She thought back. "I had a dream and my dreams are very real. That one particularly vivid. I woke early, when it was still dark, and I couldn't think where I was. I thought the dream was true." She shrugged. "That's what frightened me."

"You told Mrs. Goode something on June third which troubled her conscience. What was that?"

"Did I?" He opened the diary and read the extract to her. She shook her head. "It was probably something trivial. Di has a sensitive conscience."

"Perhaps," he suggested, "you'd decided to tell her about the corpse you'd found in the ice house?"

"No, it certainly wasn't that." Her eyes danced wickedly. "I'd remember that."

He was silent for a moment. "Tell me why you don't feel sorry for that wretched man out there, Miss Cattrell."

She turned away to look for a cigarette. "I do feel sorry for him."

"Do you?" He picked up her lighter and flicked the flame for her. "You've never said so. Neither has Mrs. Maybury or Mrs. Goode. It's hardly normal. Most people would have expressed some sympathy, said 'Poor man' as the minimum gesture of regret. The only emotion any of you has shown so far is irritation."

It was true, she thought. How.stupid they had been. "We save our sympathies for ourselves," she told him coolly. "Compassion is a frail thing. It dies at the first touch of frost. You would have to live at Streech Grange to understand that."

"You depress me. I assumed compassion was one of your muses." He splayed his hands on the desk, then stood up. "You would have felt sorry for a stranger, I think. But you knew him and you didn't like him, did you?" His chair scraped back. "Right, Friar, Jansen, let's get on with it. We'll be as quick as we can, Miss Cattrell. At the end I will ask you to go upstairs with a WPC who will search you for anything you may have concealed in your clothing. You are welcome to stay while we work in here but, if you prefer to wait outside, one of the constables will wait with you."

She puffed a smoke ring into the air and stabbed its centre with the end of her cigarette. "Oh, I'll stay, Sergeant," she told him. "Police searches are meat and drink to me. It should run to a couple of thousand words on a woman's page somewhere. I rather fancy a headline like the pry trade or licence to snoop. What do you think?"

Sallow-faced bitch, he thought, as he watched the smoke drift from her mouth. The room stank of her cigarettes. "Please yourself, Miss Cattrell." He turned away. The blood swelled and throbbed and thickened in his head till he thought only a scream would relieve its pressure.

They went through everything with a fine-tooth comb and with infinite patience. Inside books, behind pictures, beneath chairs, through drawers; they ran long needles into the earth in the plant pots, felt for lumps under the fitted carpet, upended the sofa and poked deftly into its soft cushions; and when they had finished, the room looked exactly as it had done before they started. Anne, who had been moved courteously from her place behind her desk, was duly impressed.

"Very professional," she told them. "I congratulate you. Is that it?"

"Not quite," said McLoughlin. "Would you open the safe for me, please?"

She gave him a startled look. "What on earth makes you think I've got a safe?"

He walked over to the oak-panelled mantelpiece which was an exact replica of the one in the library. He pressed on the edge of the middle panel and slid it back, revealing the dull green metal of a wall-safe with a chromium handle and lock. He glanced at Friar and Jansen. "I found the one in the library this morning," he said. "Neat, isn't it?" He couldn't look at her. Her panic, brief though it had been, had shocked him.

She walked back to her desk, collecting her thoughts. She had always believed Phoebe the better judge of character, but it was Diana who was scared of McLoughlin.

"Would you open it, please?" he asked her again.

She took an unbroached packet of cigarettes from a carton of two hundred in her top drawer and tore the seal off it. He watched her patiently, saying nothing.

"Just who do you think you are?" snapped DG Friar angrily. "You heard the Sergeant. Open the bloody safe."

She ignored him, flipped the lid of the packet and turned the whole thing upside down, shaking a key into the palm of her hand. "How are you on Spenser?" she asked McLoughlin with a quirky smile. " 'A man by nothing is so well betrayed as by his manners.' It might have been written for your friend here."

She's stalling, he thought, she's afraid, and I hate her. God, how I hate her. "The safe, please, Miss Cattrell."

She walked over with a tiny shrug, unlocked the door and pulled it open. The safe was empty except for a carving knife with a blood-stained rag wrapped around its handle. The blade was black and crusted. McLoughlin felt sick. For all his anger, he hadn't wanted this. With a detached part of his mind, he wondered if he was ill. His head was burning as if he had a fever. He leant his shoulder against the mantelpiece to steady himself. "Can you explain this, please?" He heard his voice from a distance, harsh and unnatural.

"What's to explain?" she asked, taking out a cigarette and lighting it.

What indeed? The shutter clicked open and shut, open and shut, behind his eyes. He glanced at the cigarette packet on the desk. "Let's start with why you went to so much trouble to hide the key?"

"Habit."

"That's a lie, Miss Cattrell."

Tension had tightened the skin around his nose and mouth, giving him a curiously flat look. She thought of the steel hawser she had once seen in Shanghai, winding on to a huge capstan and drawing a crippled tanker into the docks. As the slack was taken up, it had risen from the concrete, shaking itself free of dust as it thinned and tautened, and then had come a moment of pure horror when it snapped under the strain and whipped with frightening speed through the defenceless flesh of a man's neck. He had seen it coming, she remembered, had put up his hands to protect himself. She looked at McLoughlin and felt an urge to do the same. "I want to phone my solicitor," she said. "I will not answer any more questions until he gets here."

McLoughlin stirred. "Friar, find Inspector Walsh for me and ask him to come to Miss Cattrell's wing, will you? Tell him it's urgent, tell him she wants to make a phone call. Jansen"-he flicked his head towards the French windows-"rustle up a WPC for a strip search. You'll find Brownlow somewhere outside." He waited till the two men had left then turned to the mantelpiece and stood staring at the open safe. After a moment he swung the door to and put his hands on the mantelpiece, lowering his head to look into the unlit fire. It was a gas replica of a real fire and the artificial coals were peppered with cigarette ash and dog-ends. "You should put them in a bin," he murmured. "They'll leave marks when they burn."

She craned her neck to see what he was looking at. "Oh, those. I keep meaning to hoover them up."

"I thought Mrs. Phillips did the hoovering."

"She does, but she discriminates against certain messes, or more accurately the makers of certain messes, and won't touch them with a barge pole."

He turned to look at her, resting his elbow on the mantelpiece. He was shaking like a man with ague. "I see." He didn't, of course. What sort of discrimination did Molly go in for? Racial? Religious? Class?

"She discriminates on moral grounds," Anne told him. Had he spoken his thoughts aloud? He couldn't remember, his head ached so much. "She's a good old-fashioned Puritan, only truly happy when she's miserable. She can't understand why the rest of us don't feel the same way."

"Like my mother," he said.

She gave her throaty chuckle. "Probably. Mine doesn't bother, thank God. I couldn't do battle with two of them."