“Not when you’re standing out in it.” Mangeshkar remembered an incident from her childhood, when she spent the evening locked out on the balcony of the flats while her stepfather beat the hell out of her mother. She had been wearing a T-shirt and track suit bottoms, and the snow had fallen steadily enough to whiten her hair. Eventually a neighbour had taken the frozen girl in and warmed her beside the fire. She had not cried or complained, but never spoke to her mother’s husband again, even after he begged her to forgive him. She had no love of snow. Watching Bimsley’s goggle-eyed reaction to the weather merely convinced her that he was part Labrador. The fact that they expected her to work with someone so hopelessly optimistic and soft showed how badly they had misjudged her abilities. With a groan of fury, she stalked out of the office in search of Giles Kershaw, slamming the door hard behind her.

Raymond Land sat in his office and tipped back his chair, balancing his heels on the edge of his desk. This was how he liked it, so quiet you could hear mice scampering in the skirting boards and Crippen straining in his litter tray. He had been right to keep his staff on at the unit. It was time to stop treating them with kid gloves.

Only the angry traffic in the street below could remind him that he was still stranded here, in an ugly district of the city at a miserable time of the year. If only he had taken a post far, far away from the junkies and nutters of North London, somewhere in the southern hemisphere, where the sun remained visible even in the depth of winter, and the locals smiled respectfully instead of waving two fingers at you. Actually, he would have been grateful to find the Agincourt V sign still in use, but few of the street traders in Camden could manage English and only mustered a phlegmy expectoration as his officers passed.

He tipped his chair back further and placed his hands behind his head, savouring the first moments of what he fully expected to be the calmest three days of his career at the PCU. No tabloid-baiting lunatics to track down, no white witches, weepy clairvoyants, or chanting necromancers to chuck out of Bryant’s room, nothing but the gentle drift of a half-empty office running on a skeleton crew. Faraday had failed to close the unit down entirely, but at least both Bryant and May were out of his hair for the first time in many years. For once there was no-one telling him what to do, or what he ought to have done, or completely ignoring him. Land felt in charge once more, and at a time when there was so little work on that even he could not be accused of making a mistake.

Smiling to himself, he stretched and tipped his chair just a little bit too far.

Madeline ran down the steep slope of the road, her trainers sliding on loose gravel. She knew that her head start would not last long.

In the time it took Johann to dry and clothe himself, or even understand what she had realised about him, she could be back at the hotel. Steep staircases and flood gutters traversed the winding roads, allowing her to cut a path down the hillside to the palm-lined Basse Corniche. She reached sea level without a car passing her, and ran around the granite wall that lined the cliff in the direction of her hotel. Even though it was early, the village was dormant and lifeless. Only the occasional motorbike tore past her, waiters heading home from Monte Carlo to Nice.

She was shocked to discover that she still had the envelope with the passport and photographs gripped tightly in her hand, the proof of his guilt that would protect her from harm. What could she do now? He knew where she was staying, and there was nowhere else to go in a place as small as this.

She checked her watch and thought about the time it would take to rouse Ryan, pack, and check out. She could not remember how the winter train schedule operated, and did not want to wait on the exposed station platform, which could be seen from virtually everywhere in the village. The only alternative was to find a gendarme and convince him that this man was dangerous, but she could imagine how that conversation would go: ‘What were you doing with him in a house he’d broken into?“ ’You made love to him while the owner lay dying in the upstairs room?”

She had already been warned about the local police treating outsiders with suspicion. He had not just stolen passports; he had stolen whole identities. Perhaps if she threw the photographic evidence away, into the bushes beside the railway track, he would leave her alone-but they were her only weapon against him.

Or he might ignore her, simply move on to another town and start again. How long had he been travelling about like this, burglarizing and killing? How many others had discovered his secret, and what had he done to them? He had shown gentility and thoughtfulness in her company. Or perhaps he had just been careful. Her husband had always demonstrated a capacity for violence, but Johann-or whatever his real name might be-had hidden his other self so completely that he had disarmed her natural inclination to suspicion.

She thought back to the day that Kate Summerton had shown her how to kill the moth, using only the power of her unconscious mind. When she had first visited the refuge, Kate had healed her and cared for her like any hospital nurse. It was what she had done for so many other women who had been bullied and beaten by their men. But later, the art of her healing had moved beyond salves and sticking plasters to something more spiritual, a personal training program that had allowed her to understand why men had always troubled and deceived her. Yet it seemed that even Kate had not been able to prevent it from happening again…

Heavy clouds far blacker than the night were rolling over the edge of the Savaric cliffs, and the first fat droplets of rain had started to fall, drawing up the scent of pine and earth. She reached L’Auberge des Anges and walked through the bright, empty bar. Mme Funes and her husband usually stayed in the back watching television when there were no diners or drinkers to serve.

She unlatched the door of her room quietly and found Ryan folded up in the corner of her bed. She packed around the sleeping boy, shoving everything into two small bags, placing the envelope with the passport and photographs into her shoulder purse. It was 9:12 P.M. She thought there was a train at twenty-two minutes past, but could not be sure. There would probably not be another for an hour.

Ryan remained heavy and unmanageable, drifting in a fugue state from pyjamas to sweater and jeans without fully awakening. She needed to leave without disturbing Mme Funes, who would keep her talking, and tell others that she had left. The room bill could be mailed at a later date. Getting out of the front door, on the other side of the bar, would be the tricky part.

“Ryan, I want you to be very quiet, okay? We don’t want anyone to know we’re going out.”

“Where’s Johann?” the boy asked sleepily. “Can he come with us?”

“No, he has to work tonight. We’ll call him later.” She hoisted Ryan’s bag onto her spare shoulder and led him down the stairs. The floorboards were covered in threadbare carpet, and creaked horribly.

“Where are we going?” he whispered.

“We have to catch a train. We can’t stay here.” He was about to speak again, but she cut him off. He was at the age when he demanded explanations for everything. “I’ll tell you all about it once we’re on our way, I promise.” She would provide him with some invented excuse; there was no point in scaring him further.

At the foot of the stairs, she stopped and peered back through the hatch to the Funeses’ claustrophobically wallpapered lounge. She could hear the television playing, some announcer shouting ‘Qui gagnera le grand prix de ce soir’- Mme Funes was addicted to game shows. When she opened the front door, a blast of rainy wind blew in, and she heard the old lady rising from her place before the TV. Pulling Ryan through the door, she closed it firmly and headed out across the forecourt in the direction of the yellow radiance marking the railway station. Streetlights obscured by branches caused patches of shadow to waver across the road like flittering bats.