The Whole World

CHAPTER 6

I had two opportunities to shove Richard into the river, and didn’t act on even one.

Do you see the kind of restraint I put on around our family?

The first chance to push him was as everyone boarded their punts. It was darkish already, and the boats were lit by candles in glass lanterns. Thank goodness the driving rains of the past week had stopped.

This time of year, Scudamore’s doesn’t do daily business, so there isn’t any crowding. We were our own crowd, though, around the weir of the Mill Pond. The women had high heels on, and narrow or short dresses, so boarding was a comedy. I got Gwen and Dora in, and then leapt up to Alice ’s other side. Gwen and Dora are my responsibility, and Alice is Richard’s, but this was their day, so I helped. They’d just been married at a church in the city centre. Richard was in his only suit. How did my brother get to forty-two with only one suit? And a casual scarf that must have come from Alice, or from our mother. And a coat because it was bloody cold.

As Alice stepped in, dozens of cameras clicked like popcorn.

Richard leaned over, to hand champagne bottles into the punts, to pass out hot water bottles for guests’ laps, to tuck a blue plaid blanket up over Alice ’s skirt. I could have turned around to hand him something and knocked him off the end of the dock into the water. He would have been fine. There would have been shrieks, then everyone would have laughed. He would have changed into something unsuitable, which would have ended up being funny. Ruining the groom’s clothes is nothing like ruining the bride’s.

Of course I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it in the middle of the river either, when we were trading places. That was my second missed opportunity. We had chauffeurs, but everyone goaded Richard to punt, and me too. I stood at the back, pushing us through the water, and then it was his turn. For half a minute we both stood at the end together, and the front of the boat sat up and begged like a dog. I had to get the pole into his hands and get myself back crouched into the body of the punt again. And it all went without a wobble because I don’t take out petty frustrations by bullying my brother.

I take them out passive-aggressively on Gwen. She loves psychology! She’d say that admitting it is the first step!

In a normal family, I would have been the child who had grown up and done everything right. It’s not normal to want your kids to be all in their heads forever, right? Because all I want is for Dora to not make any permanent mistakes in her teens, and then for her to get an education, and have a good job, and choose a man who has sense and kindness. This is pretty basic stuff. For some reason, in our family it’s a good thing to still be living at university as a grown man, theorising. In a normal family, actually doing something would be expected and appreciated. But in this family, we applaud thinking. Thinking about thinking.

I went to university. I thought. I was good at it too. But when I hit statistics, I just couldn’t fake it anymore. I managed the calculations, I understood why the numbers worked. I just couldn’t get past the meaninglessness. One thing being more likely than another is irrelevant to what actually is. Someone is dead or alive. Someone is here or gone. Statistically, the truth may be unlikely, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Potential life has statistics; real life is binary. Things are or aren’t. That something shouldn’t have happened doesn’t change that it did.

I finished my exams, but I did something practical with them. I have a real job and I do real things. Richard thinks about potentials. He theorises the origins of life, he lets his religion interfere, and he qualifies everything he proposes, citing “scientific humility.” Atheists hate him, and so do fundamentalists. The people who like him mostly misunderstand. Students take his advice, which baffles me. Two women have married him.

My family should have seen it coming. Me, I mean. Even choosing Churchill instead of Magdalene-Dad had been at Magdalene-had been a rebellion. I chose a Cambridge college with no history or architectural significance. Ha! Take that, family!

They acted like it didn’t matter.

Dad died within a year of my signing on with the force. And the point, the whole point, of joining the police had been to be able to actually do something about what happens in this world. But he died on a research trip outside the country. Nothing nefarious, just a bad accident. There was nothing to solve. I’d been as useless as the rest of them.

When the punts arrived in Grantchester, Richard was the first to step out. He helped Alice out, then our mother. I think he would have stayed there, personally emptying the boats of every guest, but Alice nudged him away. She pulled him to the field path, where waiters stood in the tall grass with champagne. The men had jackets, while the female servers shivered in their blouses. The drama of this setup was the doing of Alice ’s parents. Their daughter’s first, they hoped only, wedding.

Gwen’s shoe heels sank into the wet ground with every step. She clung to my arm. We’ve been married for sixteen years.

At last reaching The Orchard, a rustic tearoom tarted up with lanterns, there was one last hurdle. I’d forgotten about that stile. Two benches had been stacked and threaded through the fence to make a way over. Keeps the cows out. People can clamber over it. I didn’t mind, but if Gwen ripped her tights I’d hear about it all night. Richard set the bar for the rest of us by lifting Alice over. Great.

Next came photos and the smell of dinner. The canvas sling folding chairs in the garden were nearly dried out from the past week’s rain. The mud under the grass stuck to everyone’s shoes.

“Dora!” Gwen hissed to our daughter, miming buttoning up. Dora has cleavage now. She pretended to misunderstand and continued in conversation with some boy. He’s older than her, I think. Most boys her age are shorter, but he had an eyeful from his height.

“It’s all right,” I said automatically.

Richard waved us over to get into a picture, so we went. He put his arm around my shoulders. That’s the kind of person he is: making sure people feel comfortable and included. Which makes me uncomfortable.

Of course coats were removed for the photographer. Alice had on a dress that wasn’t big. It was almost a normal dress, not one of those bride dresses. It was normal, and it covered her up, but watching her take off her coat, watching Richard watch her… it was far too personal. It was like watching her strip. They’ve made this huge deal of not living together before the wedding, not sleeping together, which is why this wedding is in the winter, right? They didn’t want to wait. That’s what I think. Which is fine, whatever you want to do with yourself is fine. They’re getting married to sleep together; I got married because Gwen and I had been sleeping together and after six months she said the next step is a ring. Fine. It’s all fine. We’re all adults. We all know that marriage is a kind of containment system for sex, which… in my line of work I’ve seen enough of the crap that can come from messing with that. Sex can use some containment. So, all right. But still, I could do without the looks Richard and Alice were shooting each other. It was embarrassing.

Gwen came up from behind and circled me with her arms. “Do you remember when we got married?” she asked, her chin on my shoulder. Still tall, still well organised, still herself.

I wasn’t quick enough to answer. “At least pretend to be happy,” she whispered sharply, and walked away.

I patted at my suit pocket as if my phone had vibrated and waved to excuse myself out the gate. Across the road was that old church famous for its clock reading “ten to three.” To rhyme with “tea” in a poem.

I jogged up the street, and the wind pushed against my face. It felt great.

I turned in to follow the footpath. I’d walked it a dozen times. I used to come this way into Grantchester with my flatmates from Churchill: through Newnham and then fields and then to the Green Man pub. Once, I got so drunk that I couldn’t manage the cow gate between fields on the way back. You could walk over a kind of grate, or you could use the swinging gate, a “kissing gate”; either are too challenging for cows. I swear I was no better than a cow. You could have locked me up in a pasture with one of those. My friends couldn’t believe it. They mooooo-ed at me from the other side of the gate. I wouldn’t give in and use the grate side. I persisted with the kissing gate. All you have to do is push it forward, follow it in, step to the side, and then push it past back behind you. I kept thinking I was standing aside but I just kept pulling the gate into me. After a while I didn’t even try, I just pulled it into me, over and over, to keep everyone laughing. Then I’d climbed over it and fallen on my face.

I missed dinner. They were pushing back tables for the barn dance when I got back. More people had arrived. Gwen was busy but she would deal with me later. “Work,” I mouthed at her from across the room. She rolled her eyes.

“Dance with me,” said the bride, coming up behind me. Richard was paired up with his new mother-in-law. Our father is dead so… I would be the obvious counterpart. Where was Uncle Max, damn it? Or Albert-he counts, he’s a cousin. Why weren’t Richard and Alice dancing with each other anyway? No doubt Richard would say, “We can be selfish on our honeymoon, Morris, but the wedding itself is about our families, not only ourselves…”

“No, no, no…” I demurred. “I don’t even dance with Gwen. Sorry… Alice.” Damn. I hate that I still hesitate. It’s been long enough that I shouldn’t get caught anymore by Richard’s successive two wives having the same name.

She had noticed my pause. “Am I still the ‘new Alice,’ the ‘second Alice ’?” she asked.

“No, of course not,” I quickly assured her, embarrassed that she knew we had ever referred to her that way. “You’re just Alice.” Richard’s first wife has been downgraded to “first Alice” or “other Alice” or “Mrs. Lapham,” which is her last name now. She’d married again too.

Gwen swooped in from behind. “You must dance with the bride,” she chided me. She took my coat. Apparently, I would dance.

The caller gathered us four forward. I put my hand on Alice ’s waist and followed his instructions. Finally the music started up with a waltz and we made a swirl in the centre of the room that pushed the rest of the guests back. I willed them to join in rather than stare at us. “Sorry,” she said as we turned, obviously embarrassed by my reluctance.

