Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Where was the third suit? The one already in the wardrobe still had the dry-cleaner's little pink tag attached to its collar with a small safety pin, so the suit that was missing must be the one that Dr Hunter was wearing yesterday. There was no sign ofit anywhere. Had she driven all the way down to Yorkshire to see the mysterious sick aunt without getting changed? That seemed completely out of character for Dr Hunter who always got changed the minute she got home from work, kicking off her shoes, hanging up her suit and throwing on something casual, jeans usually. 'There, I'm me again,' she sometimes said, as if the suit was a disguise.

On the carpet, in front of the chest of drawers, were Dr Hunter's low-heeled black court shoes, one upright, one fallen over, looking as ifDr Hunter had just stepped out of them. Sadie sniffed anxiously at each of the shoes as ifshe was about to be sent off to follow a scent trail. Next to the shoes were Dr Hunter's discarded tights in a wrinkled heap on the floor, pale and empty, like an abandoned snake skin.

Looking at the contents of the closet gave Reggie a funny feeling, a bit like when she looked at Mum's clothes hanging in the wardrobe or Ms MacDonald's clothes in the skip. It seemed to have the same effect on Sadie who lay down on the floor next to the shoes and gave a mournful whine. Reggie wanted to hear Dr Hunter's voice, hear her say, 'I'll be back soon, Reggie, don't worry.' Reggie was sure that Dr Hunter wouldn't feel 'bothered' ifshe phoned her. She dialled Dr Hunter's mobile number again but just as the number began to ring she heard the sound of a car approaching. Sadie pricked up her ears and stood to attention. A glance out of the window confirmed it was the Range Rover. 'Sugar,' Reggie said to the dog.

For a mad moment she thought about diving into the bedroom closet but when people did that in horror films it never turned out well. They were either found and murdered or they witnessed something horrible from behind the slatted doors of their hiding place.

The thing was, when she dialled Dr Hunter's phone (my lifeline) she had heard the unmistakable sound ofits ringtone -Bach's 'Crab Canon' ('So called,' Dr Hunter explained, 'because the second voice plays exactly the same notes as the first, only backwards,' which Reggie didn't entirely understand but she smiled and nodded and said, 'Right, I get it.'). The phone was ringing from somewhere downstairs. Reggie was halfWay down the staircase on a hunt for the phone -the Bach sounded as if it was coming from the kitchen when Mr Hunter burst through the front door at his usual velocity and was brought up short at the sight of her.

'Still here, Reggie?'

'Just been to the 100,' Reggie said, feigning nonchalance. The phone had stopped ringing a beat after Mr Hunter entered the house.

'Don't you have a home to go to?' Mr Hunter said.

'Yep, sure do,' she said, marching past him and out of the front door. Sadie raced past her, hoovering up familiar smells in the border at the side of the drive. When Reggie reached the gate she whistled to Sadie, who came trotting up tail whirling round, the way it did when she was excited at retrieving treasure. She was carrying something in her mouth and when she reached Reggie she placed her find at her feet and sat obediently, waiting to be praised.

Reggie's heart nearly stopped when she saw what Sadie had dropped on the ground.

The baby's comforter, his square of moss-green blanket. It looked as ifit had been trampled in the mud and when Reggie picked it up and examined it she could see a stain on it, a stain that wasn't tomato sauce or red wine, a stain that was blood. Reggie knew blood now. She had seen more in the last twenty-four hours than she had seen in a previous lifetime.

