“Absolutely,” Barbara said, to rescue him.

“If she did not return, you see, as she said she would do, I didn’t wish Hadiyyah then to have to explain. It seemed to me it would make her disappointment that much worse.”

“Absolutely,” Barbara said.

“So you see.”

“Clear as anything.”

“Hadiyyah always believed.”

“She did. She always said.”

“I don’t know why.”

“Well, it’s her mum after all. There’s a bond. She’d know that. She’d feel it.”

“You don’t quite…” Azhar felt in his pockets. Barbara knew what he was looking for, but she’d come without her cigarettes. He found his own packet and offered her one. She shook her head. He lit up himself. “Why she returned,” he said.

“What?”

“The truth behind why she returned is what I do not yet know.”

“Oh. Well.” Barbara didn’t know what to say. The subject of exactly why Angelina had left Azhar and her daughter in the first place was something that had never come up. The euphemism had long been a trip to Canada. While Barbara had reckoned it stood for something other than a tour round that country-if that was even where Angelina had been-she had never pressed for more information. Hadiyyah, she assumed, would not have it and Azhar would not be willing to give it.

“I suspect it wasn’t quite what Angelina thought it might be,” Azhar said. “Living with him.”

Barbara nodded. “Right. Well. That’s usually the story, isn’t it,” she said. “The bloom fades, and at the end of the day people’s knickers start showing no matter how they try to hide them, eh?”

“You knew there was another, then?”

“Another bloke?” Barbara shook her head. “I wondered why she left and where she really was, but I didn’t know there was someone else involved.” She looked towards the front of the house when she went on. “’F I’m honest with you, Azhar…? It always seemed dead mad to me that she’d leave the two of you. Especially Hadiyyah. I mean, men and women have their troubles, and I get that, but I never got her leaving Hadiyyah.”

“So you understand.” He drew in on his cigarette. The lighting was dim along the path on the side of the house and, in the darkness, Barbara could barely see his face. But the tip of his cigarette glowed fire with how deeply he drew upon it. She recalled that Angelina didn’t like his smoking. She wondered if he would now give it up.

“Understand what?” she asked him.

“That she will take Hadiyyah, Barbara. Next time. She will take her. And that is something…I cannot lose Hadiyyah. I will not lose Hadiyyah.”

He sounded so fierce and, if it was possible, at the same time so bleak that Barbara felt something give way within her, a crack in a surface she would have preferred to keep forever solid. She said, “Azhar, you’re doing the right thing here. I’d do the same. Anyone would.”

For he had no choice and she well knew it. He was caught in circumstances of his own devising, having left his wife and two other children for Angelina, having never divorced, having never remarried…It was a nightmare situation that would end up in court if Angelina so chose and he’d be the loser and what he’d be the loser of was the only person left in his shattered life who mattered to him.

“I must do what I can to keep her here,” he said.

“I completely agree,” Barbara said.

And she meant those words despite the fact that they changed her world as much as they changed the world of the man who stood in the darkness with her.

TWELVE DAYS WENT BY BEFORE ROB HASTINGS COULD BRING himself to call upon Meredith. During that time, he rang the hospital daily till she was at last released into the care of her parents, but he found he could do no more than merely ask for information about her condition. What he gathered from these phone calls was little enough, and he knew he could have learned more had he gone in person. He could, indeed, have seen her for himself. But it was too much for him and even if it hadn’t been, he found he had no clear idea how to talk to her any longer.

In those twelve days, he discovered who had taken the pistol from his Land Rover and what had been done with that gun. It had since been returned to him, but it was a black mark on his career that he’d managed to have the weapon taken in the first place. Two people were dead because of this, and had he not been a Hastings with the Hastings history of service to the New Forest behind him, he’d likely have been given the sack.

The news was bursting with the story of Ian Barker, the wicked child killer of a toddler, a bloke who’d managed to keep his identity secret for the years since his release from wherever he and his murderous mates had been held. Reporters from every media source in the country had at first sought out everyone whose life had touched on Gordon Jossie’s, no matter how remotely. There was, it seemed, a hideous kind of romance to the story that the tabloids especially wanted to feature. It was the story of the Notorious Child Killer Who Killed Again, with a minor headline indicating that this time he’d done it to save a woman in danger, before going on to kill himself. This didn’t actually appear to be the case, according to Meredith Powell and Chief Superintendent Zachary Whiting, since the truth of the matter according to them was that Frazer Chaplin had charged towards Jossie and only then did Jossie shoot him, but that wasn’t as symbolic an act of redemption as was the idea that Jossie had saved someone prior to ridding the world of his presence, so it was that story and not the other that got the most ink from the tabloids. Ian Barker’s childhood photo was printed every day for a week, along with Gordon Jossie’s more recent visage. Some of the tabloids demanded how people in Hampshire had possibly failed to recognise the bloke, but really, why would they have recognised in a quiet thatcher a long-ago child who, they probably suspected, had cloven hooves for feet and horns beneath his schoolboy cap? No one was looking for Ian Barker to be hidden away in Hampshire, anyway, leading an unassuming life.

Neighbours along Paul’s Lane were interviewed. Never suspected and I’ll keep my doors locked from now on, I will were the general comments. Both Zachary Whiting and a Home Office spokesman made a few statements about the duty of the local police in matters of new identities, and for several days sightings of both Michael Spargo and Reggie Arnold were reported. But finally, the story faded away, as these stories do, when a member of the Royal family got into an unfortunate struggle with a paparazzo in front of a nightclub at 3:45 A.M. in Mayfair.

Rob Hastings had managed to weather all this without speaking to any of the journalists. He let his phone take the messages, but he returned no calls. He had no desire to discuss how the former Ian Barker had come into his life. He had less desire to talk about how his sister had taken up with the bloke. He understood now why Jemima had left the New Forest. He did not understand why she had not confided in him, however.

He spent days pondering this question and trying to work out what it meant that his sister had not told him what had driven her from Hampshire. He was not a man prone to violence, and she surely had known that, so she could hardly have expected him to accost Jossie and do damage to him for deceiving Jemima. What would have been the point of that anyway? He could also keep a secret, and Jemima had to have known that as well. Beyond that, he would have only too happily welcomed his sister home without question had she wanted to come back to Honey Lane.

He was left considering what all of this said about him. But the only answer he was able to come up with was the one that asked another question: What would have been the point of your knowing the truth, Robbie? And that question led to the next: What kind of action would you have taken, you who have always been so fearful about taking action in the first place?