‘There’s a lot of noise your end,’ Branson said.

‘I can hear you OK. Tell me?’

‘First thing is, the sister went to New York with Lorraine Wilson a week after 9/11 – just as soon as they could get a flight. They went to the hotel Ronnie was staying at, the W.’

‘The W?’ Grace queried. ‘The W what?’

‘That’s its name.’

‘Just W?’

‘Old-timer, you spend your life under a stone or what? You need to employ me as your full-time style guru. The W is a chain. They’re, like, considered u¨ber-cool hotels.’

‘Yeah, well, my salary doesn’t run to u¨ber-cool hotels.’

‘I can’t believe you haven’t heard of them.’

‘Well, there you go, yet another of life’s many unsolved mysteries. Anything you want to tell me about it, other than that I haven’t heard of it?’

‘Yeah, quite a bit. So, some of his belongings were still in the room, and the management weren’t too happy, because the credit card he’d given had maxed out on them.’

‘They didn’t make any allowance for the fact that he was dead?’

‘I presume they didn’t know at that point. He’d booked in for just two nights and left an opened credit card slip with them. Anyhow, the thing is that his passport and airline ticket back to the UK were still in the safe.’

To his relief, Grace suddenly saw his bag appear. ‘Hang on a tick.’ He hurried forward to grab it, then said, ‘OK, go on.’

‘So then they went to Pier 92, where the NYPD had set up a kind of bereavement centre. People were bringing stuff like hairbrushes, so they could get the DNA of probable victims to help identify the bodies, or the body parts. They were also displaying personal items that had been recovered. Lorraine went there with her sister, but the police hadn’t recovered anything belonging to her husband that could identify him, at that stage.’

Grace lugged his bag away from the crowd to a quieter spot, then had to wait for a tannoy announcement to end before he could ask, ‘What about the money Lorraine received?’

‘I’ll come to that – and I gotta dash in a minute to the briefing.’

‘Tell DI Mantle to call me afterwards.’

‘I will. But you’ve got to hear something first. We have a big development! So, anyhow, Lorraine blags fifteen hundred dollars from the officer at Pier 92. They were doling the dough out to anyone who’d lost someone and was suffering financial hardship.’

‘Fair enough at that time. She’d been left up shit creek financially, right?’

‘Yes. Then a couple of weeks after they get back to the UK, her sister said Lorraine got a phone call – a fire-damaged wallet containing Ronnie Wilson’s driving licence and a mobile phone identified as belonging to him were handed in by rescue workers digging in the rubble at Ground Zero. Photographs of them and the contents of the wallet were sent over to her so she could formally identify them.’

‘Which she was able to do?’

‘Yep. Now, the cash she got – the big payments of the life insurance, then the compensation – here’s the thing. Her sister was astonished when we told her. Like more than astonished, like blown-fucking-away astonished.’

‘Acting?’

‘Not in my view, nor Bella’s. She swung between astonishment and anger. I mean, she blew her rag at one point, saying she’d cleaned out her own savings to help Lorraine – and that was long after, according to the bank records, Lorraine had had the first lump of moolah in.’

‘So no honour among sisters then?’

‘Seems like it was one-way between these two. But I’ve got the best to come for you. You’re going to love this.’

There was another tannoy announcement. Grace yelled for Branson to wait until it had stopped.

‘The lab’s come back this afternoon with a familial DNA match on the foetus Lorraine Wilson was carrying. I think we’ve got the father!’

‘Who?’ Grace asked excitedly.

‘Well, if we are right, it is none other than Ronnie Wilson.’

Grace was silent for a moment, adrenaline surging. Thrilled that his hunch seemed to have been right. ‘How good a match?’

‘Well, this particular familial match means we have half of the father’s DNA. There could be other matches. But considering who the mother is, I’d say the chances of it being anyone else are too remote to be worth considering.’

‘Where did Ronnie’s DNA come from?’

‘From a hairbrush his widow took the NYPD when she went to New York. That profile was passed back to the British police, as routine, and entered on the National Database.’

‘Which means,’ Grace said, ‘that either our friend Mr Wilson had left behind some frozen sperm which his wife, who wasn’t quite so dead as she appeared, had implanted. Or…’

‘Me, I favour the or option,’ Branson said.

‘Certainly looks favourite from where I’m standing,’ Grace replied.

‘And you’re standing a lot closer than me, old-timer. With your shoes on or off.’

Abby heard a phone ringing somewhere, close and insistent. Then she realized, with a start, that it was her own. She sat up, confused, trying to work out where she was. The phone continued to ring.

There was chill air on her face, but she was perspiring heavily. She was in darkness, just shadows all around her in a ghostly orange haze. A spring creaked beneath her as she moved. She was sitting on a sofa in her mother’s flat, she realized. Christ, how long had she been asleep?

She looked around, fearful that Ricky had come back and was in here. She could see the glow of the phone’s display and reached for it. The coils of fear rising in her stomach worsened when she saw the words: Private number. The time on the display read 18.30.

She brought the phone to her ear. ‘Yes?’

‘Had a good think about it, have you?’ Ricky said.

Panic raced through her brain. Where the hell was he? She had to get away from here quickly. She was a sitting duck in this place. Did he know where she was at this moment? Was he outside somewhere?

She waited a moment before replying, trying to collect her thoughts. She decided to keep the lights off, not wanting to show him she was here, in case he was out in the street watching. There was enough glow penetrating the net curtains, from the street light outside the window, to see all she needed in here at the moment.

‘How is my mother?’ she demanded, and heard the tremble in her voice.

‘She’s fine.’

‘She’s got no resistance. If you let her get cold, she could get pneumonia-’

Interrupting, Ricky replied, ‘Like I told you, she’s snug as a bug in a rug.’

Abby did not like the way he said those words. ‘I want to speak to her.’

‘Of course you do. And I want what you’ve stolen from me. So it’s very simple. You bring it back, or you tell me where it is, and your mum can go home with you.’

‘How do I know I can trust you?’

‘That’s rich, coming from you!’ he sneered. ‘I don’t think you know the meaning of that word.’

‘Look, what happened happened,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you back what I’ve got left.’

The pitch of his voice changed to alarm. ‘What do you mean what you’ve got left? I want it all. Everything. That’s the deal.’

‘You can’t have it. I can only give you what I’ve got.’

‘That’s why it wasn’t in the safe-deposit box, right? You spent it?’

‘Not all of it,’ she gambled.

‘You callous bitch. You’d let me kill your mother, wouldn’t you? You’d let me kill her rather than give it back to me! That’s how much money means to you.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re quite right, Ricky. I would.’

Then she hung up on him.