“No, no,” I protested. “I don’t mind.”

Around and around. “You’re good at this,” Alice said over the music. I smiled in return. I’m not actually good at it.

Alice is kind. Richard knows what he’s doing; both his Alices were good choices. There had been a divorce, yes, but it had been more of a widowing than a divorce. Alice, the first Alice, had become a different person. Of course people were gossiping about that. Members of our family were telling it to Alice ’s family (this Alice: Alice the doctor, Alice the bride). Dora is the worst about repeating it-she finds the story impossibly romantic and dramatic and tragic. She’s fourteen.

I thanked Alice for the dance. She nodded and caught her breath back and partnered with someone else for the next set of instructions. I wondered when she and Richard would dance together. At what point does selflessness become ridiculous? At what point does confidence become showing off?

Gwen appeared at my side, pulling me in to learn the reel. I knew it would go like that. If I danced with Alice, there’d be no excuse. Which is why I hadn’t wanted to dance with Alice. Do you see how these things go?

Eventually, the band took a break. Someone put on a CD to keep the music going. I was tempted to slip out again-Gwen would give me hell anyway, why not earn it-but the song pulled me up short. I’d played it before.

When I’d swapped classical violin for fiddle music, in my Churchill days, Richard had been the only one in the family ever to come hear me play.

We played mostly for folk dance groups. Supporting dancers has a different feeling to it from playing concerts. There’s more obligation to fit in, and less obligation to impress. It suited me fine.

Alice, the first one, had played flute with us. During the two months she’d been with us I’d been going out with the sister of one of my fellow constables, but it was nothing serious. I wanted Alice. She liked me too. She was casual but kind of deep, with long skirts and long hair. It was the eighties but she was still flower-child-like, and so pretty that I couldn’t really think straight. We’d already messed about once, not a lot, just kissing this one time that had been cut short. She was finishing up her last year at the local polytechnic, which she chose over university because she said she wanted to play music, not study it. I never in all my life would have thought there was something in her for Richard, who’d just that past spring handed in his thesis and was already a Fellow. Never.

He’d come to hear us out of kindness. This was the tune I played as a solo. Alice and James and Mick stepped down off the stage to give me space. James and Mick took off outside to smoke, but Alice stayed to listen. Richard stood next to her. She made him dance-he’s as bad as I am, but a more willing sport about it.

By the end of the number, she’d invited him to join us at the Folk Festival the next week. Later I asked him not to, so he didn’t. It was supposed to be a date.

The festival was loud and good. Everyone sweated in the heat. At the end of the first day I leaned up against her, with her back to a wall, but she said there were people around. So I asked her to come back to my flat. This is where everything went to a crazy place. This is where she told me, and I believe she thought she was being nice, that a week ago she would have gone with me in a minute. Apparently, I’m a really great person, and she would have been flattered for the chance to go home with me. That’s what she said. And I wanted to know what was wrong.

She said that she’d gone to Richard’s church, and she’d had this “experience,” and she was trying to figure out what it all meant. It had to have been just that past weekend. Just one Sunday. She was adamant that it wasn’t a Richard thing; it was, she said, something bigger than that. And then she said the usual about Jesus and God and it’s nothing I haven’t overheard for most of my life, starting when Richard read his first C. S. Lewis at age twelve. She said she was going to put things on hold for a while, while she figured out what she thought about all that. Meaning, I’m reading between the lines, that she wasn’t going to have sex with anyone for at least a while. Definitely not that night.

“All right,” I said. “We can just-” Meaning, I don’t know, just fool around. Something short of everything.

She cut me off. “It’s amazing,” she gushed. “It’s all-Jesus made us, and we’re all special, right? We’re beautiful…” And the way she said “beautiful” cracked, and then she cried. “I’m beautiful,” she said between gulpy sobs. She said it like it was news.

She asked me if I wanted to come with her to church next week. I said no.

Ten months later they were married. Two years after that a teenager in the Bible study she ran smashed a brick into her skull. He was, he’d said, in love with her.

Alice survived, but she was different. Part of the front of her brain was broken.

By then I was married to Gwen, who was waddling in that pregnancy posture women get.

Richard stayed married to Alice for four more years. He didn’t complain. Her mind was changed and her manner was changed, but he remained steadfast to the new person inside her body. Then she wanted to marry someone she’d met at the rehabilitation clinic, who’d had a similar injury. So he granted her a divorce.

“Aw, you look sad.” Suddenly Carmen was next to me. Our sister. I didn’t feel like responding to that.

“Come on,” she said. “Have a little fun. Are you still jealous?”

I stopped myself from answering. Answering Carmen just leads to trouble, gives her stuff to analyse. “Get off it, Carmen,” I said.

She’s convinced that I haven’t “let go” of the first Alice, that I hold it against Richard for “stealing” her. Which is ridiculous, because Alice was never mine. Sure, I’d liked her, but we’d never been anything. We might have become something, but we hadn’t. So how could he steal? And this is Richard. That’s a commandment, one of ten. He doesn’t steal.

I suddenly noticed a difference in her. “What did you do that for?” I gestured at Carmen’s head. Her hair was back in some kind of lump on her head. It’s usually more like a bush around her face. She and Mother argue about it at every family gathering.

She rolled her eyes. “You only notice things that don’t matter.”

“No, really,” I said. I wasn’t going to let this go. “What made you give in?” I grinned. This was getting to her. This was older brother stuff. I could handle this.

“Do you want to know what got to me?” She poked my chest. “My respect for Richard’s happiness got to me. Accepting that this event is about him, not me, got to me. My desire for a conflict-free celebration, with Mum having no excuse for an argument, got to me. I wish that kind of thing would get to you.” Then she walked away.

All right. If she wanted to talk about that, we would talk about it. Walking away was no fair. I followed her.

“I’m going to the loo,” she insisted. There was one up here, but she took the stairs toward the ones in the corridor. Just to get away from me.

“Wait,” I said, following her to the narrow corridor.

She stopped so I could say something, but I froze up. “The thing is,” I stammered, “I don’t know what you think the problem is.”

She sighed with exaggerated patience. That sound was the background score of my entire childhood.

“You’ve always been jealous of Richard,” she said, stretching “always” out long and thin. “You don’t like when he gets anything.”

This wasn’t true. I shook my head. “We don’t want the same things, Carmen, so what exactly am I supposed to be jealous of?” Someone exited the ladies’ and we had to flatten against the wall to give her room to pass.

Carmen said it loud enough that the woman turned to look at me: “You both wanted Alice.”

“This is what I think about Alice,” I exploded, too loudly. So I lowered my voice. “The first one, all right? The first one. He ruined her. He made her into something different, and that difference led her into harm’s way. I know those kind of kids she was working with. She had no business trusting thugs like that. There’s no way she should have let herself alone with them, let her guard down. She trusted Richard and his ideas about how the world works. She sacrificed herself-that’s what I hold against him. He turned a vibrant person into a vulnerable person. Now she’s gone. Her body’s still alive, and someone lives there, but it isn’t her anymore. She’s gone. He didn’t take her away from me, Carmen. This isn’t about me. He took her away from the world. He took her away, full stop. Now she’s gone.”

Carmen smiled. She had a look of glory on her face. “That’s a breakthrough, Morris.” Then she hugged me.

“Christ, it’s not a breakthrough, Carmen. It’s just-the way things are.”

She released me and wagged a finger. She was still smiling when our mother emerged.

“Oh!” Mum said, flustered for a moment to be confronted right out of the toilet, as if she’d been caught coming out of a stranger’s hotel room. Her hands travelled over her dress, patting it to ensure everything was secure. “I despise public toilets,” she announced. Then, suddenly, “I’m glad you see I was right, Carmen. You look like an adult. A lovely adult.”

“Cheers, Mum,” said Carmen, smiling fake-brightly, and I had to give her credit for not saying more.

“Really,” I asked, after Mother had walked past, “why now? You’ve been defying her with your hair for a good thirty years. What makes this time different?”

“You don’t even notice, do you? This is hard on Richard. His friend is missing. You’re supposed to be finding him. He almost delayed the wedding, out of respect, but I persuaded him not to. You dredged the river, Morris… He was a wreck.”

She expounded further but I’d stopped listening at “You’re supposed to be finding him.” I’d released Miranda Bailey that morning. A regular had been hauled in the night before with Nick’s credit card who swore he’d mugged Nick near East Road after Miranda was already back at her hotel. We were at a dead end.