Dr Hunter's surgery was in Liberton and Reggie started walking because she wasn't sure how Sadie, who had never been on a bus, would fare with all those trampling feet and shoving bodies. Reggie never fared well herself. She ate her Mars bar and would have given a heel of it to Sadie but Dr Hunter said chocolate was bad for dogs. She would have to buy dog treats, nothing with sugar, Dr Hunter didn't like Sadie to have sugar (,Got to look after the old girl's teeth.'). Reggie had bought a couple of tins of dog food from the Avenue Stores on Blackford Avenue but they were already weighing her bag down. She had to keep swapping it with the Topshop bag on her other shoulder. She felt extremely burdened. Mum used to carry loads ofheavy bags around with her -they'd never been able to afford a car -she used to say her genes had been spliced with those of a donkey. No she didn't say that, Mum wouldn't have used the word 'spliced', she might not even have used 'genes'. What had she said? She was fading, retreating into a darkness where Reggie couldn't follow. 'Bred from a donkey' -that was it. Wasn't it? The darkness deepens.

Eventually Reggie felt too tired to walk any further and caught a bus the rest of the way. Sadie did pretty well for a first-time bus user.

The surgery was a big, modern, single-storey building with no obvious place to leave a dog so Reggie said 'Sit' and 'Stay' to Sadie in her most authoritative voice, the one she used on the baby ('No!') when he was making an accelerated move on a deathly grape or coin. When Sadie was a puppy Dr Hunter had taken her to obedience classes from which Sadie had graduated top of her class. ('Dog school', Dr Hunter called it. Which was a lovely idea.) She even had a red rosette, tattered now with age, to prove it, which Dr Hunter kept pinned to the cork noticeboard in the kitchen. She was pretty smart for a dog, she could do all the usual sit-and-stay stuff as well as walking tightly to heel like a dog at Crufts, 'My Best in Show,' Dr Hunter said fondly. Sadie had what Dr Hunter called her 'party pieces' as well, she could roll over, and play dead, and shake your hand -her big paw softer and heavier in your hand than you expected.

Sadie hunkered down obligingly on the ground outside the big glass doors to the surgery and Reggie went inside and found the reception desk where a woman was having a silent stand-off with her computer. Without even glancing in Reggie's direction she put her hand up and made a kind of 'halt' sign to her. Reggie wondered if she was going to say 'sit' and 'stay'. Eventually the receptionist tore her eyes away from the screen and, giving Reggie a starchy look, said, 'Yes?' It pained Reggie to think that Dr Hunter worked in a place that contained such unfriendly people.

'I know Dr Hunter's away,' Reggie said. 'I just wondered when she would be back?'

'I'm afraid I can't tell you that.'

'Because it's confidential information?'

'Because I don't know. Are you looking for an appointment with her?' 'No.' 'Because I can make one with another doctor.' 'No, no thank you. You don't know why she's gone away, do you?'

Reggie asked hopefully.

'No, I can't tell you that.'

'Because it's confidential information?'

'Yes.'

'Just one last thing,' Reggie said. 'Did she phone in herself, or was it Mr Hunter?' 'Who are you?' Little Miss Nobody. Sister of the lesser Billy. Orphan of the storm.

Little Polly Flinders sitting amongst the cinders. Reggie didn't sav any of that, of course, she just said, 'Well, seeya,' and hoped she wouldn't.

On the way out of the surgery, passing a seemingly endless display of posters urging her to brush her teeth twice a day and eat five pieces of fruit and watch out for chlamydia, Reggie bumped into one of the midwives attached to the practice. Dr Hunter's friend, Sheila.

One afternoon in late summer Dr Hunter came home with her and said, 'Sheila, this is the famous Reggie, she's my life-support system,' then Sheila and Dr Hunter sat in the garden with the baby crawling around on the grass ('I can't believe how he's grown, Jo!') and drank Pimm's, even though Dr Hunter said, 'God, Sheila, I'm breastfeeding, this is shameful,' but they were laughing about it and Sheila said, 'It's fine, Jo. Trust me, I'm a midwife,' and they laughed even more.

They invited Reggie to join them but Reggie thought someone should keep a sober eye on things in case they became drunk in charge of a baby but, of course, Dr Hunter wasn't like that and she made one drink last until the afternoon had begun to lengthen into twilight when Mr Hunter arrived home and said, 'Still here, Reggie?'

