I walked back into town thinking about Karen Tyrrell. Ten years ago Regina would have been forty-two or forty-three, reaching the end of her fertility; many single women who get pregnant by accident at that age keep a child they would have aborted ten years previously: some go out with the intention of getting pregnant by an anonymous one-night stand. But nine years ago would also bring us back to the aftermath of Patrick Hutton's disappearance; nine years would be long enough for someone who'd been made pregnant by Patrick Hutton to have his baby, almost a year after his disappearance. That would help to explain Miranda Hart's less than fond tone when she mentioned Regina. It might also go a long way toward accounting for Miranda's self-destructive trawl through Tyrrellscourt in the period after Hutton's disappearance: hard enough for your husband to disappear, but knowing (assuming she did know) that he had impregnated another woman, an older, richer woman whose family had in a sense informally adopted Miranda and Hutton both: that must have felt like betrayal. I won't play the Judas for anyone, Hutton said; perhaps he already had, with Regina Tyrrell, and when Miranda found out, she made sure the Tyrrells got to see the ugly consequences on the streets of their own town. Maybe that accounted for Regina 's dismissive attitude to the marriage: not because she considered Patrick Hutton unworthy of Miranda, but because she had been in love with him herself. I called Dave Donnelly, and a couple of minutes later he called me back.

"Dave, I want you to see if you can get hold of Don Kennedy's case files. He looked into Patrick Hutton's disappearance a couple of years ago, so that Miranda Hart could have him declared dead."

"What am I looking for?"

I thought for a minute.

"Birth cert, baptismal cert, anything official. Hutton seems to have been a man without a past. And anything else that Kennedy turned up…I mean, he cleared the way for the insurance company to sign the house over to Miranda, but any time you do a trawl like that, you always uncover other stuff. Anything, even if it feels like gossip to you."

"Want to explain?"

"Not sure if I can. Just feeling my way."

Dave ended the call, and I kept along the road.

My thoughts turned to my own little girl, and the lie I had told, and how I felt about telling it. It hadn't been about me: it was to spare Karen Tyrrell's feelings. Not that she needed me to. Kids don't live in quite such dread of death as adults do. But it reminded me of the relief I had felt when my daughter was born, that I was no longer the center of my own world, she was. I had moved contentedly away from center stage in my own life. I remember the initial vertigo, and then the thrill, the rush to embrace the natural feeling that a new generation is more important than your own. And the grief of her death was accentuated and prolonged by my revulsion at having to deal with myself and my own feelings: it felt like indulgence, or worse: I made myself sick. A month ago, I wouldn't have told a lie about Lily, even to say she would have been nine, instead of five, let alone that she was alive when her ashes lay scattered in the ocean at Santa Monica under an indifferent sky. But I told it, and I was glad I had, and Karen Tyrrell's kiss on my cheek had made me feel closer to Lily than three years of drinking and fucking and fighting had. I said a prayer, or something like a prayer, offering it up to the clear, starry sky, then slipped and nearly fell on an early frost outside McGoldrick's pub. I righted myself, hand on cold railings, my breath pluming in the freezing air, relieved to be upright with blood in my veins, the living voices from the pub swirling around my head; relieved to be among the living, with the memory of what Karen Tyrrell had whispered still fresh in my ears: Don't look so sad.

Before I went inside I played a hunch. I called the bookie whose mobile number I had found in Hutton's pocket.

"Yes, friend?" came the reply.

"Jack Proby?" I said.

"Who wants to know?"

"Edward Loy. I'm a friend of Miranda Hart's. I'd like to talk to you about a horse called By Your Leave."

"Yeah? What are you, friend, some kind of journalist?"

"No, I'm some kind of detective. Friend."

"Well, I'm kind of busy at the moment, friend. How did you get this number anyway?"

"If I told you, you'd have to kill me."

"That's very funny, friend, but I'm here at home with my family and I really don't appreciate-"

"I hear you, friend. That's what I'm calling about actually, the unappreciated. The jockeys who disappear because they won't carry out orders. The women who sell their bodies because the men they love are scumbags who'd rather pimp them out than care for them. The men whose fathers are gay and vulnerable to blackmail, who end up working for gangsters to keep the family secrets. Unappreciated, every one. We really should do something for them, don't you think? In this season of goodwill."

"What do you want?"

Proby's voice had lost the hail-fellow-well-met tone; now he sounded edgy and dangerous, like a rat in a trap.

"Where do you live?" I said.

"Foxrock," he said.

"Foxrock? Nice up there."

"I worked for every penny," he said.

"So do most people. They just don't seem to end up with as many pennies. A shame, isn't it?"

"Keeps me awake at nights."

"I'm sure it does. I'll see you at midday tomorrow down in Seafield. The West Pier."

"Tomorrow's Christmas Day, friend-"

"So it is. Where are my manners? Merry Christmas. Friend."

It was called pushing the boat out. The cops would be all over this case soon, if they weren't already. But what lay beneath it might never come out in their investigation. It would in mine. Call it justice. Call it curiosity. Whatever it was, it came down to this: I needed to know that nine-year-old girl had a future, one in which she would not be betrayed. And I wasn't convinced that, without my help, she would.

TOMMY OWENS WAS sitting on the same stool he'd been on when I left the pub, but it was as if a carnival had erected itself around him: face painters and street performers in clown costumes; folk musicians wearing bad hats; bearded bikers in leathers and their women in lace and feathers; three Santa Clauses and several drunken helpers in green-and-red elf costumes and, holding the line at the bar, a phalanx of little old men in jumpers of all ages, drinking seriously and devotedly and steadfastly resisting the temptations of excessive gaiety, even if one or two couldn't resist a stray look in the direction of the drunken elves, particularly the one who kept threatening to get her tits out unless one of the Santas promised to "do" her in his costume. Steno the barman, who had a reassuring aura of calm authority, finally brought this seasonal tableau to a close by ejecting the offending elf, but she was accompanied off the premises by one of the Santas, although possibly not the one she favored.

The lounge was calmer and tonier, with a crowd that looked bored by their money and keen to get rid of it; you could sell a lot of blow here tonight, and someone no doubt was. In the warehouse, it was as if everyone we had seen on the street earlier today was crammed inside; indeed, when I pulled open the double doors, three people stumbled back into the lounge; Noddy Holder was shrieking "It's Chriss-miss" on a jukebox as I made my way back to Tommy. I assumed he had been drinking all this time, but in fact he was stone-cold sober, or as stone cold as Tommy ever got; he nodded at me and introduced me to the short, slightly built guy on the stool next to him, who wore an olive-green flight suit and looked like a shaven-headed heroin addict: his taut flesh was mottled and pocked; his drawn cheeks had tight vertical folds like stiletto scars; his tiny eyes were recessed deep beneath heavy brows: dark blue and bloodshot, they glowed like hot coals.