“Would it be better if I hadn’t come? Do you think the trail’s going cold because I took a day off? Do you think finding someone is just a matter of persistence? Is that what you think? It’s not. Some people don’t get found. Some people…” I grappled for a metaphor my family would understand. “… Some people… there isn’t the data available. With incomplete data, the conclusions are necessarily conjecture…” I stopped because it was absurd.

“No one is blaming you,” she said in an awful, placating tone. But everyone was. I was.

The band was on again. Richard and Alice danced together, finally. Everyone else had joined in too. Gwen danced with Uncle Max. Her head swivelled. She was looking for me.

I pushed right through the swirling crowd. My shoulders and elbows made a way. I walked right through them up onto the stage.

The band stopped playing. The caller tried to usher me off, but I put up my hand. It wasn’t a threatening hand, more of a “calm down” hand. I don’t know if it was because I was the groom’s brother, or have that cop way about me, or because it was crazy and it’s best not to argue with crazy. I pointed to the fiddle. “Let me,” I said. The fiddle player didn’t move at first. Then he handed the instrument over. It felt like home picking it up. Almost home, because it wasn’t my fiddle, but it was good.

I hadn’t played in a long time. My group had broken up shortly after Alice had converted. The bass player moved, and what were Mick and I supposed to do, just the two of us? I’d got promoted and there was Gwen. I didn’t play anymore.

I faced the crowd but didn’t look at anybody. I was just into myself. The bow touched down on the string and I rode away with it. I pushed the instrument and it pushed back. That relationship, that push and response, is the whole thing. Sound doesn’t fly or leap; it can only bump, from something to something, from one air molecule to the next. That’s how it travels, by contact. That’s what I learned at uni. There’s no sound without relationship. There’s no sound without touch. Something has to touch something, even just a molecule of air, or else there’s no sound at all. That proves it: Sound doesn’t have to be music to be profound. But when it is music, this is it. This is the stuff. I didn’t even know who was looking or who cared. This was contact, this was action, this was making something happen. I might be alone and I might be stymied and I might be useless, but, by God, at the molecular level I was shaking the world.

Something else shook. The inside pocket of my suit jacket rumbled against my chest. God, not now. My mobile. Not, not, not now. I pushed again and again at the repetition leading toward the end. Not now, not now, I chanted in my head along with the persistent rhythm.

I brought it down to Earth when I was ready. I slowed it when it was time. Everything up till then had been wild and delicate and “How did he do that?” fast. But the end was something else, just the melody, nothing tricky. Three notes, the same three that had persistently underwritten the wildness before. One, two, three. Done.

The room didn’t have sound in it any longer. The phone in my pocket had stopped as well. All held still for a moment, all held blessedly still. Then-crack!

Someone outside rammed the patio doors with his shoulder, and they flew back to smack against the wall. Everyone turned around to see. It was that boy, the tall boy, wet and shivering. He had Dora in his arms; she was wet too. She was soaked. It wasn’t raining, but it was cold. “She fell in the river,” he said. The whole crowd surged toward them and I pushed through them all.

I would have hauled her up in my arms, but the fiddle and bow were still in my hands. I stood useless for only a moment, but in that moment Gwen took charge: She sent someone for warm coats, someone for hot tea. Dora had to be breathing. She had to be. The river can be cold enough to give someone a heart attack. But the weather had been warm lately, warm and wet. It hadn’t been frosty. I’d only been joking about pushing Richard in. I’d never have done it. Jesus Christ. I’d never have done it.

Someone laid two coats over her, two big wool coats. I wanted to do something, but Gwen was already there, cradling her. Dora snuggled, and tugged at the wet hair sticking to her neck. It had fallen from some fancy style, and I think she was trying to put it back up. Or tear it all the way down. She was trying to fix herself. She suddenly reminded me of Alice, the first Alice, back at the Folk Festival. How is it that women don’t know how beautiful they are?

“Dora…” I said. Gwen looked at me, looked hard. This was a test of some kind. There was some right thing I could say that would make me a good husband, a good father. I didn’t know what it was. The fiddle was still in my hand.

I waited too long again. Gwen looked away, exasperated.

Mother pushed past me with the tea. Dora said, “It’s too hot.” Gwen told her it wasn’t and to just drink it. The boy was in the midst of his own family swarm. Alice, a doctor, had quickly checked him, and then came to Dora. She knelt in front of her.

There would be no breaking through this wall of women. And I still had the fiddle in my hand.

I returned it to the stage. Then I checked my phone messages.

Bloody hell. Nick Frey and a dead professor.

Richard knew. Somehow he knew.

“Duty calls,” I said lightly, snapping the phone shut.

I found where Gwen had put my coat. Richard didn’t say anything. But he knew. I could tell by the way he stuck to me.

“Please,” he said quietly.

I had no right to tell him, certainly not before telling the parents. Really, I shouldn’t tell anyone until I was certain for myself. Mistakes get made. There was no room for that here.

But he followed me outside. I asked him to tell Gwen I had to work. “And congratulations,” I said. He turned my intended handshake into a pleading grip.

“Please tell me,” he said.

I shook my head. “Can’t do that.” It took shaking my fingers to get the blood back. I repeated the message: “You know I can’t tell you.”

He didn’t fight. He only hoped.

That’s what really puts me over the edge with him. He doesn’t push for anything. He just-stands, and people join him. He’d take a beating if anyone ever bothered to hate him. He’d take it. He took what had happened to the first Alice. I couldn’t believe how he took it.

The boy who’d smashed her head had done a runner, and it took some doing to track him down. The sergeant who picked him up got cut. The boy had had a knife, a stupid small kitchen thing. A dull paring knife, probably from someone’s trash. The sergeant got cut but wrestled it off the kid and brought him in.

When I brought this news to Richard, brought it like a present, he pushed it back. This was one for our side, we’re the good guys, right? A sergeant had bled to bring the boy in, because justice matters. Because Alice mattered. A policeman had risked his life, a cop like me.

Still Richard didn’t say anything, so I repeated it: “Richard, we’ve got him. It’s done.”

He just covered his face. I couldn’t get anything out of him.

Finally, he wrote something on a piece of paper from the pad next to the phone. Alice ’s paper. Alice ’s pen. I’d never had special paper for the phone before I was married, and neither had he.

He wrote something on the paper and asked me to bring it to the kid. It said, “I forgive you.”

I wouldn’t take it. I held my hands up out of reach. “What the hell is that?” I said.

“Please.” He pushed it at me.

I shook my head. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You don’t deserve her. If anyone tried to hurt Gwen I’d fucking kill him.”

He covered his face again. When I left, he was pressing the note against his closed eyes.

That’s what I remember whenever he says “please” to me, like he was saying now.

I grabbed the front of his shirt to bring his face close. “Don’t repeat this, all right? Not even to Alice.”

He nodded.

“Nick’s all right. He’s back. All right? That’s all I can tell you. Don’t breathe a word.”

I let him go and he stumbled backward. “Thank you,” he said.

“Thank you,” he said again. His face shone. He was happy.

Alice came to find me. “Dora’s fine,” she said. I knew she was; the last I looked one of the servers was lending her a change of clothes.

“Thanks,” I said. Richard was still radiant. I wanted to kick him.

Alice wound an arm around one of his. “You look happy,” she said.

He stuttered. He looked at me with guilt. Christ, he was terrible at secrets.

“He’s happy he has you,” I said, trying to lead him with the obvious.

He caught on. He kissed her hand. But she looked suspiciously at me.

“Morris…” she said. “Is this about Nick Frey?”

“No,” I said, showing Richard how it’s done. But he looked at his shoes. Alice would know by morning.

I rubbed my forehead. I needed to tell Gwen myself that I had to leave.

I opened the door back to the tearoom, but that entrance was filled with Mother, apparently on her way out to me. “I was looking for you. Working again, Morris?” she said.

There wasn’t any point to arguing.

“Dora was in a punt with that boy,” she continued. “She said they were talking.” She twisted that last word sarcastically.

“Dora’s all right, Mother,” I said.

“Dora’s a teenager, Morris. She needs a father who pays attention to her.”

“Look how great we turned out without a father paying attention to us,” I said through a fake, bright grin. Richard was so shocked he backed up a step.

Mother pushed back. “Your father-”

It’s all the same conversation. It’s all we ever really say to each other, over and over again.

She kept talking as I walked away.

CHAPTER 7

Detective Sergeant Chloe Frohmann picked me up in front of Grantchester’s old church. I would normally be paired with a Detective Inspector on a murder case, but she’d worked with me on the missing person, so I asked to keep her on. “How was the wedding?” she wanted to know. I wasn’t in the mood to answer. It would only encourage her. She was planning her own wedding for next year.