Both women had looked disconcerted at the sight of Mr Hunter, striding across the lawn with a can of beer in his hand like someone who'd crash-landed from another world but then he said, 'Can anyone join this session then?' and Dr Hunter said, 'You've come late to the party, we're as tight as ticks here,' which wasn't true and Mr Hunter said, 'Aye, a right pair ofjakies,' and they all three laughed and Reggie went out and scooped the baby up from the lawn and put him to bed with a bottle -Dr Hunter kept a stash of expressed milk in the freezer. Reggie had once seen Mr Hunter take out the bottle of Stoli he kept in the freezer and frown at the sight of the little containers of frozen breast milk. 'The difference between men and women,' he laughed when he saw Reggie watching. 'By the contents of their freezer shall you know them.'

'It's Reggie, isn't it?' Sheila said. She pointed at her chest and said, 'I'm Sheila,Jo's friend. Sheila Hayes.'

'Yes, I know, I remember. Hi.'

'How are you? Are you looking for Jo? I don't think she's in today, I haven't seen her anyway.' 'She's gone away to see a sick aunt in Yorkshire.' 'Really? She never said anything. That would explain it. We were supposed to be going to Jenners last night, for their Christmas shopping evening, and she didn't turn up and that's just not Jo.' 'And when you tried to phone her -no answer?' Reggie hazarded.

'Yes, strange, isn't it. Her phone's her-'

'Lifeline?' Reggie supplied.

'Still,' Sheila said, 'an illness in the family, that explains it. An aunt?'

'Yes.'

'She's never mentioned an aunt. Is everything OK with you, Reggie?' 'Totally. Thank you.'

Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisherfound it. From the pocket of her new jacket Reggie took out the scrap ofgreen blanket that Sadie had retrieved from Dr Hunter's front garden. A pocket was where prostitutes kept their money, Dr Hunter said. 'Nursery rhymes are never what they seem.' That could be said about a lot of things in Reggie's opinion. When Sadie laid the baby's muddy bit of blanket at her feet she had been horrified. It belonged with the baby. The baby belonged with Dr Hunter. The dog belonged with Dr Hunter. Reggie belonged with Dr Hunter. It was all wrong. The whole world was wrong. Hard times.

Pilgrim5 Progress HE WAS DREAMING. HE WAS WALKING ALONG A DESOLATE COUNTRY road, following a woman. It was the strolling woman from the Dales. Still strolling. He shouted to her, 'Hey!' and she turned round to look at him. She had no face, just a blank oval like a plate where her features should have been. She was terrifYing. He woke up.

'Nice cup of tea?' a nurse said to him. A nurse (with a face) was putting a cup and saucer on a bed-tray in front of him. And he remembered everything. Not the train crash, not being on the train at all, the last thing he remembered was finding the lost highway, waiting on the slip road to the Ai, looking for a gap in the traffic.

But he knew who he was, his name, his history, everything.

'My name's Jackson Brodie,' he said to the nurse. 'I remember , now. 'Jackson Brodie?You're sure?' 'Sure.'

'Where am I?' Jackson asked a nurse.

'In the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh,' she said.

'Edinburgh? Edinburgh, Scotland?' Listen to him, he sounded like an American tourist.

'Yes, Edinburgh, Scotland,' she affirmed.

What on earth was he doing in Edinburgh? The scene of some of his greatest defeats in life and love. Why was he in Edinburgh? 'I was on my way to London,' he said.

'You must have gone the wrong way,' she laughed. 'Bad luck.'

He might not know where he had come from but he knew where he was going. He was going home. Edinburgh. Louise was in Edinburgh. A sudden spasm of panic gripped Jackson. No one had looked for him. Did that mean he had not been alone on the train, that perhaps Tessa had joined him at N orthallerton and he couldn't remember? And now she was lying in the hospital somewhere? Or worse? Jackson sat bolt upright and grabbed the nurse's arm. 'My wife,' he said. 'Where's my wife?'

