People liked to say that the wrong streets of Acton got the heat of the day and that’s why things were so different there. It was as if an enormous hand had swept down from the sky and jumbled up houses and avenues and people so that everything was always just a bit out of sorts. No one worked quite so hard on appearances: houses sagged moodily into decay. Gardens once planted were soon ignored, then forgotten altogether and left to fend for themselves. Children played noisily on the dirty pavements, disruptive games that frequently brought mothers to doorways, shrieking for peace from the din. The winter wind spit through poorly sealed windows and summer brought rain that leaked through the roofs. People in the wrong streets didn’t think much about being anywhere else, for to think of being elsewhere was to think of hope. And hope was dead in the wrong part of Acton.

Barbara drove there now, turning the Mini in on a street lined with cars that were rusting like her own. Neither garden nor fence fronted her own house, but rather a pavement-hard patch of dirt on which she parked her little car.

Next door, Mrs. Gustafson was playing BBC-1. Since she was nearly deaf, the entire neighbourhood was nightly regaled with the doings of her favourite television heroes. Across the street, the Kirbys were engaging in their usual preintercourse argument while their four children ignored them as best they could by throwing dirt clods at an indifferent cat that watched from a nearby fi rst-fl oor window sill.

Barbara sighed, groped for her front door key, and went into her house. It was chicken and peas. She could smell it at once, like a gust of foul breath.

“That you, lovey?” her mother’s voice called. “Bit late, aren’t you, dear? Out with some friends?”

What a laugh! “Working, Mum. I’m back on CID.”

Her mother shuffled to the door of the sitting room. Like Barbara, she was short, but terribly thin, as if a long illness had ravaged her body and taken it sinew by sinew on a march towards the grave. “CID?” she asked, her voice growing querulous. “Oh must you, Barbara? You know how I feel about that, my lovey.” As she spoke she raised a skeletal hand to her thin hair in a characteristic, nervous gesture. Her overlarge eyes were puffy and rimmed with red, as if she had spent the day weeping.

“Brought you some peaches,” Barbara responded, gesturing with the sack. “The travel agent was closed, I’m afraid. I even banged on the door to get them down from above, but they must’ve gone out.”

Diverted from the thought of CID, Mrs. Havers’s face changed, lighting with a dusty glow. She caught at the fabric of her shabby housedress and held it bunched in one hand, as if containing excitement. “Oh, that doesn’t matter at all. Wait till you see. Go in the kitchen and I’ll be right there. Your dinner’s still warm.”

Barbara walked past the sitting room, wincing at the chatter of the television and the fusty smell of a chamber too long kept closed. The kitchen, fetid with the odour of tough, broiled chicken and anaemic peas, was little better. She looked gloomily at the plate on the table, touched her fi nger to the withered fl esh of the fowl. It was stone cold, as slippery and puckered as something kept preserved in formaldehyde for forensic examination. Fat had congealed round its edges, and a single, rancid dab of butter had failed to melt on peas that looked as if they had had their last warming in a former decade.

Wonderful, she thought. Could the “lovely crab salad” have even come close to this epicurean splendour? She looked for the daily paper and found it, as always, on the seat of one of the wobbly kitchen chairs. She grabbed the front section, opened it to the middle, and deposited her dinner on the smiling face of the Duchess of Kent.

“Lovey, you’ve not thrown away your nice dinner!”

Damn! Barbara turned to see her mother’s stricken face, lips working in rejection, lines drawn in deep grooves down to her chin, pale blue eyes filled with tears. She clutched an artificial leather album to her bony chest.

“Caught me, Mum.” Barbara forced a smile, putting an arm round the woman’s bird-like shoulders and leading her to the table. “I had a bite at the Yard, so I wasn’t hungry. Should I have saved it for you or Dad?”

Mrs. Havers blinked quickly. The relief on her face was pathetic. “I…I suppose not. No, of course not. We wouldn’t want chicken and peas two nights in a row, would we?” She laughed gently and laid her album on the table. “Dad got me Greece,” she announced.

“Did he?” So that’s what he was doing out of the cage. “All by himself?” Barbara asked casually.

Her mother looked away, fingering the edges of her album, picking nervously at the artificial gold leaf. She gave a sudden movement, a quick, brilliant smile, and pulled out a chair. “Sit here, lovey, let me show you how we went.”

The album was opened. Previous trips through Italy, France, Turkey-now there was a bizarre one-and Peru were fl ipped through quickly until they arrived at the newest section, devoted to Greece.

“Now, here’s the hotel we stayed at in Corfu. Do you see how it’s just right there on the bay? We could have gone down to Kanoni to a newer one, but I liked the view, didn’t you, lovey?”

Barbara’s eyes smarted. She refused to submit. How long will it take? Will it never end?

“You’ve not answered me, Barbara.” Her mother’s voice quivered with anxiety. “I did work so hard on the trip all today. Having the view was better than the new hotel in Kanoni, wasn’t it, lovey?”

“Much better, Mum.” Barbara forced the words out and got to her feet. “I’ve got a case tomorrow. Can we do Greece later?” Would she understand?

“What sort of case?”

“It’s a…bit of a problem with a family in Yorkshire. I’ll be gone a few days. Can you manage, do you think, or shall I ask Mrs. Gustafson to come and stay?” Wonderful thought, the deaf leading the mad.

“Mrs. Gustafson?” Her mother closed the album and drew herself stiffly upright. “I think not, my lovey. Dad and I can manage on our own. We always have, you know. Except that short time when Tony…”

The room was unbearably, stifl ingly hot. Oh God, Barbara thought, just a wisp of air. Just this once. For a moment. She went to the back door, which led out to the weed-choked garden.

“Where’re you going?” her mother asked quickly, that familiar note of hysteria creeping into her voice. “There’s nothing out there! You mustn’t go outside after dark!”

Barbara picked up the discarded chicken dinner. “Rubbish, Mum. I won’t be a moment. You can wait by the door and see I’m all right.”

“But I…By the door?”

“If you like.”

“No, I mustn’t be by the door. We’ll leave it open just a bit, though. You can shout if you need me.”

“That sounds the plan, Mum.” She picked up the package and went hurriedly out into the night.

A few minutes. She breathed the cool air, listened to the familiar neighbourhood sounds, and felt in her pocket for a crumpled pack of Players. She shook one out, lit it, and gazed up at the sky.

What had started the seductive descent into madness? It was Tony, of course. Bright, freckle-faced imp. Fresh, spring air in the constant darkness of winter. Watchme, watchme, Barbie! I can do anything! Chemistry sets and rugger balls. Cricket on the common and tag in the afternoon. And horribly, stupidly chasing a ball right onto the Uxbridge Road.

But he didn’t die from that. Just a stay in hospital. A persistent fever, a peculiar rash. And a lingering, etiolating kiss from leukaemia. The wonderful, delicious irony of it all: go in with a broken leg, come out with leukaemia.

It had taken him four agonising years to die. Four years for them to make this descent into madness.

“Lovey?” The voice was tremulous.

“Right here, Mum. Just looking at the sky.” Barbara crushed her cigarette out on the rock-hard ground and walked back inside.