She didn’t need encouragement. “I ask because my cousin got married last year and she wore a suit. She said that any woman over thirty can’t get away with wearing a real dress, but I think that’s crap. Alice is in her thirties, right? Did she wear a suit or a dress?”

There was no getting away from it. “A dress,” I said. Then she asked me this crazy thing: Was it a tea dress or a cocktail dress? I said, “It was a dress.”

“That’s exactly my point,” she said, punctuating “exactly” with a vigorous swerve onto the roundabout.

I leaned my head back and tried to focus. Someone was found. Someone else was dead. There would be two family visits to make.

“Shall I take the parents? Or the husband?” Frohmann does read my mind sometimes.

“We’ll do them together.”

I’d never been up Cantelupe Road. It was a strange road to be on if you didn’t live there. What were both of them doing there?

The crime scene was easy to find: Just follow the bright lights set up for the forensic team and pathologist.

Rose Cottage was a homely scene inside: soft, threadbare furniture, lit yellow by standing lamps with fussy shades. Nick, or rather his friend, had called the police from here. It wasn’t until the paramedics arrived that Nick admitted his name, to a flurry of piqued interest and scepticism. Now he sipped hot chocolate at the kitchen table, his left leg propped up on the chair opposite. Two women stood apart from him next to an Aga, one of those huge country ovens.

“Nicholas Frey?” I asked, to be official. I recognised him.

He nodded and pushed his cup away. “Yes, sir.”

I needed to caution him, in relation to the death outside, but something else bubbled up as more important first. “Richard Keene’s my brother. He’s been very worried.”

He blanched. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

This was murky. The caution had to come out. “Nick. You don’t have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence. All right?”

He nodded again.

“Do you understand, Nick? You have to say that you understand.”

He said exactly that: “I do. I understand.”

“Where have you been?” I asked.

He told me about Dovecote. He gestured toward one of the women, who nodded to affirm that she was indeed a family friend who had long ago given him a key. He claimed that she hadn’t been home until today. If so, it wasn’t an affair of some kind.

He explained something complicated and very, very young about letting people down, and trying to fix things, and only making everything worse: for Polly Bailey and Liv Dahl, and for the dead woman outside.

I’d interviewed Gretchen Paul about him. She’d said only that Nick had assisted with a research project that was now ended, and was “competent” and “thorough.” Normally I’d take bland adjectives like that to be avoidance, but from her I think they were praise. Her formal neutrality didn’t mesh with the hysteria he insisted he’d caused.

“Were you having an intimate relationship with Dr. Paul?” I had to ask.

He looked offended. “No, sir,” he said, wagging his head hard.

“What do you think her problem was?”

“I don’t know.” He let out a pent-up breath. “It had something to do with her family, I think. Her mother and her aunt. I’d been helping with some organisation for her. She’s blind, did you know that?” I nodded. I knew. “I’d helped to organise photos for her mother’s biography. She was distressed by the result. I-honestly, sir, I don’t know what was in her mind.”

“Can you guess?” I persisted. I’ve found that people who don’t “know” anything for certain often have interesting suppositions that come out when they’re given permission to muse.

He sat up straighter, as if I had called his name in class and he was ready to deliver the right answer. “Well. I’ve been thinking about it. I think maybe her mother isn’t who she thought she was. She said her mother was Linda Paul, the writer. Linda Paul wrote something a long time ago. And then she gave it all up, to raise Gretchen. But I think… I think that’s what she told Gretchen but that that’s not who she really was.”

“Really.” That was strange. “So… who was she?”

“The nanny. I think. Except there wouldn’t have been a nanny at all if the nanny was the mother… Look. There were three women, all right? Linda Paul, her sister Ginny, and this other woman. Gretchen calls her the nanny. They were in Brussels together, for a World’s Fair. It was one of the last things Gretchen saw.

“I think the woman she calls the nanny was her real mother. A friend of Linda Paul, maybe a hanger-on. Maybe Linda said she couldn’t stay around them anymore, with the baby. She was cut off, and made up this story to herself about how she was Linda Paul, and gave up that life. Fantasised that she was the one making choices, not the one being pushed out. That would make sense of the photos.”

I made him repeat much of that, and drew a diagram in my notebook. He leaned over it to check my work, ever the good little helper. I shut it so fast that the pages fluttered against his chin. “That’s not your place, Nick.”

He swallowed. “No, sir.”

I rapped the closed notebook against the table. “What were you doing on this road?” I demanded. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

He shook his head again. He opened his hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I was following the A to Z. We’d mapped out a route, and I followed signs… We were in Haslingfield. The High Street. Lesley had fallen asleep and I couldn’t well look at the map and drive…”

“Why didn’t you just stop?”

He didn’t answer right away. “I’m not very good with the clutch,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to stop and start.” He shifted position. “I was following signs and all the names were running together in my mind. One said ‘ Cantelupe Road.’ I knew that name. So I took it. I figured it for part of the directions. It’s not a name you’d think to follow if you hadn’t planned to, is it? I recognised it, so I took it.”

I leaned back and thought about how we’d just come. “It’s not the way to Cambridge.” I let the accusation remain implicit. He’s a clever boy. He knew what I meant.

“I’ve never been here in my life, sir. I didn’t expect to be here, I didn’t know Gretchen would be here. Honestly, sir…”

“But you knew the name.”

“I knew the name of the street. I don’t know from where. I thought it was part of the route we’d looked at. I don’t know where else…” He stopped himself. He slapped his hand on the table. “It was the box. At Gretchen’s house. The box of photographs. It was an old packing box. Something had come shipped in it. The address label on top had been for where Gretchen lived years ago. In Brighton. Underneath that was the address for the place the box had been first. That was Cantelupe. Here, in Haslingfield. I noticed it. I suppose it stuck in my head…”

“And this box is in Dr. Paul’s house?”

“No… not anymore. She asked me to destroy it. I threw it in the pond behind my house. My family’s house.”

I nodded, but not as if I necessarily believed or approved. I didn’t trust any of this.

“The constable tells me you were driving without a licence,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you claim you didn’t see her at all? You-”

“I felt her, sir,” he said. He shook his head again. “I felt her under the car. I’d been looking down at the map. I didn’t see anything until I got out of the car and looked at her face.”

He looked like he was going to be sick. It was time to get him home. I could talk to him again after the pathologist’s report. Frohmann offered to help him walk to the car, but he insisted on hobbling. He said to his friend, “I apologise for taking advantage of your hospitality in this way.”

She said, “I won’t intrude on your homecoming, but call if there’s anything I can do.”

“I understand. Tomorrow…”

“Nick. I think your family would prefer I didn’t.”

“I don’t care what they-”

She laid her hand on his cheek. He held perfectly still.

“I’ll be in touch,” she promised.

He glowered. His hands made tight fists for a moment, then he opened them up and slapped his thighs.

Interesting.

She went into the lounge to call a taxi, as we had to keep her car. He watched her. If eyeballs were hands it would have been indecent.

Nick spun back to me. “May I please go home now?” he said.

I sent Frohmann to take him to her car, and wait for me. I wouldn’t be long with the other woman. She looked impatient to get rid of us.

“And you are…?” I asked.

She spelled her name for me: “Melisma Cantor. An M instead of a second S. It isn’t Melissa. It’s like when you slide around on a note of music, dress it up, right? Melisma.”

I wrote down her name, correctly spelled. I omitted the explanation.

All the time I’d been talking with Nick, she’d been putting away kitchen things from a cardboard box. Coffee. Tea towels. Dish soap, but it wasn’t new. It was half-full. She looked to be in her late twenties.

“I got here a couple hours ago. Susan wasn’t home. I’m her stepdaughter.”

“Susan is the owner here?”

“Yes.”

“Was anything out of the ordinary when you arrived?”

“No. No.”

“Did you hear the accident?”

“I heard-something. It must have been the accident. They rang the bell not long after. They asked me to call the police.”

“Had you ever seen them before?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know what Dr. Paul was doing here?”

She shook her head.

“Did you know she was here?”

She bowed her head, and shook it, staring at the tabletop.

“Is something wrong, Ms. Cantor?” She repeated no. “Where’s your stepmother?” She shrugged.

“I don’t know. She’s an adult, you know. She doesn’t always stay here every night.”

“Do you?”

She shook her head, again. “I broke up with my boyfriend, and I’ll be staying here for a little while. I just brought all my stuff from his place.” She held up the half-used Fairy liquid. “I was the only one who washed the fucking dishes. Sorry,” she quickly added. Suddenly she looked as if she’d been left out in the rain. Her long hair appeared limp, her face stretched down. It was the streak of a headlamp through the front window changing the shadows. In a moment she was restored.

“Have you ever seen Dr. Paul with your stepmother before?”

“I don’t know the name.”

All right. “Where’s your father?”

