‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Kate, sitting in the kitchen with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her silver hair, still damp, hanging lank around her face.

‘Can I get one thing clear here? You saw the child in the water and yet – yet – you continued to take pictures of her? Even as she was drowning?’

He looked at her as if she were some kind of sicko.

‘I think, officer,’ she said, trying to control her sarcasm, ‘your forensics people will most likely find that she had been dead for a couple of hours.’

‘So as well as being a photographer you’re an expert in the science of –‘

‘Peterson, she was the best forensic artist the force had,’ said Harper, placing a hand on the officer’s shoulder.

Kate had seen Josh approaching, but had pretended to herself that he was going to walk past her and out of the house. Just like he had done less than a month ago.

‘Hi, Kate,’ he said, looking down at her. ‘How are you?’

She remained silent.

‘Peterson, could you let me have a few minutes with Miss Cramer?’ said Harper.

Josh pulled up a chair and sat down at the glass table. He looked out at the stretch of beach and to the Pacific beyond. He imagined what it must have been like for Kate to find that dead child. He pictured her wading into the chilly water, swimming out to rescue it, bringing it back to shore. Her desperation to breathe life back into its tiny body. His hand started to reach out to touch her hair – her beautiful silver mane, he had called it – but he stopped himself.

‘L-look, I know this is not going to be easy, but –‘

She arched one of her eyebrows, a gesture that he knew from their time together to be far more effective that any stream of expletives.

‘But,’ he said lowering his voice, ‘I just want to make sure you are okay. Why don’t we go some place where we can talk?’

Again nothing but that cold, hard stare. The first time he had seen her, with her immaculate silver hair, clear blue eyes, unlined alabaster skin, and inscrutable expression he had christened her the ice maiden. It had taken him months to get her to warm up, but finally – no, there was no point going back.

‘We need to act like professionals here,’ he said.

The words stung her, reminding her of something she had said to him when they had first met five years before.

He saw her nostrils flare, her eyes light up with anger.

‘So, that’s it, is it?’ she said, looking at him with disdain. ‘That’s all we are now – ‘professionals’. You’ve managed to put me in a little box in your tiny brain so that you don’t have to bother thinking about all that other complicated personal stuff.’

Her voice began to rise now, attracting the stares of the police working nearby.

‘Kate, come on, I know you must have had a traumatic morning –‘

‘Traumatic? You don’t know -’

‘Look, if we are going to have this conversation why don’t we go outside at least.’

‘I’m fine here.’

‘I know I didn’t behave exactly like a saint,’ he said. Most of the officers had discretely melted away from the kitchen, but Peterson was within earshot and so he tried to quieten his voice. ‘But you know you were hardly easy to talk to.’

‘So it’s all my fault, is it? My fault that you went off and screwed some short order cook at some downtown deli.’

Jules was a trained chef at one of the city’s top restaurants. But he let Kate enjoy her insult.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘The truth – that’s all. A small thing, I know, but obviously something completely out of your reach.’

‘Come on, Kate, that’s not fair.’

‘Fair? You don’t know the meaning of the word.’

‘I can see we’re not going to get very far today,’ he said. ‘But call me when you feel a little calmer.’

He stood up to go.

‘And – Kate,’ he said. ‘You did a great job this morning. I know you did everything you could to save that child.’

She bit her lip, almost tasting the blood beneath the skin.

‘Do you know who – who – she was?’ she said, softening.

‘We’re not 100 per cent, but we have an idea. Got reports of a missing child from a young couple over in San Feliz. We need a positive I-D before we can say for certain.’

‘And how she died?’

‘Again, it’s too early. She’s been taken off for a post-mortem now. But it looks like she died in the ocean, either from hypothermia or drowning.’

‘Was it one of the parents, do you think?’

‘They’ve been brought in for questioning, but we don’t think so. Broken to pieces, poor kids. Normally the little girl slept in a cot in the parents’ room, but that night they wanted a little privacy – their words – so they moved the baby into the next room. In the middle of the night the mother went in to the spare room to check on the baby and discovered it was missing from the cot. It was a one-storey house, you know the type and –‘

‘Jesus, but who would do a thing like that?’

‘You know what’s out there, Kate.’

‘I know, but a baby – why, for god’s sake?’

She thought of the feel of the little girl in her arms, her flesh cold, wet and clammy. She remembered her glassy eyes staring into nowhere.

‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she said urgently.

‘What is it?’ said Josh, his eyes searching the room for one of his deputies.

She looked at him and changed her mind. She wasn’t ready to tell him. Maybe she never would.

‘I’m going to spend a few days at my mother’s house, so I’ll be there if you need to get hold of me.’

***

Earlier that day, after she had put the phone down from 911, she had walked into the bathroom to get a small towel with which to cover the dead child. She couldn’t bring her back to life, but at least she could give her a little dignity in death. As she opened the door to the bathroom cupboard to grab a towel she spotted, on the shelf above, a clutch of pregnancy test kits. She took hold of the towel and was about to walk out of the room when an overwhelming compulsion came over her. It was irrational, inappropriate, just plain stupid. She was due to have her period any time now. She was just late. But the urge was so strong that neither logic nor decorum could defeat it. She knew she should head back down to the beach, but what she had to do would only take a matter of minutes.