'Yes, boss.' He looked disappointed at having the case snatched literally from under his nose.

'I'll just talk to him,' Louise soothed, 'and then you can have him back. I have a bit of a connection, I had to go and see his wife yesterday, that's all.'

'His wife?'

'Joanna.'

DS Karen Warner came through the open door to Louise's office and dropped a pile offiles on her desk. 'Yours, I think,' she said, resting her weight against the desk. A walking filing cabinet, eight months pregnant with her first baby and still at work. ('Going down fighting, boss.') She was older than Louise (,Elderly primigravidas how disgusting does that sound?'). Motherhood was going to be a shock to her, Louise thought. She was going to hit the wall at sixty miles an hour and wonder what happened.

Karen was still on the Needler team, halved in size now from what it had been six urgent months ago, moved back now from St Leonard's to Howdenhall and occupying a smaller incident room. Louise's superintendent had suggested it was time for her to 'move on a little' from the Needler case, to start taking on other cases. 'You're obsessed with Alison Needler,' he said.

'Yeah,' she agreed cheerfully. 'I am. It's my job to be obsessed.'

Karen unwrapped a Snickers bar and bit into it, patting her stomach. 'Licence to eat,' she said to Louise. 'Want a bit?' 'No thanks.' Louise was starving but there wasn't anything she fancied.

Marriage seemed to have affected her normally good appetite. Patrick seemed to grow healthier on it while she was fading away. She had flirted briefly with bulimia in her teens, between the selfcutting and an early bout of binge drinking (Bacardi and Coke, the thought of it now made her want to throw up) but all those things felt like an addiction of one kind or another so she had stopped. Only room for one addict in the family and her mother had had no intention of giving up her place.

Karen looked at the report on Louise's desk. 'Same Hunter?' she said. 'Neil Hunter is Joanna Hunter's husband? Wow. There's a coincidence.'

'Is Joanna Hunter a name I should know?' Marcus asked Louise.

'The one that got away,' Karen said. 'Gabrielle Mason, three kids? Thirty years ago?' Marcus shook his head. 'Sweet. You're so young,' Karen said. 'A guy killed the mother and two of her kids in a field in Devon,Joanna ran away and hid and was found later unharmed. Joanna Hunter nee Mason.' 'The man who was convicted of her murder was called Andrew Decker,' Louise said. 'He was declared fit to plead. If stabbing a mother and her two children is sane then what's the definition of insane? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? And now he's getting out -is out, in fact -and someone's leaked it. It's going to be all over the news for at least, I dunno, two hours. Feeding the empty maw of the press. I went yesterday to warn her.'

Karen crumpled up the Snickers wrapper and threw it in the bin. 'And is she still a victim, boss?' 'Good question,' Louise said.

Too late now to go to Maxwell's, she could pick up some flowers at Waitrose. She still had enough time. Just. She got into her own car, a silver 3 Series BMW that was a lot more stylish than Patrick's uber-sensible Ford Focus. He was straight as a die, right down to the car he drove.

And then her phone rang. For a beat she thought about not answering it. Her instinct, her police sixth sense, told her -yelled loudly at her -that if she answered there would be no sea bass, no twice-baked souilles.

She answered on the third ring, 'Hello?'

Sanctuary SADIE'S EARS PRICKED UP. THE DOG ALWAYS HEARD DR HUNTER'S CAR long before Reggie did. The dog's excitement was expressed in the merest quiver of her tail but Reggie knew that ifshe touched her she would find Sadie's entire body was electric with anticipation. The baby too. When he caught sight of Dr Hunter corning into the kitchen, Reggie could feel the thrill go through his solid torso as he prepared to catapult himself into the air, his little fat arms reaching out towards his mother.

'Whoa there, cowboy, steady on,' Dr Hunter laughed, catching him in her arms and giving him a big hug. Dr Hunter had brought in a blast of icy air with her. She was carrying, as usual, her expensive Mulberry bag (The Bayswater -isn't it handsome, Reggie?) that Mr Hunter had given her for her birthday in September and, draped over her arm, one of her black suits encased in a dry-cleaning bag -she had three identical suits that she rotated -one she wore, one in the wardrobe, one in the dry cleaners.

'Quelle horreur,' she said, shivering theatrically. 'Talk about the bleak midwinter. It's freezing out there.' 'Baltic,' Reggie agreed. 'The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow, and what will poor robin do then, poor thing?'

'I expect he'll sit in a barn and keep himself warm, and hide his head under his wing, poor thing, Dr H.'

'Has everything been all right here, Reggie?'

'Totally, Dr H.'

'How's my treasure?' Dr Hunter asked, nuzzling the baby's neck ('He's edible, don't you think?') and Reggie felt something seize in her heart, a little convulsion of pain, and she wasn't sure why exactly except that she thought it was sad (very sad indeed) that no one could remember being a baby. What Reggie wouldn't have given to have been a baby, wrapped in Mum's arms again. Or Dr Hunter's arms, for that matter. Anyone's arms really. Not Billy's obviously.

'It's so sad he won't remember this,' she said to Dr Hunter. (Was Dr Hunter's sadness catching in some way?) 'Sometimes it's good to forget,' Dr Hunter said. 'As I went to Bonner I met a pig without a wig, upon my word and honour.'

Reggie's mother had been a hugger and kisser. Before Gary, and before the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary, they would sit on the sofa in the evenings, cuddled up, watching television, eating crisps or a takeaway. Reggie liked to put her arm round Mum's waist and feel the comfortable roll offat that girdled her middle and her squashy tummy. ('My jelly belly', she used to call it.) That was it -Reggie's fondest memories were of watching ER and eating a chicken chow mein and feeling her mother's spare tyre. It was a bit crap really, ifyou thought about it. You would hope two lives entwined would add up to more. Reggie imagined that Dr Hunter and her son would make amazing memories for themselves, they would canoe down the Amazon and climb up the Alps and go to the opera in Covent Garden and see Shakespeare at Stratford and spend spring in Paris and New Year in Vienna and Dr Hunter wouldn't leave behind an album of photos in which she didn't look anything like herself. It was funny to think of the baby growing up into a boy and then a man. He was just a baby.

'My own little prince,' cooed Dr Hunter to the baby.

'We're all kings and queens, Dr H.,' Reggie said.

'Is Neil home yet?' 'Mr Hunter? No.'

'He's babysitting, I hope he hasn't forgotten. I'm going to Jenners with Sheila, it's their Christmas shopping night. You know -free glass ofwine, mince pie, people singing carols, all that kind of thing. Why don't you come, Reggie? Oh no, I forgot, it's Wednesday, isn't it?You have to go to your friend's.'

'Ms MacDonald isn't really my friend,' Reggie said. 'Perish the thought.'

Dr Hunter, with the baby in her arms, always saw Reggie off on the doorstep and watched her walk down the drive. Dr Hunter was trying to teach the baby to wave goodbye and moved his arm from side to side as ifhe was a ventriloquist's dummy, all the time saying (to the baby rather than Reggie), 'Bye-bye, Reggie, bye-bye.' Sadie, sitting at Dr Hunter's side, drummed her own farewells with her tail on the tiled floor of the porch.

After her mother died Reggie had tried hard to remember the last moments they had shared. Between them, with no help from the taxi driver, they had heaved her enormous, ugly suitcase into the cab, a suitcase that was stuffed with cheap skimpy tops and thin cotton trousers and the embarrassingly revealing swimming costume in a horrible orange lycra that would turn out to be the last outfit she ever wore, unless you counted the shroud she was buried in (because there was nothing in her wardrobe that seemed suitable for eternity).