“He’s in Bangalore. He works there. They’re divorced. Look, I’m really tired. I’d like to go to bed.”

I got the father’s name and address in India, and made a move to the cottage door. I fiddled with the handle. It had a proper lock. “Do you have a key, Ms. Cantor?”

“Yes, of course. We used to live here. When they were married.”

“Did your stepmother-what’s her full name, please? Susan…”

“Susan Madison.”

“Was she expecting you today?”

“I’d called earlier. She didn’t pick up, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t know. She screens.”

“Ah.” I nodded. That seemed sufficient for now.

Dr. Jensen stood up from his crouch beside the body. “Two sets of injuries,” he said, plunging right in. “She was hit once, in the vicinity of four hours ago. Likely thrown. There’s damage to the back of her head that matches with a stone underneath it. Lividity suggests that she’s lying where she died. The other injuries occurred post-mortem. She was run over and nearly cut in two by the weight of the vehicle. That’s preliminary. I’ll have more for you tomorrow.”

I stood back to take in the scene. Hit twice on a road so little-used as this? Her body was on the part of the road well past the drive. If it had been dark when Melisma arrived, she wouldn’t have seen the body.

I turned around to head for the car and bumped nose to nose into Nick, who’d been standing right behind me. “Why the hell aren’t you in the car?” I said.

“I was just-if it was going to be much longer I wanted to ask permission to phone… Is it true? Did she really die four hours ago?”

I rubbed the back of my neck and held in several expletives. Frohmann appeared over his shoulder. “Greene asked me to look at something…” she explained, sounding guilty. It was hard to know whether to treat Nick like a suspect or a found missing person.

“That finding is not yet official,” I told Nick, as to the time of death. But he sagged with relief.

In the car, Nick said, “Look, I’m really sorry for the trouble I’ve caused you. I have no doubt there were long hours put in on my behalf, and I’m not surprised that you’re angry with me. I can only apologise.”

Who talks like that? What a perfect little gentleman he is.

I turned around inside my seatbelt and faced him in the back. “Susan Madison. Do you know that name? Has Gretchen ever talked about her?”

“Of course,” he said. “Is that a trick question?”

I held back a nasty retort. “No.” I glared. “Why would it be?”

He smiled. He was lighter and lighter the closer we got to home. “That’s her mother’s character. Susan Maud Madison. She wrote five books about her. Well, Linda Paul did. Gretchen was looking for anyone who’d named her child after the character. You know, been influenced by the books. Looks like she found one.”

Looks like she did.

Nick’s family lived in a white modernist box from the 1930s: all stacked and protruding rectangles, with a long, thin window striping across the whole thing. Tall trees spiked in silhouette behind it, filling the sky over the flat roof.

It was now ten o’clock. There were lights illuminating the ground floor, so we wouldn’t be waking them up. Frohmann pressed the bell. I suppose Nick might have had his key, but he hung back obediently.

Mrs. Frey called out “Alexandra?” as she came down the stairs, and, again, “Alexandra?” while unlocking the door. She saw me and Frohmann first, and recoiled.

We parted to display Nick between us. She pitched forward to embrace him.

Frohmann backed the car out onto the road and we were tossed in our seats by the ruts beneath the wheels. “Damn private roads,” she muttered.

The private segment emptied out onto a proper city-kept street, and shortly thereafter onto a main road that eventually linked with the M11. We took the direction away from the motorway.

“Is it just a husband?” she asked. I think she dreaded facing suddenly motherless children.

“Just a husband,” I assured her.

“Did you know her?”

“Not really.” Richard knew her, but they weren’t close. I knew Gretchen Paul more from this case. She’d paid for Miranda Bailey’s solicitor but, from what I understand, didn’t actually know her. It was odd. I hoped the husband could tell me why. I looked in my notebook for his name. “Harry Reed,” I said. Frohmann nodded.

She turned down Grange Road, driving past Robinson, Selwyn, and Newnham colleges. Grand Victorian houses filled in the gaps between them. Frohmann turned left off Grange Road onto Barton and then almost immediately right onto Millington. The change was immediate: Orbs of gaslight glowed white in the fog.

“What did they do to rate the special effects?” she asked.

“Another private road. So the city didn’t include them in the electric upgrade.” Millington Road has about thirty houses on it. The gas lamps don’t shine much beyond themselves; they’re just dots tracing the right angle of the street.

The house we wanted was typical of the area: brick, gabled, big. I’d not been here during Nick’s investigation; I’d interviewed Dr. Paul in her office.

Our feet crunched down on the thick scattering of pebbles acting as a pavement. It was like walking on the bottom of a dry fish tank.

The bell control was a thin iron rod with a small handle at the bottom. Frohmann twisted it, and we were rewarded with a sound like scraping a butter knife over a glockenspiel.

We waited. She twisted the bell pull again.

“No one’s home. Perhaps he’s out looking for her,” she suggested.

“He’s the husband. He’s a suspect.” I pulled out my mobile and punched in their number. Some people keep a phone by the bed. “Or a sound sleeper,” I said.

The phones inside rang with different bells: one a trill, one a buzz. And then another sound. Some kind of… coo? chirp? Whatever it is that birds do, coming from inside the house.

“Look at this,” Frohmann called. She’d walked around to the side of the house. I joined her.

She shone a torch on a parked car. It had a cracked headlamp and dented front.

“Call for forensics,” I told her.

A sudden light hit my face. Someone else’s torch. “Police,” I barked. “Lower it.”

A smallish man came out from behind the shrubs. “Pardon me,” he said, stepping closer, “you looked suspicious.” He wore a heavy jacket over a dressing gown over pajama bottoms. “I’d like to see some I.D., please.”

We accommodated his request. “Harry Reed?” I asked.

He frowned. “No, I’m not.” He looked back and forth between my I.D. and my face. “I’m the neighbourhood watch coordinator,” he said proudly. I’m surprised he didn’t proffer identification of his own. He added as an afterthought, “I’m his next-door neighbour.”

“Really?” I asked. “Seen anything interesting lately?”

He pointed up.

Several small, colourful birds perched on the roofline. Two more were on the sill of an open window.

He sighed in disappointment at our incomprehension. “They’re cage birds. Norwich canaries.”

I started to get it. “They’re not in a cage.”

The neighbour had noticed the open windows and free birds when he’d come home for lunch. A plump orange bird flew in as a fluffy black-speckled one flew out.

“What time was this?” I asked again.

“As I said, lunchtime. One-fifteen. I always get home at one-fifteen for half an hour.”

“Anything else happen in that time?”

He frowned in thought. “My wife made a proper cooked meal for once,” he said nastily. “That’s notable.” He shrugged again. Then: “You want to get in? I’ve got a key.”

He had many more than one; it looked like every household on the street fell under his protection. He flicked through them, recognising the right one by some obscure system. He held it up and nodded, but when I reached for it he walked past me to the door. I shared a look with Frohmann, who shrugged in response.

The interior of the house was full of art and colour, in contrast to Gretchen Paul’s stark office, where I’d spoken with her about Nick. I’d taken her lack of decoration there as a natural consequence of her blindness. Maybe it was, and this was her husband’s taste. Or maybe she drew a thick line between personal and work.

Some of the birds had stayed inside; one perched on the back of a dining chair. Mindful of forensics, who were on their way, we separated to make a casual check of the home. I jumped when Frohmann called out upstairs. I bounded up to what turned out to be the study. There was another voice, droning. It sounded bizarre. “Police!” I called out.

“You’ve scared it to death.” Frohmann laughed, leaning over the computer.

I leaned over her to see. “It talks,” she said. “This must be Dr. Paul’s computer.”

It was reading out the webpage that was up on the screen. “I jiggled the mouse,” Frohmann confessed. “The screen saver disappeared and it started talking.”

It read from a maps page, telling us how to get to Cantelupe Road from here.

Things were not looking good for Mr. Reed.

The neighbour’s voice came from down the corridor, an urgent bark. He must have followed us in. “What is he doing in the house?” I muttered, ready to be stern with him.

My lecture stalled in me as I joined him at the bottom of the attic ladder. A streak of seeds, droppings, and feathers dribbled down the steps, culminating in a man’s body at the neighbour’s feet. “Get back,” I ordered, kneeling by the head. “Is this Harry Reed?”

The neighbour only made some noises. Frohmann called it in. I felt the neck for a pulse, finding none.

“Is this Harry Reed?” I pressed, looking at the neighbour for a nod. He finally gave it to me, and Frohmann led him out.

Frohmann tugged on latex gloves she’d retrieved from the cache in the car boot. I did the same, and paper shoe covers. I wanted to eyeball the scene in the bird room.

