"God!" Nancy was genuinely shocked. "How old is he?"

"Forty-eight. He spends every night in the casinos, has done for years… even when he was working. He's a con artist, pure and simple. People get taken for a ride all the time because he's good at selling himself. I don't know what his situation is at the moment-I haven't spoken to him in months-but it won't be healthy since Ailsa's will was published. He was using his projected inheritance to guarantee private loans."

It explained a lot, thought Nancy. "No wonder his parents changed their wills," she said dryly. "Presumably he'd sell this place and blow it on roulette if it was left to him?"

"Mm."

"What a fuckhead!" she said contemptuously.

"You'd probably like him if you met him," Mark warned. "Everyone else does."

"No chance," she said firmly. "I knew a man like that once and I'll never get taken in again. He was a casual laborer on the farm when I was thirteen. Everyone thought the sun shone out of his arse-including me-till he threw me onto the straw in one of the stables and pulled out his prick. He didn't get very far. I suppose he thought he was so much stronger than I was that I wouldn't fight back, so the moment he relaxed his grip I wriggled out from under him and went for him with a pitchfork. I probably ought to have run away, but I kept thinking what a fake he was… pretending one thing and doing another. I've always hated people like that."

"What happened to him?"

"Four years for sexual assault of a minor," she said, staring at the grass. "He was a right little shit… tried to pretend I'd attacked him for relieving himself against the stable wall-but I was screaming so much that two of the other laborers came piling in and found him curled up on the floor with his trousers round his ankles. If it hadn't been for that, I think he might have won. It was his word against mine and Mum said he was very convincing on the witness stand. In the end, the jury took the view that a man didn't need to expose his buttocks to urinate against a wall, particularly as the outside loo was only twenty yards away."

"Did you attend the court?"

"No. They said I was too young to be cross-examined. My version was presented in the form of a written statement."

"What was his defense?"

She glanced at him. "That I'd launched in without provocation and he refused to defend himself for fear of injuring me. His barrister argued that because the defendant was more damaged than I was, and because a thirteen-year-old couldn't have inflicted such harm on a grown man unless he allowed her to do it, I must have been the aggressor. It made me mad when I read the report of the trial. He painted me as a spoiled, rich brat with a bad temper, who didn't think twice about lamming into the hired help. You end up feeling you're the one in the dock when that kind of thing happens."

"How much damage did you do?"

"Not enough. Ten stitches in a slash across the bum and fuzzy vision after one of the prongs caught the corner of his eye. It was a lucky shot… meant he couldn't focus properly… which is why he didn't fight back. If he'd been able to see the fork, he'd have grabbed it off me, and I'd have been the one in hospital." Her expression hardened. "Or dead, like Ailsa."

Bella climbed the steps of her bus and pulled off her balaclava, running her thick fingers over her stubbly hair where her skin was beginning to itch. The army-surplus overcoats, balaclavas, and scarves had been handed out by Fox the day before at the rendezvous, with instructions to wear them every time they went outside. It hadn't been worth arguing about at the time, the cold alone made everyone grateful for them, but Bella was very curious now about why disguise was necessary. Fox knew this place too well, she thought.

A sound from her curtained kitchen area caught her attention. She assumed it was one of her daughters and reached out to pull the drape aside. "What's up, darlin'? I thought you were with Zadie's kids-" But it wasn't one of hers. It was a skinny little boy with shoulder-length blond hair, and she recognized him immediately as one of the "spares" who had been in Fox's bus at Barton Edge. "What the fuck are you doing?" she asked in surprise.

"It weren't me," muttered Wolfie, cringing away and waiting for the slap.

Bella stared at him for a moment before dropping onto the banquette seat beside her table and pulling a tin of snout from her coat pocket. "What weren't you?" she asked, prizing open the tin and removing a packet of Rizzlas.

"I didn't take nothing."

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him squash a piece of bread inside his fist. "Who did then?"

"I don't know," he said, mimicking Fox's classy speech, "but it wasn't me."

She eyed him curiously, wondering where his mother was and why he wasn't with her. "So what are you doing here?"

"Nothing."

Bella spread the Rizzla on the table and ran a thin line of tobacco down its center. "Are you hungry, kid?"

"No."

"You look it. Ain't your mum feeding you properly?"

He didn't answer.

"The bread's free," she said. "You can take as much as you like. All you have to do is say please." She rolled the Rizzla and ran her tongue along its edge. "You wanna eat with me and my girls? You want me to ask Fox if that's okay?"

The child stared at her as if she were a gorgon, then took to his heels and belted it out of the bus.

Mark lowered his head into his hands and massaged his tired eyes. He'd hardly slept at all in two nights and his energy reserves were at zero. "James is certainly the suspect in this case," he told Nancy, "though God knows why. As far as the police and coroner are concerned, there's no case to answer. It's a crazy situation. I keep asking him to challenge the rumors that are flying around but he says there's no point… they'll die down of their own accord."

"Perhaps he's right."

"I believed that at the beginning, but not anymore." He ran a worried hand through his hair. "He's been having nuisance calls and some of them are vicious. He's been recording them on an answerphone and they're all accusing him of killing Ailsa. It's destroying him… physically and mentally."

Nancy plucked at a blade of grass between her feet. "Why wasn't natural causes accepted? Why does suspicion remain?"

Mark didn't answer immediately and she turned her head to find him grinding his knuckles into his eyes in a way that suggested lack of sleep. She wondered how often the phone had rung the previous night. "Because at the time all the evidence seemed to suggest an unnatural death," he said wearily. "Even James assumed she'd been murdered. The fact that Ailsa went out in the middle of the night… the blood on the ground… her normally robust health. He was the one who whipped up the police to look for evidence of a burglar and, when they couldn't find any, they shifted their attention to him. It's standard procedure-husbands are always first in the firing line-but he got very angry about it. By the time I arrived he was accusing Leo of killing her…which didn't help." He fell silent.

"Why not?"

"Too many wild accusations. First a burglar, then his son. It smacked of desperation when he was the only one there. It only needed evidence of an altercation to make him look doubly guilty. He was put through the wringer about the nature of his and Ailsa's relationship. Did they get on? Was he in the habit of hitting her? The police accused him of locking her out in anger after a row, until he asked them why she wouldn't have broken a windowpane or gone to Vera and Bob for help. He was pretty shocked by the end of it."

"But that all happened in the police station presumably… so how does it explain the continuing suspicion?"