(An Elderly Aunt'

LOUISE HAD NOT JOINED NEIL HUNTER IN HIS BREAKFAST WHISKY even though, more than most, she appreciated the medicinal taste of a Laphroaig. She could drink most guys under the table if she had to (sometimes you had to) but she had her rules. She never drank and drove any more and she never drank on duty -she would have been mortified if anyone at work had smelt whisky on her breath. Only alcoholics smelt of alcohol at nine in the morning. (Her mother. Always.) Instead she picked up a double espresso from a street stall and returned to her office where she sat in solitary confinement and reviewed, for the hundredth time, all the reported sightings ofDavid Needler.

The heat had gone out of the case, Louise could feel it growing colder by the day, feel it slipping away. It had been big news for a while and now it was almost as if it had never happened and it was beginning to feel that it might turn into a never-ending limbo for everyone concerned, one ofthose cases that detectives brood over for decades. Louise took this extremely negative thought and held it under waves until it went limp and then forced open her rusted seachest on the seabed and threw it in.

There had been no sightings ofDavid Needler at all until they got the case on to Crimewatch, after which they had been deluged by callers claiming to have seen him everywhere from Bangor to Bognor, but not one of them had checked out. The man had disappeared off the radar. He hadn't used a credit card, hadn't used his passport. His car was found parked near Flamborough Head but Louise thought that was the work of someone who thought they were cleverer than the police. She was surprised he hadn't painted 'Clue' on the side of the car in big black letters. She was disinclined to think that he had killed himself, he wasn't the type, his sense of self-importance was too great. 'Hitler killed himself,' Karen Warner said. 'He was what you might call self-important.' She was standing in front ofLouise's desk, eating a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer that was making Louise feel nauseous. 'Napoleon didn't,' Louise said. 'Stalin didn't, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Caesar. Let's face it, Hitler was the exception to the rule.'

'My, you're in a mood,' Karen said.

'No, I'm not.'

'Yes you are.' Karen's stomach was huge. Louise didn't remember being that big with Archie, he had been tiny, almost premature.

Louise blamed herself, she had smoked through the first three months because she had no idea she was pregnant. Louise was sure that buried deep inside her, lurking in the murky labyrinth of her heart, there was an incredibly well-behaved person wondering when she would ever be let out. Patrick probably wondered the same thing. Patient Patrick, waiting for her to come good. Long wait, baby.

Karen was right, she was especially cranky today, all the coffee had taken the edge off for a while but now she could feel a headache rolling in like haar up the Forth.

'Just came to report back on the woman who said she saw David Needler sitting on the harbour wall in Arbroath "eating a fish supper" , she said.'

'And?'

'Tayside police seem doubtful,' she said, through a mouthful of food. 'No one else remembered him and when she looked at the photograph again she wasn't so sure.' 'He's gone underground,' Louise said. 'He's not the kind to be hanging out eating chips in Arbroath.' David Needler was the clever , cunning sort, plus he was English, so he had probably run for the border. And he still had lots of blokey mates down south who might have helped him, they all denied it blind, ofcourse, but a few of them were flash with money so it wouldn't have been impossible for him to get abroad. But Louise thought he was still in the UK somewhere, the ordinary guy living next door to someone. Maybe he was already courting another woman.

She picked up the file photograph of him and studied the bland face that gazed back at her. Alison Needler hadn't been able to find a photograph taken of him on his own in the last few years (photographs were memories, perhaps no one had wanted to remember him), so they had lifted this image and blown it up. The original photograph was of the whole family, taken at Disneyland Paris three children and a wife gathered round, grinning as if they were in some kind of happiness competition ('It was a terrible day,' Alison said grimly. 'He was in one of his moods.'). Louise thought ofJoanna Hunter's black-and-white photograph of thirty years ago, people held in a moment that could never come again.

Marcus entered her office, waving a piece ofpaper like a little flag. He caught sight of the photograph and said, 'News of Lord Lucan?'