The robot voice from the computer pulled me back into the study. “Quote I love him completely comma quote she said full stop she pulled on her socks and trainers comma girlishly tying the laces in double knots full stop she’s my sister but completely unlike me full stop she dreams about men comma but why should a fish dream about water question mark she’s-”

Frohmann shook her head. “I wouldn’t be able to take that for a whole book…”

“Is that what it is?”

“A book excerpt.”

“Note the URL for me, all right?” I said, escaping the monotone recitation. Behind me I heard it switch to reading out an email header.

The steps had no visible footprints on them. I kept to the far left edge of the steps, and crept up, careful not to use my hands. Someone else might have held on. I just wanted to get my eyes to floor level and get an overview of the scene. More seed, droppings, and feathers, small broccoli florets, and splashes from overturned plastic birdbath bowls.

Flapping and urgent twittering alerted me to a bird with a foot trapped in the door of an overturned cage. A whole wall of wire cages had been pulled down. The central aviary had been bashed down on one side, perhaps by the chair lying on its side across the room. The aviary’s corner was bent in, which would have taken repeated blows, if the wire frame was as strong as it looked. About half a dozen birds were still in it, not having taken advantage of the open door. One flew from one perch to another, back and forth. Two others pressed together in a corner.

The bird with its leg in a cage door was too far to reach from here. I didn’t want to compromise the scene, but I couldn’t leave the animal in distress. I entered the room completely, stepping over debris, and freed the fluffy orange creature. I let it go. It flew up to the top of a wall of cages still standing on the other side of the room, and perched next to a red prize ribbon.

“Sir,” Frohmann called.

“Here.”

“Jensen’s pulled up. Forensics won’t like you in their scene.”

“I know,” I said, descending. I filled her in as we headed downstairs to let Jensen in. “… It’s been savaged up there, especially the aviary and one wall. Maybe means something, or maybe the other cages are just better secured…”

I stuck with forensics until they left at two. Then someone from the RSPCA came to rescue what were left of the birds. I left them to it with a constable to keep an eye out. I slept on a couch at the station and woke with a rotten headache.

She could have killed him, and then been the victim of a random hit-and-run. Except that it was his car that killed her.

He could have killed her, and then returned home to die in an accidental fall down those steep stairs. Except for the condition of the bird room. No accident there.

They were both murdered. Even if one of them did kill the other, there was a third party involved in at least one of the cases.

I spent the morning on a computer, re-creating Gretchen’s web history and branching off into some investigations of my own. She’d taken a taxi to Rose Cottage: A page with the car company’s phone number had been in her browser history, and she’d used a map website to print out directions for the driver.

I drove there myself. Susan Madison was expecting me.

“You can make yourself tea if you want to,” she announced when I arrived. I declined and followed her into the lounge. She sat down in a well-worn club chair and put her feet up onto a footstool.

There was no other seat in that room. Who has a lounge with only one chair? “May I?” I asked, and she nodded. I carried a chair from the kitchen table and squeezed it into the lounge, which was crowded with small tables and chests. She was older than I thought she would be. I had expected fifties. She was seventies.

“You have a beautiful home,” I said, choosing charming.

“Why don’t you ask what you came here for so I can get back to work?”

Work. Ms. Madison is a writer. She was already demonstrating to me a mastery of directness and brevity.

“Where were you last night?” I asked, sitting down in the hard chair.

“I was with a friend. He lives in Great Shelford.” She gave his contact information.

“What time did you arrive there?”

“Around four. My ex-husband’s daughter had announced to me her intentions of leaving her partner and coming to stay with me. I preferred to be elsewhere.”

“And you were with him till morning?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

I tilted my head to one side. “If you didn’t want your stepdaughter to come stay with you, why didn’t you just say so?” Sideways questions sometimes lead interesting places.

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said simply. “I didn’t see any reason to engage it at all.”

I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward. “Did you see Gretchen Paul here yesterday?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

I nodded to myself. “I understand she was tracking down people who’d been named after a book character her mother had created…”

“… But I’m too old,” she finished for me. “Yes, I am. As was evident to her immediately. I told her it was merely a coincidence.”

“Is Susan Madison a pen name?” I asked. “That would have been of interest to her. A writer having named herself after this character.”

She mouthed “no.” I think she was unhappy with my jovial persistence.

“Are you sure? Because the publication of your first book in 1963 was also the first year that you paid any tax. Ever. There doesn’t seem to be a record of you before then. And ‘S. M. Madison’ has had a steady, low-key career since then…”

She looked straight ahead, not at me.

I pushed. “Ms. Madison? Was that your name before 1963?”

From Nick I knew the theory about the woman Gretchen called the nanny, Gretchen’s actual mother, admiring her friend Linda Paul too much. She could have made life hell for her idol, enough that Linda had made a drastic escape. And a pretty obvious one, to be honest.

“All right,” she said. “Don’t gloat.”

“You’re Linda Paul.”

She lifted her shoulders and waved her hands in little circles. “I was, and now I’m Susan Maud Madison. It doesn’t matter.”

“Why did you change your name?”

“It’s not illegal to use a new name.”

Maybe. “But why bother? Was Gretchen’s mother harassing you?”

She closed her eyes, retreating.

“Ms. Madison. Please answer.”

“Fine, fine, all right. It was easier to walk away.”

“Your writing career?”

She waved a hand dramatically. “I write. I write.”

“I’m sorry…?”

Her hands balled into fists. She shook them on either side of her head. She didn’t like explaining herself. “I like my own company. I like being in charge of my own small world. I write. And then I let it go.”

I pressed again. “By giving up your name, you gave up your professional status. You had to start over. Why would you do that?”

She began to shiver. I was halfway to calling for an ambulance when I realised this was a fit of laughter. “She wouldn’t leave me alone! She followed me, she imitated me. Oh, oh…” She leaned forward, head over her knees.

So I’d been right about the nanny being a stalker.

“How did Gretchen feel about this?”

She grinned. “Oh, you seem to know everything.”

“Were you aware that Gretchen’s mother used your name?”

“I don’t care what other people do.”

“Were you aware that she-excuse me, what was her original name?” That was a puzzle piece I didn’t have.

She laughed again, a small, mean giggle. “That’s what she wanted to know.”

“Excuse me?”

“She wanted me to tell her that woman’s real name. I’ve forgotten. What was she to me? I’ve forgotten.”

“Gretchen? That’s what Gretchen was asking-her mother’s real name?”

“She got so angry when I didn’t tell her. Then when I explained I couldn’t remember-well, that got rid of her. She left.”

“When was this?”

She flapped a hand at me. “I don’t know. Three? Four?”

“Do you know where she was going?”

She rolled her eyes. All right, I got it-she wasn’t anyone’s keeper. I closed my notebook.

“We both left,” she told me. “She wasn’t stranded. She had a mobile. I saw her talking on it as I drove away. I assume she was calling a taxi.”

She’d called home. We found her phone near the scene. It had been thirty feet from the body. She’d been hit hard, and thrown far.

“There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “What about the box? The box of photographs. Gretchen had it. It had once belonged to this address, and had been reused to ship to Gretchen’s mother, when she and Gretchen lived in Brighton. They were your photographs. How did they get there?”

“I didn’t want them anymore.”

“You mailed them? You addressed them to ‘Linda Paul’?”

She didn’t say anything else. She closed her eyes.

Frohmann met me at Millington Road. I wanted to look around the house again with a fresh mind. Black clouds of fingerprint dust covered strategic stretches of wall, rails, doorknobs.

Frohmann reported the latest: “It was his car, for sure. Paint match. Tire match. No fingerprints in it except expected ones, and in all the expected places…” We had the appropriate elimination prints from the investigation of Nick’s disappearance.

“Steering wheel wasn’t wiped, then,” I clarified.

“That’s right. Must have worn gloves. Premeditated?”

“Or cold. It’s December.”

She continued: “The vehicle wasn’t cited for anything last night-no speeding tickets, no parking violations.”

I prowled the house, touching all the furniture. I’d had to hold back last night, for fingerprints’ sake. Now I could indulge in getting a feel for the place. Expensive. This was a well-kept house.

“What did he do for a living?” I asked.

She riffled through her notebook. “He bred Norwich canaries.”

“For a living, Frohmann. Birds are a labour of love.”

“They were his only labour, sir. Ex-solicitor.”

I turned in a circle and marvelled. “Look at this place, Frohmann. She was a professor. Where did the money come from?”

“Family, sir. Isn’t that usually the way, with homes like this?”

“Exactly. Find out if it was his family, or hers.” She made a note.

“Also, sir, the driver’s seat was adjusted for Harry’s height.”

“So, driven by Harry, or by someone Harry’s height, or by someone who had the sense to set it back when they were done.”

