‘Can I stay here tonight?’ Stacey asked.

‘Sorry. There are no beds. Just a mattress on the floor, and that’s mine.’

‘I’ll sleep on the floor, I don’t care.’

‘No, you won’t.’ Absolutely not.

The doorbell rang. Stacey howled at Charlie not to tell Sellers she was there. ‘Your car’s parked outside, you stupid arse,’ Charlie muttered as she went to open the door. The possibility that her second late-night visitor might be anyone other than Colin Sellers did not occur to her, so she was startled into silence when she found, instead, Simon Waterhouse on her doorstep wearing his slightly puzzled grin, as if he was surprised to find himself there.

Charlie grabbed him with both hands and pulled him into the kitchen. ‘You’ll have to go now,’ she told Stacey. ‘Simon and I need to talk. Don’t we, Simon?’

He had rammed his hands deep into his trouser pockets and was looking embarrassed.

‘But you haven’t told me the answer!’ said Stacey. Her mouth hung open. The lower part of her face was covered in a shiny layer of mucus.

‘It defeats the object if I tell you,’ said Charlie. ‘What your teacher wants to know is whether you can figure it out, and you can’t.’

She watched as Stacey stumbled down the hall and out into the rain, hobbling past her second slipper without stopping to pick it up. Never before had closing the front door given Charlie so much satisfaction.

‘What was that all about?’ asked Simon.

As she explained, he picked up the sheet of paper that Stacey, in her distress, had left behind. He walked up and down as he read it. ‘An Englishman wrote it. Right?’

‘Obviously.’

‘The name François’s meant to make you think it’s by a Frenchman, so it can’t be or it’d be too easy.’

‘What? You’re kidding, right?’

Simon wasn’t.

‘Come on, it’s obvious.’

‘Not to me,’ he said.

‘Then you’re as thick as Stacey Sellers,’ said Charlie. ‘What do you want, anyway?’ She tried to sound off-hand.

‘You heard what we found at Corn Mill House?’

‘You want to talk about work? Your work? Go and wake up Sam Kombothekra. I’m off to bed.’

‘I also wondered… if you’d thought any more about the other business.’

‘The other business? The other business?’ She flew at him, slamming the palms of her hands into his chest, sending him staggering across the room. ‘You can’t even say it, can you? Because you don’t mean it! You don’t love me-at least, you’ve never said you do. Well?’ She was aware that she needed to create some silence if she wanted him to respond.

‘You make it impossible for me to say any of the things I want to say,’ he managed eventually.

‘Tough,’ Charlie snapped. ‘You used to treat me like a leper and now you want to marry me, when we’ve never even slept together, never been out on a date? What changed?’

‘You did.’

Charlie waited.

‘You need me now. You didn’t before. Even then, I cared more about you than I did anyone else, though I might not have shown it.’

Charlie dropped her cigarette end into what was left of Stacey’s vodka. ‘Maybe I should push the boat out and slit my wrists,’ she said. ‘Make myself utterly irresistible to you.’

Simon shook his head. ‘There’s no point, is there? I might as well go.’

‘No. Stay. Tell me about the case.’ Charlie needed time to think about what he’d said.

‘What if I don’t feel like it?’

‘I’m not asking for a declaration of love.’ Charlie smirked. ‘The mood doesn’t have to be right.’

He sighed. ‘We think the writer of the anonymous letters is called Esther Taylor, although we’ve yet to find an Esther Taylor who looks anything like Geraldine Bretherick. There are a couple we’ve not managed to track down yet, so hopefully she’s one of them. Anyway, the photographs that were hidden in the frames she took from Corn Mill House are of Amy Oliva and her mother, Encarna. That’s been confirmed by the school.’

‘Encarna?’

‘Encarnación. They’re Spanish. She was a banker at Leyland Carver in London, and Amy’s father, Angel Oliva, was a heart surgeon at Culver Valley General. They’re supposed to have moved to Spain, except the contact details they left with Harry Martineau, the guy who bought their house, don’t check out. I could have been in Spain by now, but the Snowman wants to dig up every inch of Mark Bretherick’s garden before he’ll fork out for a plane fare, tight-arse that he is. He reckons we’re going to find Angel Oliva’s body. So does Kombothekra.’

‘And you disagree?’

Simon looked away. ‘The name Harry Martineau ring any bells?’ he asked.

‘With me? No.’

He closed his eyes, folded his hands behind his head and rubbed the top of his neck hard with his thumbs. ‘I’ve seen it before-I know I have. Or heard it.’

‘You’ve got a theory, haven’t you?’ said Charlie.

‘I’m waiting for Norman to come back to me about something. ’

‘HTCU Norman?’

Simon nodded.

‘So it’s something about the computer, Geraldine’s laptop?’

‘I’ll tell you when it’s been confirmed.’

No question that it would be confirmed; Simon was sure he was right. As usual. Charlie couldn’t resist. ‘If I was your wife, would you tell me things before they’d been confirmed?’

‘Would you tell me the answer to Stacey Sellers’ French puzzle?’

She laughed. Reluctantly, Simon grinned.

‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘Work it out all by yourself and I’ll marry you.’

He looked curious. ‘Seriously? You’d do it, just based on that?’

Just based on that. He was unbelievable. Charlie didn’t have the energy to be solemn, or worry about it any more. She didn’t have the energy to accept or reject Simon’s offer of marriage in the proper spirit of either, with the earnestness and anguished soul-searching that was required, the meticulous calculation of probabilities, the thousands of tiny equations featuring the words ‘hope’ and ‘fear’. If she took the matter of his proposal and her response to heart, the only outcome could be terrible pain: of that Charlie was certain. So, might as well let it depend on something absurd. Send it up mercilessly. That way, the end result wouldn’t matter.

‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘Vraiment. That means “really” in French.’

Mark Bretherick’s solicitor, Paula Goddard, was waiting for Sam Kombothekra outside the custody suite. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I wanted a quick word before we go in.’

Sam walked and she followed, struggling to keep up. Her legs were short and her shoes looked like instruments of torture. ‘Shouldn’t you be having a last-minute consultation with your client?’ Sam said.

Goddard stopped walking. ‘I’m not spraining my ankle to keep up with you.’

Sam considered not stopping; it was past eleven o’clock. He’d missed his boys’ bedtime two nights running. They were too young to understand, old enough to know how to turn their disappointment into a weapon. His four-year-old was bound to be explicit about Sam’s new position in the family hierarchy the next time he saw him. ‘I don’t like you any more, Daddy. I only like Mummy.’ Or words to that effect.

Sam slowed down. ‘Sorry,’ he said. It wasn’t Paula Goddard’s fault that the way she’d said, ‘There you are,’ as if he’d been hiding from her deliberately, had reminded Sam of his wife Kate, whose there-you-ares tended to mean, ‘Stop skulking in the lounge with the newspaper when there’s Lego to be put away.’

Goddard folded her arms. ‘Let me say from the outset: I haven’t got time for the pointless battles that cops and lawyers go in for. I’m not your enemy and you’re not mine, right? I know two dead bodies were found in my client’s garden…’

‘You forgot the two in his house.’

‘… and I know how bad that looks. And you know he was in New Mexico when his wife and daughter died; that’s been established to everyone’s satisfaction, right?’