Everyone remembered Lord Lucan's name but hardly anyone remembered Sandra Rivett, the nanny he clubbed to death. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Gabrielle Mason and her children, also mostly forgotten by the collective memory. Who could name one of theYorkshire Ripper's victims? Or the Wests'? The forgotten dead. Victims faded, murderers lived on in the memory, only the police kept the eternal flame alight, passing it on as the years went by.

'What was the nanny that he killed called?' Louise asked Marcus. Here beginneth the catechism.

'Don't know,' Marcus admitted.

'Sandra Rivett,' Karen said.

'She has the memory of an elephant,' Louise said to Marcus.

'Gestating an elephant as well,' Karen said. 'Can't wait to get the little fucker out.'

'You have to stop swearing once you have a baby,' Louise said.

'Did you?'

'No.'

'You're supposed to be a role model for me.'

'Am I? You're in trouble then.'

'Boss?' Marcus said, handing her the piece of paper he'd been holding on to. 'Our Mr Hunter's been unlucky lately. It turns out that a couple of weeks before the fire the manager of the Bread Street arcade was attacked when he was cashing up and one of the windows in another amusement arcade was put in last Saturday night. Plus, one of his drivers was dragged from his cab outside the Foot of the Walk and beaten up, and another car had its windows smashed when it was picking up a passenger in Livingston-'

'Livingston?' Louise said sharply.

'It's OK, boss -nothing to do with our lady.'

Louise didn't know when or why Marcus had started referring to Alison Needler as 'our lady' but it always threw her. Our Lady of Livingston. Our Lady of the Sorrows.

Louise could see Karen's belly clearly through her thin jersey maternity top. Her belly button pushing out like a doorbell asking to be rung. The belly was pulsing as her baby moved around, like something from Alien. Louise remembered that odd fluttery feeling of having a freewheeling baby inside you, independent and dependent at the same time, an eternal maternal dialectic. A foot, a little foot, a tiny, tiny little foot, pushed against the thin drumskin of flesh and jersey. It didn't help Louise's queasiness.

'So?' Louise said. 'The man has bad karma, or someone's trying to tell him something? He's all yours by the way, he's giving nothing away but he looks like a very worried man to me.'

DI Sandy Mathieson, a man who had risen above his abilities as far as Louise was concerned, put his head round the door. If there was a collective noun for police like Sandy it would definitely be 'plod'.

'MAPPA have been on the phone, about Decker.'

'What about him?'

'He's disappeared.'

A black crow flapping across the sun, a dark place, a bad feeling in Louise's own belly. A real, physical feeling, probably brought on by the tub of egg mayonnaise that Karen Warner had just produced and was digging into with a teaspoon. The woman couldn't go five minutes without eating something. Something disgusting usually.

'Patrol car in Doncaster did a routine check on him this morning just to see he was where he was supposed to be.'

'And he wasn't?'

'Mother said he went out at tea-time on Wednesday and never came back.'

'He knew the press had got wind of him,' Louise said. 'He was probably just trying to escape.' That word again. What had Joanna Hunter said, I think I'll go away, escape for a bit? Were they both running from the same thing? Two people who would never be free of each other. Joanna Hunter and Andrew Decker would belong to each other for evermore, their histories twisted and fused together.

'Well, at least the train crash stopped it making the papers for a day or two,' Sandy said.

'Every disaster has a silver lining, eh, Sandy?' Karen said. 'It won't be long before the press hounds are baying at their heels again. A train crash only gets headlines for what -three days tops? Anyway, he's in England, isn't he? He's not our problem. MAPPA's emailed through a photo,' she added, placing a photograph on the desk in front of Louise.

Decker looked a completely different person from the teenager who had stared out of the papers thirty years ago (Louise had googled up his ghost). He was a different person, of course. There was a whole wasted lifetime between the two images.

On her way back from a Tasking and Coordinating Group meeting at St Leonard's Louise realized she was famished and pulled into Cameron Toll car park and bought an enormous bar of chocolate in Sainsbury's. She never ate chocolate but she ate the whole bar as soon as she was in the car and when she got to the station she had to throw the chocolate straight back up again in the toilet. Served her right for trying to put herself into a diabetic coma.

