death.”

“Why wouldn’t Lily play?”

“She knew it wouldn’t last. As soon as Madeleine was top dog again, she’d have dropped her like a hotcake. I think Lily felt she’d be better off setting them against each other.”

“She was probably right.”

Peter shook his head. “She enjoyed stirring too much…and it backfired on her. She used to refer to Jess as her ‘little stalker’ in front of Madeleine, and to Madeleine as her ‘little parasite’ in front of Jess. It wasn’t very clever of her. If they’d liked each other, they’d have treated it as a joke, but as they didn’t”-he smiled rather bitterly-“it just added fuel to the flames.”

“So how did the lesbian rumours start? I mean, if Jess had a relationship with a man, why does everyone assume she’s a dyke? Has she had affairs with women?”

A look of distaste crossed Peter’s face. “I don’t think that’s anyone’s business but hers.”

“Why on earth not?” I asked in surprise. “It’s perfectly legal…and she’s told me about your affairs. You’re not homophobic, are you?”

He glared at me. “Of course not.”

I shrugged. “There’s no ‘of course’ about it. Everyone else in Winterbourne Barton is homophobic. It’s like Zimbabwe-fifty years out of date and deeply ignorant. Robert Mugabe won’t tolerate gays so no one else does either…not if they want to keep a head on their shoulders.”

Peter rubbed his eyes. “She has two women working for her-Julie and Paula. They live together as an openly gay couple, and it may have something to do with that. The younger one, Julie, is Harry Sotherton’s granddaughter-he’s the old boy who used to work for Jess’s father and still helps out at the farm-and he asked Jess to take Julie on about ten years ago. She was twenty-five and married, but she left her husband a year or so later and moved herself and her children in with Jess. They stayed for about two months, then she set up home with Paula…which is when the tongues started wagging.”

“Why?”

His mouth twisted cynically. “Jess was the facilitator. She introduced them, and took Paula on to the payroll so that Julie could work flexitime around her children. Now she and Paula box and cox mornings and afternoon so that one of them’s always free to do the school run. It works very well.” He looked as if he was about to add a “but,” then changed his mind.

“But Winterbourne Barton doesn’t approve of lesbians bringing up children?”

“Harry’s wife certainly doesn’t. She’s had a lot to say on the subject…and she lays the blame at Jess’s door.”

“For enabling them to work?”

“For initiating her granddaughter into moral turpitude and depravity. She won’t accept that Julie’s a lesbian and thinks Jess ‘taught’ her”-he drew quote marks in the air-“then handed her over to big, butch Paula to finish the job. Julie’s very feminine, and looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”

“What does Harry say?”

“Nothing, just turns up for work every day and goes to see the great-grandchildren on his own. Julie won’t let Mrs. Sotherton near them.”

“Which makes Mrs. Sotherton worse, I suppose?” Peter nodded. “What about Lily? Presumably she didn’t condone moral turpitude in Winterbourne Valley?”

He smiled again and this time the smile reached his eyes. “Quite the reverse. She took it all in her stride. She said Jess was too inhibited to sleep with women, but she quite saw that Julie might, and had no doubts at all about Paula. I think she quite envied them as a matter of fact. She told me once that her life would have been very different if she’d had a loving wife instead of a ne’er-do-well husband.”

“Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.” I paused, but he didn’t say anything. “Where did Jess’s ‘loner’ tag come from? It’s a very schizophrenic view that has her offering beds to women and children on the one hand…and acting like a morose recluse on the other.”

“Pass.”

“Weirdo?”

“Spends her time with weasels…has photos of the dead on her walls…dresses like a man.” He spread his hands at my frown of impatience. “Best I can do. If she smiled or said good morning once in a while, it would do more to change people’s opinions than anything else.” He steepled his fingers in front of his nose. “But you’ll be wasting your breath if you tell her. She’s even more dismissive of advice on her lifestyle than she is on her art. Lily was constantly trying to change her, and it had no effect whatsoever.”

I wondered if he knew how obvious his feelings were. “You really like her, don’t you?”

He gave a muted laugh. “If you mean Lily, then, no. She was an evil-minded old bitch when the mood was on her.”