She sighed at me. I was being negative again.

“Look,” I said. “The question here, the big question, is why bring the car back?”

“To frame Harry,” she answered too quickly.

“Maybe. But he’s dead. How framed could he be?”

“Try this, sir. She messed with his birds, he found out, he killed her, came back here…”

“And had an accident while cleaning up? I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t have left those windows open. He wouldn’t have left those cages toppled over. Last night I saw some of those birds-crushed in their cages, some of them not quite dead yet. He wouldn’t have left them. He’d save them before he’d avenge them.”

“What if he killed her for a different reason? Killed her for something else, and then came home and found the birds? What if the reason she was angry enough to go after his birds might be the same reason he was angry enough to go after her?”

“The neighbour saw the car here at lunchtime, when he also saw the windows open. So, whoever took the car later knew about the birds. Not Harry. It wasn’t Harry.”

I jogged up the stairs, and up again, to the bird room. Frohmann trailed me.

“The killer had no assurance that Harry’s death wouldn’t have been discovered,” I mused. “The birds coming and going might have alerted someone. Returning the car was a risk. Why bring it back? Why?”

The empty cages had been restacked haphazardly. Fallen rosettes had been tossed into a corner: first prize, champion, best in show. The birds had been taken, but nothing had been cleaned. The mess on the floor had been swept into a now stinking pile.

“Maybe, sir… to get his own vehicle? What if the murderer had parked here, and just needed to get his own car away? That would be worth coming back for.”

That was good. That was very good.

“Any witnesses to unusual vehicles, in the driveway or on the street?”

She flipped back through her notebook pages. “Mr. Neighbourhood Watch gave us a list. We ran the plates; no one popped as connected or suspicious.”

The doorbell clamoured before she finished. That grating sound.

Frohmann descended to answer it. I followed more slowly. From the top of the main staircase I watched her open the door to Miranda Bailey, of all people.

“May I help you, Mrs. Bailey?” Frohmann asked politely. I ought to send a thank-you note to her mother for raising her right.

“I-Where’s Harry? I heard about Gretchen. Where’s Harry?”

Frohmann looked up at me for guidance. Polly’s mother followed her gaze. “Oh!” she said. “Inspector Keene.” She looked upset. I’d been the one to interrogate her over Nick.

“Mrs. Bailey.” I descended the stair like a host. I wanted to be kind.

“If you think Harry had anything to do with it, you’re wrong. Where have you taken him? Have you dragged him away to jail?” She was strangling her wrists with the strap of her bag.

“No, no, no, Mrs. Bailey,” I said. “Please, sit down. Please,” I said.

Frohmann got to the point as soon as she was off her feet. “He’s dead, Mrs. Bailey.”

She jumped up. “What? No! No, it’s Gretchen. I was told by someone from the University. Gretchen’s dead.”

“They’re both dead,” Frohmann assured her.

Miranda looked at each of us, back and forth, a little tennis game. “Really?” she finally squeaked.

There was a box of tissues on the mantel. I handed it to her. Frohmann pushed her gently back to sitting, and sat next to her, on the arm of the couch.

“Was he in the car too?” Miranda asked, obviously having heard “car accident” through the grapevine. Her misunderstanding of the facts spoke well for innocence.

I took over. Not everything would be released to the public. “He died here.”

Miranda cried. Frohmann pushed ahead. “Did you know him well, Mrs. Bailey? Why did you come here today?”

“I…” She looked around, as if surprised to find herself here. “I’d heard about Gretchen. I wanted to see if he was all right.”

“How well did you know Mr. Reed?”

She only blinked.

“Harry Reed,” I expanded.

She put her hand to her mouth, and looked back and forth from me to Frohmann. “I thought his last name was Paul,” she finally said.

“A reasonable mistake,” I assured her.

She rocked back and forth. “No, it’s not. It’s really not.”

Frohmann intervened. “How well did you know him, Mrs. Bailey?”

“Apparently, not well at all!” Her laugh was high-pitched.

“Can you tell us why they took such an interest in your arrest?” I pressed. “Did you know either of them before your arrival in Cambridge?”

“They were friends of my daughter. They took an interest in justice. Do I really need to rationalise that?”

“No, Mrs. Bailey,” I agreed. “No, it’s only that your concerns about one another seem to have been deeper than one would expect of friends of family.”

“Then I feel sorry for you,” she said. “You must lead a very insular life.”

“When exactly were you here last?” I asked, ignoring her editorial.

“Yesterday morning. Around ten-thirty? I think?” Her hands were full of crumpled tissue. As she swivelled her head looking for a rubbish bin, she suddenly perceived her vulnerability. “When I left he was alive!” she asserted. “I left him and he was about to take a shower. And I went into town. I took Polly shopping. We bought things. I used a credit card at Robert Sayles! You can trace that! I bought a sweater. I bought her a coat. She wanted a new coat…”

“Sergeant Frohmann will take you home,” I suggested. We would check on that alibi later.

“Oh. No, thank you. No, I have a rental car. A hire car. I’m visiting my old village today. I used to live fairly near, when I was a girl. I wanted Polly to come with me, but she didn’t want to. That’s all right. It’s been a good visit. She let me buy her a coat yesterday. We haven’t been shopping together in a long time, too long. But yesterday she let me. She let me buy her a coat.” She was awfully excited about that coat. She covered her face and eked out a sound like a deflating balloon.

“What do you make of her?” Frohmann asked me, after she’d left.

“She seemed honestly surprised.”

Shouting outside distracted us. Across the street, Miranda and another woman were arguing in the driveway of a house for sale. The other woman sounded belligerent and Miranda cowered.

Frohmann bounded across the street.

The woman arguing with Polly’s mother wore a suit and high-heeled shoes, all in red.

They stopped. Lady-in-red turned her glare to Frohmann. “This car needs to be ticketed. It has no right to park here.”

“Can we back it up a little?” I suggested, catching up. “You are…?”

“Rebecca Phillips-Koster. I represent this home for sale, and I’m tired of people using it as a catch-all parking slot.”

Miranda was crying again. “Yesterday a horrible man put notes on all the windshields of cars parked in the street instead of in driveways. He was on a crusade against Christmas shoppers parking in the road. I didn’t want to deal with him today. You had the police cars in the driveway, so I parked here. I didn’t think it would hurt anyone.”

“What horrible man?” Frohmann asked.

“That man.” She pointed to the house next door to Gretchen and Harry’s. The neighbourhood watch.

“This driveway is not a public car park. This is trespassing!” the red lady insisted.

“All right, all right,” I soothed her. “I understand your frustration. Has this been going on a lot?” I shot Frohmann a significant look.

The red lady looked embarrassed. “Once or twice. But even once is too much! This is private property.”

“Yesterday?” Frohmann prodded. “Was anyone parked here yesterday?”

Red lady shook her head, then switched abruptly to a nod. “Students.” She rolled her eyes, inviting us all to commiserate. “One had left a bicycle here. Propped against the side of the house, around here…” We all walked around the side of the house, and looked where the offending bicycle had once been.

“Did you see this student? Do you remember what the cycle looked like?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t see him. But-” She pulled a remote control out of her purse. The garage door slowly inched upward. “I taught him a lesson. I put the bike in the garage. Ha.” She looked satisfied.

I must have looked pretty satisfied myself. “Please don’t touch it,” I said, as she walked toward the garage. Frohmann called forensics on her mobile. I felt a vibration in my front pocket.

“Why haven’t you phoned?” Gwen demanded.

“I’ve been working,” I apologised.

“I assumed so.” Her voice was deliberate. “But I didn’t know it. I was wondering if something had happened.” This comes from every police spouse.

“I slept at the station. Things went late. We found that student…”

“I know. And the professor. It’s on the news.”

“It’s ugly. Look, we’re in the middle of-”

She cut me off. “It’s Dora.”

“What? What’s Dora?”

“We left the wedding after you did. She was exhausted. She was cold. A waitress lent her some dry clothes. She went right to sleep as soon as we got home-”

“Right, right, yes, I get that. What’s happened?”

“I wanted to brush her hair. It was getting matted with all that gel and pins in it. I opened her vanity drawer, to get her brush, and there was a condom in there.”

Shit. I stepped farther away and lowered my voice. “It’s not hers. It must belong to a friend.”

“Exactly,” she said. Meaning a male friend.

“She’s fourteen, Gwen. She’s fourteen…” She didn’t say anything, so I kept talking. “I can’t deal with this right now. We’re in the middle…”

Gwen cried. I couldn’t not deal with this.

I called to Frohmann, “Take care of the bicycle. I’ll catch up with you at the station.” I walked down the driveway, holding the phone tight enough to squeeze the blood out of my fingers. “All right. What can I do?”