She was coming out of the toilet when her phone rang. 'Reggie Chase,' the voice said. The name was familiar but Louise couldn't place her. The girl was going a mile a minute and Louise couldn't keep up with her. The gist of it was that 'something' had 'happened to Dr Hunter'. 'joanna Hunter?' Louise said. My lady, she thought, another one. Louise's ladies. Reggie Chase, the wee girl who had opened Joanna Hunter's door to her on Tuesday. 'What do you mean something's happened to her?'

Wee girl and a big dog, it turned out. Dr Hunter's dog. It wagged its tail at the sight of her and Louise felt flattered, absurdly. Perhaps a dog would fill the space between her and Patrick that he wanted a baby to occupy. Was there a space between them? Was that a good thing?

Or a bad thing? She had driven back into town to meet the girl. They left the dog on the back seat of Louise's car while they went and had a coffee in a Starbucks on George Street. Louise hated Starbucks. Drinking the Yankee dollar. 'Someone has to make money for the evil capitalists,' she said to the girl, buying her a latte and a chocolate muffin. 'Some days it's you and me. This is one of those days.' The girl said, 'Och, we do a lot of things that we shouldn't do.' The girl had a nasty-looking bruise on her forehead that she made some excuse for but to Louise it looked like she'd been hit by someone. Reggie Chase. Joanna Hunter's nanny, like Sandra Rivett -no, not nanny, 'mother's help'. Mother's little helper. Louise had taken Valium after Archie's birth, 'Numb the shock a bit,' her GP said. The guy had been a pusher, handing out tranquillizers like they were sweeties. Louise couldn't imagine Joanna Hunter doing that. Louise wasn't breastfeeding when she took drugs, her milk had never come in properly and ran out after a week. (,Stress,' the GP said indifferently.) Archie seemed to find a bottle more emotionally comforting than his mother's breast. She stopped taking the Valium after a week, it made her into such a dull-witted person that she was afraid she would drop the baby or lose it or forget she'd ever had it to begin with.

Was Reggie old enough to look after another woman's child when she was almost a child herself? She was the same age as Archie. She tried to imagine putting Archie in charge of a small baby but the thought made her shudder.

'Look, look what Sadie found in Dr Hunter's garden,' the girl said, thrusting a manky piece of green cotton into Louise's hand.

'Sadie?'

'Dr Hunter's dog.'

'What is this?' Louise asked doubtfully, holding the scrap of green between thumb and forefinger.

'It's the baby's bit ofblanket, his comforter,' Reggie said. 'He won't go anywhere without it. Dr Hunter would never have left it behind. I found it in the garden. Why was it in the garden? It was already dark when I left and he had it in his hand then, and look at it, that stain there, that's blood.'

'Not necessarily.'

Archie had something similar, a bit of egg-yolk-yellow plush that had started life as a duck hand-puppet before the stitching gave way and the duck was decapitated. He couldn't go to sleep at night without it, she could see him now clutching it fiercely in his hand as if his life depended on it. Only in sleep did his fingers uncurl. He was the deepest sleeper. Louise would creep into his room in the middle of the night to cut toenails, remove splinters, swab cuts and grazes, all the little acts ofeveryday child maintenance that would cause him to scream the house down in daylight hours. He would rather have been separated from Louise than from that bit of yellow material.

She handed it back to the girl, saying, 'Things get lost.' Accidents happen. Milk gets spilt. Platitudes rain.