“I meant Jess.”

“I know.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll have to be making tracks soon. Was there anything else you wanted?”

It was smoothly done, but just as final as Jess’s earlier injunction to keep my mouth shut. I took the hint with good grace and left, but as I headed back to Barton House I couldn’t help wondering if Peter had made his soft spot for Jess as obvious to Madeleine. If so, it might explain a few things.

From: connie.burns@uknet.com

Sent: Thur 29/07/04 10:43

To: alan.collins@manchester-police.co.uk

Subject: Scan

Dear Alan,

Re: Scan of O’Connell’s documents

No. Even allowing for the poor quality of the original fax, the man in the photo is NOT MacKenzie/Harwood. MacKenzie is thinner-faced, thinner-lipped and his eyes are much paler. This man has dark eyes. Also, he looks younger. I can’t make any useful comments re the facts in the documents since they don’t relate to MacKenzie. NB: With the name and contact address for next of kin blacked out, this man could be anyone. Bill Fraser only has Alastair Surtees’s word that it’s Kenneth O’Connell.

Could you stress very strongly to Bill that I do not believe MacKenzie was wrongly identified to me? Our Iraqi guide took care to note the correct office, and I have no reason to think he made a mistake or that the academy’s records were out of date when I was told the next day that Kenneth O’Connell was still working there. The press corps was guaranteed free access to anyone at the academy, and several of my colleagues elected to do one-on-one interviews which were speedily arranged. Had O’Connell been wrongly identified as MacKenzie, then there was no reason for O’Connell not to speak to me. But if O’Connell was MacKenzie then he had every reason not to speak to me. Not least because he was using a fake identity.

I realize this casts major doubt on Alastair Surtees’s role-not to mention BG’s head office in Cape Town-but private security firms are making a fortune in Iraq, and none of them wants to kill the golden goose through the adverse publicity of an investigation. For this reason, I’m deeply sceptical about these “documents,” and my guess is Bill’s been sold a “dummy.”

FYI: At the suggestion of my boss in Baghdad, Dan Fry, who’s interested in pursuing the story, I’ve tracked down a Norwegian photographer who was in Sierra Leone in 2002. I remembered him doing a photo-montage of Paddy’s Bar-to show the post-war multinational interest in Freetown-and I hoped he might have a shot of MacKenzie. He’s sent through two prints with MacKenzie in the background, and a friend here is enhancing the best one to produce a workable and recognizable headshot.

Dan’s idea is to show it round the academy to see if anyone identifies it as Kenneth O’Connell. Clearly, if he succeeds, he will have a story on Alastair Surtees and BG’s operation in Iraq and Cape Town, although he’s willing to share any information with Bill before he breaks it. If Bill wants to contact him in advance his email address is: Dan@Fry.ishma.iq

Finally, if Bill is serious about nailing MacKenzie, would it be worth looking for the Mary MacKenzie on the envelope? She must be related to him, and I’m as sure as I can be that the address was Glasgow. NB: All the Brits in Freetown described Harwood’s accent as Glaswegian. I realize it’ll be like looking for “Mary Smith” in London, but if the rest of the family’s anything like Keith-i.e., violent-they might be known to the Glasgow police.

Hope this finds you well. I shall keep my fingers crossed for your son’s A levels. Does he want to be a policeman like you?

Best, Connie

PS. By far the easiest way to identify MacKenzie is by the winged scimitar at the base of his skull-not unlike the one David Beckham has, but smaller. MacKenzie seems to have a thing about feathers. Did I tell you he called the prostitutes in Sierra Leone “devil’s feathers”?

From: connie.burns@uknet.com

Sent: Tues 03/08/04 12:03

To: Dan Fry (Dan@Fry.ishma.iq)

Subject: MacKenzie photo

Attachments: DSC02643.JPG; Wcb=surtees (28KB)

Dear Dan,

We have lift off! I can’t claim much credit for this-there’s a woman here who’s a computer/photo whizz-and she’s finessed the end result to perfection. I sent the finished version to an Australian mate who was in Sierra Leone at the same time, with the tagline: “Do you recognize this face?” And he emailed straight back: “I’m surprised you’ve forgotten. It’s the woman-hater from Freetown, John Harwood.”