“I don’t know.” She was still crying.

“Have you talked to her? Is she there?”

“No. No, she was asleep the moment she fell into bed. I didn’t say anything last night, I just walked out of the room. I waited for you to come home. I kept waiting…”

Sorry, sorry, sorry… “Then what?”

“I fell asleep rather late. She was already out when I got up. She’d left the cereal box open on the table. She’d made herself coffee.” Dora drinks coffee? Since when does a fourteen-year-old drink coffee? “I just kept waiting. I didn’t want to bother you but I was going crazy.”

“Do you know where she is?”

Gwen didn’t answer. I guessed she was shaking her head. When she’s upset she forgets a person on the phone isn’t right in front of her.

“Look, Gwen, she’s probably with Stephanie, right? Stephanie and… what’s the other one?”

“Margaux.”

“Margaux. Right. They hang out together. I’ll bet they’re… shopping or something.” What do teenage girls do? “Have you checked her email?”

“Of course I checked her email. She doesn’t use the email we gave her. She probably uses one of those free ones you can check at a website.”

“All right, all right. Try a few. The computer might be set to remember her login. Try Hotmail. Try Yahoo.”

“She’ll hate us…”

Probably. I reasoned to myself that there was no reason to panic. If the condom was hers, she was either already in deep and today wasn’t any more important than tomorrow, or she was just playing at being a grown-up and there wasn’t any real worry at all.

“She’ll come home for dinner. Or she’ll call. You know she always does,” I said.

Gulping sounds, which I interpreted as more tearful nodding. Then: “You know, what I really want is a co-parent in this situation. What I really want is a partner, a real partner…”

I know, I know, I know…

“I know our daughter’s going to grow up, Morris. I know what’s part of that. I know. But I don’t want it so fast, and I don’t want to parent it alone.”

Sorry, sorry. “I know.”

“She was so beautiful last night, Morris. She’s so beautiful…” She is. She looks like Gwen.

“I’ll come home for lunch. Will you make me lunch?” I felt a bit lord-of-the-manor saying that, but it would distract her.

“It’s late for lunch-” she said.

“I’ll come home,” I said.

The first time I’d met Gwen’s dad I’d been in a panic to impress him. I wore a tie. I bought new shoes. I brought flowers for her mother.

“Mum, Dad,” she’d said. “This is Morris.” It was such an announcement. “This” was Morris: newly a detective constable. New shoes. A tie that had been a despised Christmas gift.

Her dad had shaken my hand. “Gwen likes you,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re supposed to say how much you respect her,” he prompted.

“I do, sir,” I said. Nothing else would come out. What could I say to a dad? That I was hard all day thinking about her? That’s what everything came down to. Her prettiness, her love of animals, her kindness, her cleverness-everything I liked made me want her. That’s the way things are at that age.

The first time we’d done it, which had been a week after that dinner with her parents, I’d been too fast. I’d thought she wouldn’t see me again after that. I’d been drinking, and selfish, and stupid, and eager.

We got better matched over time. We were good together. We were.

Gwen stood at the door, waiting for me. “Oh, Morris,” she said, and started crying again.

I said, “She’s all right, you know. She’s all right.” And Gwen nodded. It really wasn’t the end of the world, was it? It really wasn’t.

“It’s just so early,” she said. “I thought we had years…”

“We have years,” I said, suddenly fierce. “We have years to be parents to a fine girl who’s becoming a fine woman, who’ll drive us crazy sometimes, and scare us sometimes, and make us proud sometimes. We have years of that ahead, so don’t spend all your energy on today. We have years, Gwen, we have years…” At that, she wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled herself tight to me. She almost lifted herself off the floor.

I didn’t know what to do with my arms. We’d been making love like usual, but we hadn’t embraced in a long time.

I put my hands on her back. “Oh, Morris,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

I’d been away, that was sure. I just wasn’t certain I was entirely back.

“I’m sorry, Gwen, it’s been…” I didn’t know what it had been. Richard’s wedding?

She released herself and led me to the table. She’d set out sandwich fixings, and coffee. “I know yesterday was difficult for you,” she said.

I shook my head. “Dancing embarrasses me, but I wouldn’t call it difficult.”

She sighed elaborately but wouldn’t face me. “It was Alice,” she said. Why do people think I carry a torch for Alice? Has Carmen been pushing her ideas on Gwen?

“I don’t give a shit about either Alice, except in the most human, generic manner of wishing them both well,” I said.

She shrugged. We were at a stalemate again. The connection from the doorway was gone.

“Gwen,” I said, reaching across the table. “Gwen, I was never in love with Alice. I hardly knew Alice. I liked her, and I might have had something with her, but I didn’t. I had something with you.”

She ignored my hand. “I always knew I was second choice…” Shit. Where was this coming from? Sixteen years!

“All right, Gwen, all right. When I first met you, we weren’t serious, right? It wasn’t serious for you either. We were just having fun. And I thought about having fun with someone else too, with Alice. That’s ordinary. There’s nothing big there. So I tried to get off with her, and she said no. She said no. And you and me, we kept going on, and we became something, and here we are. This isn’t a contest with places. This is just… life. We went from not being together to being together. Here we are.”

“Yes, here we are,” she said. I wanted to eat to stop the talking but I couldn’t face food. She pushed on, “What can I do, Morris? Is there something I can wear or something I can do to make you look at me again?”

“What on earth would you wear?” I said, knowing it was incendiary as soon as it popped out. But what is it with women thinking how they dress is going to change something? “Stop crying,” I said. “Gwen…”

“Do you remember our first time?” she said. Great. One of my most embarrassing moments. “You made dinner at your flat, and we had strong red wine. I felt elegant, having wine instead of beer. I was nervous so I just kept sipping. I didn’t want the food because I was worried about garlic on my breath. I thought kissing the taste of wine would be nice. So I just kept drinking…” I’d just assumed she’d noticed that I’m a terrible cook. “I knew we were going to go all the way. I was-we knew, didn’t we? Without talking about it. We knew. Morris, I’d never felt so wanted. You were… wild about me. You were on me like…” She shook her head. She couldn’t find the best words. “You were so hungry for me. I’d never felt so perfect in my life.”

Dora interrupted. She’d pushed the door open with a hand full of shopping bags, and had heard the last sentences. “That’s disgusting, Mum. Keep it to yourself,” she said lightly. “Are you trying to corrupt me?”

Gwen pinkened. I jumped right in. “You don’t seem to need much help. What do you have a condom for?”

She froze. “Which one of you went into my things?”

“Not the point, Dora. Just tell us what’s going on.”

She put down the bags and joined us at the table, looking suddenly much younger. She stood holding the back of a chair, looking from one of us to the other. “Margaux and Spencer are doing it. They’ve been dating a year, right, and they think they’re in love.” She rolled her eyes at that, which made me glad. “So she gave one to me and one to Stephanie ‘just in case,’ right? She said it was great and we should be prepared. I put it in my drawer, ’cause what was I gonna do, carry it in my purse like an emergency tampon?” She rolled her eyes again.

I nodded. “All right. That’s a fine answer. In fact, that’s a great answer. I like that answer. But you can come to us when the answer is different too, all right?”

“Ew,” she said, and went upstairs.

I rubbed the back of my neck. Gwen tapped one finger on her cheek.

“Do you believe her?” she whispered.

“I do. I do,” I said. She nodded too.

“Oh, Morris,” she said, relieved and embarrassed, and still fragile.

“You were in a right tizzy,” I teased her.

“No more than you!” We laughed dodged-a-bullet laughs.

“Morris, I’m sorry. Maybe all this”-she said, waving a hand around-“is my fault. I’ve always felt like I was competing with what might have been, and then when Richard got engaged…” She shrugged. “I don’t know why that would have bothered me, but it did. It made me jealous. The newness of what they have. Their love is so… shiny. It’s shiny.”

“What, so their love is a puppy, and our love is an old, hairy, smelly, half-blind dog?” That made her laugh.

“We’re smelly old dogs,” she agreed.

“Aw, Gwen. You’ll always be one of those dumb yapping puppies to me.” I smiled hugely. She came ’round to my side of the table to swat me in the chest. I caught her wrists. “No, babe, no,” I said. “I’m a cop, you can’t get the better of me.” There we were, about to wrestle.

“You haven’t called me ‘babe’ in years,” she said, like she was going to cry again.

My phone vibrated. “Sorry,” I said. She knew my work-voice. It was Frohmann. I had to get to the station. She’d done something magic to get the bike owner’s name so fast.

“I’m proud of you,” Gwen said, seeing me out the door.

“I’ll be home tonight,” I said.

We kissed a kiss like we hadn’t since we were pissed on cheap wine and empty stomachs.