'Mr Hunter said Dr Hunter drove down,' Reggie said, 'but her car was in the garage. There was nothing wrong with it when she drove home in it yesterday. She's gone away but she never told me she was going, which isn't like her at all and Mr Hunter says she's visiting a sick aunt but she's never mentioned the existence of an aunt to me, I spoke to her friend Sheila at work and she was supposed to have gone to Jenners' Christmas Shopping evening yesterday but she didn't tell her she couldn't make it -which is 50 not Dr Hunter, believe me -and her phone is in the house somewhere because I heard it ringing, I definitely heard it ringing, Bach's "Crab Canon" she wouldn't forget her phone, it's her lifeline -she isn't forgetful, Dr Hunter never forgets anything, and her suit is missing, she wouldn't drive all that way in her suit, and-'

'Take a breath,' Louise advised.

'She's disappeared,' the girl said. 'I think someone's taken her.'

'No one's taken her.'

'Or Mr Hunter has done something to her.'

'Done something?'

The girl dropped her voice to a whisper, 'Murdered.'

Louise sighed inwardly. The girl was one ofthose. An over-excited imagination, could get stuck on an idea and be carried away by it. She was a romantic, quite possibly a fantasist. Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Reggie Chase was a girl who would find something of interest wherever she went. Training to be a heroine, that was what Catherine Morland had spent her first sixteen years doing, and she wouldn't be surprised if Reggie Chase had done the same.

'It happens that I was at Dr Hunter's house earlier today,' Louise said. 'I was seeing Mr Hunter about something quite unrelated.'

'That's a funny coincidence.'

'And that's all it is,' Louise said sharply. 'A coincidence. Mr Hunter told me that his wife had gone away, to stay with an aunt who isn't well.' 'Yes, I know, I said that, that's what he told me but I don't believe it.' 'The aunt isn't a matter of faith, she's not Father Christmas, she's a relative. She's not part ofsome grand conspiracy to hide Dr Hunter.'

'No one's seen Dr Hunter. No one's spoken to her.'

'Mr Hunter has.'

'He says.'

Louise sighed heavily. 'Look -Reggie -why don't I give you a ride home?' 'You should get the phone number for the aunt of Dr Hunter, make sure she's OK. Maybe you could send someone to the aunt's house in Yorkshire, someone local. Hawes, H-a-w-e-s. Mr Hunter won't give me an address or a phone number but he'd have to give it to you.'

'Enough.' Louise held up a hand like a traffic cop. 'Leave it alone. Nothing has happened to Dr Hunter. Come on, my car's not far away.'

'Find out ifthe aunt exists. Get hold ofDr Hunter's mobile it's in , the house, then you can see if the aunt really phoned her.'

'Car. Now. Home.'

She said she had saved the life of a man at the train crash. More fantasy, obviously. Louise should have sent a uniform to talk to her. Ifit had been about anyone else she would have done, it was just that she had claimed Joanna Hunter and now she couldn't let her go. Her lady.

I might go away. Escape for a bit. Her husband's finances were in meltdown, he was walking on the dark side with some questionable people, the marriage was probably falling apart and Andrew Decker was back on the streets. Who wouldn't disappear? Was the marriage falling apart, or was she just projecting her own feelings on to Joanna Hunter?

Joanna Hunter had never told Reggie about what had happened to her when she was a child. In fact she hadn't told anyone as far as Louise could see, apart from her husband, and Louise wasn't about to break that confidence. It was Joanna Hunter's decision to keep her secrets, not Louise's to reveal them. 'I don't want Reggie to know something like that,' Joanna Hunter said. 'It would upset her. People look at you differently when they know you've been involved in something terrible. It's the thing about you that they find most interesting.' But it was the thing that was most interesting. Survivors of disasters were always interesting. They were witnesses to the unthinkable. Like Alison Needler and her children.

'A burden you have to carry through the rest ofyour life,' Joanna Hunter said. 'It doesn't get better, it doesn't go away, you just have to take it with you to the end.' Louise thought ofJackson, his sister had been murdered a long time ago and now he was the only one left who had known her. No such problem with Samantha. If her husband and her son didn't remember her, her things did. She lived on, forgotten but not gone, the spirit of Patrick's wife embalmed for ever in her napkins and vases and good silver fish knives. Samantha was the real wife, Louise was the pale impostor.