I know I’ve committed you to sharing information with Bill Fraser in Basra, but it is important, Dan. Please don’t let me down. You’ll still have your story on the Baycombe Group, but it will give Bill a chance to locate MacKenzie before Surtees spirits him out of the country, or he’s spooked into running himself. It may already have happened, but Bill should at least be able to find out where he’s gone and what name he’s using now. If I’m wrong, and O’Connell isn’t MacKenzie, then I’ll apologize to everyone for wasting their time. If I’m right, you’ll have a good, exposing piece on the lax vetting procedures of UK security firms.

Time’s fairly short as Bill leaves Basra at the end of this month, and I doubt his replacement will be as sympathetic/interested as he is. Also, I’d rather you didn’t give information to Jerry Greenhough in Baghdad. 1) He’s leaving at the end of September; 2) A fake UK passport isn’t his problem; 3) He won’t include you in the loop, and by default me.

I’ll keep fingers crossed for a speedy result, and please keep watching your back. Of course, I’m worried about you. I’m worried about all of you out there.

Love,

Connie

From: Dan@Fry.ishma.iq

Sent: Wed 11/08/04 10:25

To: connie.burns@uknet.com

Subject: Good news/bad news

Good news: 3 positive IDs of the photo as Kenneth O’Connell.

Bad news: Alastair Surtees now claiming that, “following concerns raised,” he conducted his own in-house investigation and “gave Kenneth O’Connell his papers two weeks ago.” He has no idea where he went or what name he travelled under, but he allowed him to keep the O’Connell passport as he had no authority to confiscate it. Bill Fraser predictably furious and now going hammer and tongs at Surtees. As am I.

Will forward my copy on the Baycombe Group ASAP.

NB. There’s no record of a Kenneth O’Connell/John Harwood/Keith MacKenzie flying out of Baghdad airport, but Bill thinks he probably hitched a lift with an army vehicle and drove out through Kuwait. Frankly, with Iraq’s borders so porous, he could have left through any of them.

Bill seems to think it was my idea to show the photograph at the academy. I haven’t disabused him, but is there anything you haven’t told me about MacKenzie/O’Connell? Did he have anything to do with your abduction, Connie? Because despite your assurance that he didn’t, I’m having doubts.

Do you still not trust me?

Love, Dan

From: Brian.Burns@S.A.Wines.com

Sent: Thur 12/08/04 08:52

To: connie.burns@uknet.com

Subject: Telephone calls

Darling,

Written in haste. I’m in a meeting all morning but will call this afternoon when I’m back at my desk. Your mother’s terribly upset about the row last evening re the nuisance phone calls. When she asked if Jess Derbyshire could be making them, she meant, was it possible-i.e., had you given Jess our phone number or might she have seen it written down somewhere? (Be fair, C. It was you who planted the seed a couple of weeks ago, otherwise the idea of Jess making them would never have occurred to Mum.)

From the way you flew off the handle, I suspect you’re more worried than angry, but I don’t think there’s any reason to assume these calls are aimed at you. An adviser at British Telecom suggested they’re the result of random dialling-probably a man-who punched in numbers until a woman answered, and now uses “redial” for the thrill of it. We’ve had numerous calls from people trying to contact you, and we’ve followed your instructions to the letter-said you were out of London and taken their names and numbers to pass on to you. We’ve refused to be drawn into further detail, even when we’ve recognized the voices of your friends.

This is particularly true of this nuisance caller. Whoever’s doing it only rings during the day, and your mother hangs up as soon as she’s greeted by silence at the other end. In fact, she has no idea whether it’s a man or a woman as they never speak. There were some 20 calls between Monday lunchtime and yesterday p.m., but dialling 1471 doesn’t help as the caller’s number is withheld. I’ve now asked British Telecom to bar all withheld numbers, which means calls from abroad will be automatically rejected. It’s a bore in the short term, but hopefully this pest will lose interest when there’s no response.

