As she walked into his study she almost expected to see him sitting there at his piano, his long, tapering fingers poised above the keyboard. The room was exactly as it had been the day he had died. Unfinished musical scores littered the surface of the piano, the series of seemingly haphazard black notes arranged around the faded paper like the remains of an insect colony. A pair of half-moon glasses lay on the piano stool, as if they were waiting for their absent-minded owner to walk into the room to reclaim them. On the desk, situated by the French doors that looked onto the lush garden, was a mass of paper – a couple of appointment books, old diaries, pages ripped from the New York Times, letters from various orchestras around the world asking about the possibility of performing his work, statements from his agents in America and London, a few of his favourite scores (Prokofiev, Stravinsky) that he seemed to read with the same ease as Kate read novels. On one of the shelves next to his desk were arranged a number of his awards – accolades from the American Film Institute, the British Academy of Film and Television, even an Oscar for his score for The Place Outside. But all these awards, Kate knew, had meant little to her father.

‘Sure the film business has been good to me,’ he had once said to her, during one of his recurring bouts of depression, ‘but really it’s no better than prostitution. I shouldn’t have been seduced by it. I should have held out for something else, something more lasting. Nobody is going to be interested in me after I’m gone.’

She had tried to argue, tried to convince him that wasn’t true. That he was an artist. But he wouldn’t listen. He was just a second-rate composer who hired out his talents to philistines, he said. She had left him sitting at the piano, his head in his hands.

She walked over to the keyboard and pressed one of the keys. The sound was still clear, beautiful. Hope had the piano tuned regularly even though neither she nor her daughter played, probably for the same reason she wouldn’t allow anyone to touch her deceased husband’s things. Both mother and daughter half expected him to return. Kate sat down at the piano and took hold of one of her father’s scores. She opened it at random, amazed that her father – the descendant of poor Russian Jews who had come to America at the very end of the nineteenth century – had possessed what she saw as an extraordinary talent. Did he hear the music in his head before he wrote it down, she always wondered. Or did it form itself when he was sitting at the piano? She tried to imagine doing it herself, willing the sound of music to stir inside her head, but there was nothing, only the rustle of the breeze in the trees outside.

Just then her cell rang. She jumped with a start. She reached inside the pocket of her jeans. It was Josh.

‘Hi, Josh,’ she said.

‘Where are you? Are you okay?’ He sounded worried, anxious.

‘Sure, I’m fine. I’m still at my mom’s place. What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Cassie Veringer. You remember that -’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said, images of the past beginning to flash through her mind. ‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s fine. But we’ve just had news that she’s been sent something.’

‘And?’

‘Kate – it was a package containing three human fingertips. We don’t yet know where they are from – who they are from – but as you imagine we’re treating it very seriously.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, already knowing what Josh was going to say.

‘Gleason, yes,’ he said.

‘But he’s dead.’

He hadn’t worked on the Gleason investigation – it was before his time – but Kate had been troubled by nightmares for years afterwards. Since then he had made it his business to look into the case.

‘Josh – he’s dead. Right?’

‘Sorry, that was just Peterson saying something. Yeah, for sure he’s dead.’

‘So it’s just another fruitcake. A coincidence. That’s all it is. Motivated by that recent Times piece.’ Kate was desperate to try and convince herself.

‘Could be, yes.’

Kate stood up and walked over to the French windows. Everything seemed normal. Her mother was outside, talking to one of the gardeners, the elderly, rotund Puerto Rican with the lovely kind smile. The water glistened in the pool. The gates to the drive were locked, secure. So why did she feel so afraid, as if she were being hunted, terrorised? She looked around the room, half expecting to see an intruder standing behind her, watching her, but of course there was no-one there.

‘Kate – you’re not keeping anything from me? Anything I need to know.’

‘No, nothing,’ she said. ‘Why would I do that?’

She could hear someone say something in the background.

‘Okay, Peterson,’ said Josh. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. Call me later, okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Bye.’

It had to be a fluke, right? The idea that there was some connection between her discovery of that baby girl in the ocean and the package that had been sent to Cassie Veringer was just too awful to contemplate. And it was impossible. Ridiculous. Bobby Gleason had committed suicide seven years ago while on death row in San Quentin State Prison.

Gleason. The name was enough to turn her stomach. She felt the bitter taste of bile in her mouth. She needed a glass of water.

An image of him standing in the court, just after receiving his sentence, flashed into her head. She remembered him turning towards her and smiling, a look that promised unfinished business. She recalled the dreams she had had, the nightmares that haunted her months after he had been imprisoned. The thought that one day he would do to her what he had done to those six women, that he would kidnap her, take her out in that van - which the state prosecutor, Jordan Weislander, had likened to a travelling circus of torture - rape, brutalise and mutilate her until finally she pleaded to be killed. She pictured herself on her knees, naked and degraded, before him, begging him to slit her throat.

Most likely Gleason would have carried on killing had it not been for Cassie Veringer. The court heard how he had assaulted her late one night in a downtown parking lot. He had hit her over the head with a broken bottle, pushed her into his van and tied her up. He had driven out into the desert – the empty quarter Gleason had called it, a place where nobody could hear you scream, a line that he had kept repeating, a phrase from some movie that he had liked. That same night, after taking a mixture of scotch, cocaine and Viagra, Gleason had raped and sodomised her. Cassie, however, had had the foresight – and the courage – to feel his face, even during the most brutal moments of the attack. He had told her that in the morning he would kill her – he didn’t like the fact that she kept touching him, it freaked him out, he said. At some point that night Gleason, in a drug and alcohol-induced haze, must have passed out. Cassie – who miraculously had not lapsed into unconsciousness – had managed to be able to crawl out of the van and disappear into the night. The fact that it had been dark had worked in her favour, as she had used her other, heightened senses to guide her through the arid scrubland to the nearest house.