Poor Marianne wouldn’t have mentioned the calls if she thought you would react the way you did, and now we’re concerned that you’re not coping as well as we thought. We both feel we should advance our visit. She’s asked me to talk to you about it as she thinks you’re more likely to say “yes” if I make the request. I’m not sure that’s true, C, but I will phone as soon as I’m free. In the meantime, will you call your mother? You know how she hates falling out with anyone-but particularly you.

All my love, Dad xxx

From: alan.collins@manchester-police.co.uk

Sent: Fri 13/08/04 16:19

To: connie.burns@uknet.com

Subject: Keith MacKenzie

Dear Connie,

I had some difficulty understanding your email. If you re-read you will see that it’s very confused. However, there seem to be three things worrying you: 1) MacKenzie has left Iraq. 2) He’ll come looking for you. 3) Your parents have been receiving nuisance calls.

Re 1) I can’t see MacKenzie returning to the UK. His most likely course is to go back to Africa where he knows he can find work. That being said, I posted him some time ago for passport-related offences, and Glasgow has your photofit and his 2 known aliases. Ditto Customs & Excise, who will pick him up if he tries to enter the country under any of those names.

Re 2) You say he must know you accused him of serial murder because of the emails you copied to Alastair Surtees. In fact Surtees denies showing them to him because he thought your allegations were malicious. Bill Fraser doesn’t place much reliance on this but, in either event, I believe you’re worrying unnecessarily. You’re the one person who can identify MacKenzie, so he’ll stay as far away as possible from you-whether his crime is rape and murder, or merely forging passports. It is not in his interests to draw attention to himself.

Re 3) Coincidences do happen, and it would be wrong to assume the timing of these nuisance calls to your parents suggests MacKenzie is in the country. Your parents should report the problem to the police as it sounds as if someone’s casing their property, but without very good evidence that MacKenzie: a) knows their phone number; b) their location; c) is in the UK-then giving his name as a suspect will confuse the issue.

Re the clear alarm in your email. You understand that my advice/conclusions are based on the information you’ve given me. In order that neither of us is in error about that information, I have it listed as follows:

1. Following the serial murders in Freetown, John Harwood’s attack on a prostitute and my remark about “the foreign contingent,” you began to wonder if Harwood was responsible for the women’s deaths.

2. You mentioned your suspicions to some of your colleagues, who threw cold water on your ideas, and you didn’t take them any further. Shortly afterwards you left Freetown, but not before Harwood showed you an envelope with the name “Mary MacKenzie.” At that point you remembered he was calling himself Keith MacKenzie in Kinshasa.

3. Two years later, you recognized him in Baghdad but were told his name was Kenneth O’Connell. When you raised the issue with Alastair Surtees, you were dismissed as unreliable and malicious.

4. You searched the Iraqi press for similar murders to those in Freetown. You found two, attempted to raise interest among Iraqi journalists, got nowhere, so informed me and by extension Bill Fraser.

5. You copied those emails to Alastair Surtees.

6. Shortly afterwards, you were abducted on your way to the airport by an unknown group who released you three days later. You were blindfolded the entire time and were unable to give the police any useful information. Because your abduction was unlike any other, and because you’ve refused to talk about it, this has led to you being branded “a faker.”

7. On your return to the UK, you went into hiding and have never told your story. As far as I know, I am one of the few people in contact with you-certainly the only policeman as you refuse to give your email address to Bill Fraser-but you have not made me party to your address or telephone number.

8. Your mobile and laptop were stolen during your abduction. Therefore, any information stored on them-contact details of family and friends, notes/emails re the murders in Freetown and Baghdad-is available to your abductor(s).

9. You are now terrified that MacKenzie is looking for you.

At the risk of repeating myself, Connie, you know how to contact me if there’s anything you wish to add. I cannot force you to say anything. If I could, I would have done it when you returned to England.

I won’t pretend I can guarantee a positive result on a crime/crimes committed abroad but, if MacKenzie is as dangerous as you claim, there’s everything to be gained by trying. Not least for your sake. Fear of retribution is a powerful disincentive to speak out, but I hope you know by now that anything you say to me will be treated in confidence.

Kind regards as ever,

Alan

DI Alan Collins, Greater Manchester Police