'You can't get over something like that,' Louise had said to Patrick in bed last night. 'No, but you can try,' he said. 'Who made you the voice ofwisdom?' Louise said, but only in her head because the love of a good man wasn't something to be thrown away like a piece of paper, even Louise wasn't so blunt-headed that she couldn't see that. joanna Hunter went upstairs and came back with a photograph, black-and-white in a plain frame. She passed it silently to Louise. A woman and three children -Gabrielle,jessica,joanna,joseph. It was an arty kind of photograph ('My father took it'), a close-up, their faces crowded together, Jessica smiling self-consciously, joanna grinning happily, the baby just a baby. Gabrielle was beautiful, no arguing with that. She wasn't smiling.

'I don't keep it out,' joanna Hunter said. 'I couldn't bear to look at them every day. I take it out now and then. Put it away again.'

Howard Mason had married several times after his wife was murdered. How had the subsequent wives felt about their dead predecessor? The first wife. Gabrielle -beautiful, talented, a mother of three, and murdered into the bargain -that was an impossible act to follow. The second wife, Martina, killed herself, the third -the Chinese one (as everyone referred to her) -was divorced by Howard Mason, the fourth had some kind ofhorrible accident, fell downstairs or set herself alight, Louise couldn't remember. There was a fifth one somewhere -Latin American, who outlived him. Louise wouldn't be surprised if there was a beheading in there somewhere. You would certainly have thought twice before saying 'I do' to Howard Mason.

'My Last Duchess' -the Browning poem -came unexpectedly into her mind. The thought brought a chill with it.

As time had gone by Howard Mason had become more famous for his dead wives than for any literary talent that he possessed.

Louise had never read any ofhis novels, he was before her time. After her meeting yesterday with joanna Hunter she had looked his books up on Amazon but he seemed to be out of print. You might have thought that after the murders a certain notoriety would have boosted his sales but instead he became a kind of pariah. He might be dead and out of fashion as well as print but he continued to live on, on the internet, the ghost in the machine.

As chance would have it, on her way home she had stopped off at the Oxfam Bookshop on Morningside Road and found a secondhand copy of Howard Mason's first, most famous novel, The Shopkeeper, and had read most of it in bed last night.

'Could he write?' Patrick asked. He was reading some kind of abstruse medical journal. (Should she take more interest in his profession? He was always interested in hers.)

'Yeah, he can write, but it's of its time. It must have felt very cutting edge way back when, but it's all very, I don't know, northern.'

'Eeh ba gum?'

'More like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.'

Howard Mason was a northern grammar-school boy with an Oxford scholarship who wrote as if he'd read too much D. H. Lawrence as a teenager. The Shopkeeper, written after he graduated, was an 'acid critique' (according to the Dictionary ofLiterary Biography) ofhis dull parents and his provincial background, an autobiographical source that he always freely admitted to. To Louise, it read like a rather spiteful revenge text. There was a thin line between fact and fiction in Howard Mason's life.

The Shopkeeper was written when Howard Mason was still green, before his life became grand guignol, before he fathered three children, before he married Gabrielle Ascher, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, the last three attributes lost the minute she signed the marriage register in Gretna Green at the age of seventeen. Was Howard Mason such a terrible choice that the parents felt they had to disinherit her? What happened after she died, did joanna Mason become a rich little orphan? Questions, questions. joanna Hunter had got under Louise's skin. She had stood on the edge of the unknowable, she had been to a place that no one would choose to go to, and she had come back. It gave her a mysterious power that Louise envied.

Andrew Decker had, surprise, surprise, been a model prisoner. Helped to run the library, worked in the Braille shop, converting books to Braille, refurbished wheelchairs, all very worthy. Sometimes Louise hankered after the days when prisoners were made to walk endlessly on treadmills or turn crank handles. Paedophiles, murderers, rapists, should they really be making books? If it was up to Louise she would put the lot of them down, though obviously this was not the kind of opinion she voiced at divisional meetings. ('Have you always been a fascist?' Patrick laughed. 'Pretty much: she replied.) Andrew Decker had done his A Levels, got an OU degree in philosophy (of course), showed no sign of wishing harm on anyone. Right. And thirty years ago he'd slaughtered a family when according to his workmates he'd been 'an ordinary guy'. Yeah, Louise thought, you had to watch out for the ordinary ones. David Needler was ordinary. Decker was only fifty, he might have another good twenty years left in him of being ordinary. Still, look on the bright side -he had a degree in philosophy. 'At least he served the full sentence: Joanna Hunter said. 'That's something, I suppose.' But it wasn't really, and they both knew it. 'I might go away; Joanna Hunter said. 'Escape, for a bit, just until the fuss dies down.' 'Good idea.'

In Livingston Alison Needler was under siege, staying inside her house all day, growing pale, only venturing out to walk the children to school. She wouldn't drive them because she was convinced that David Needler would rig a device to the car and blow them all up. David Needler had been a quantity surveyor and had no apparent knowledge of explosives but Louise supposed that once paranoia had got lodged in your brain it was pretty hard to shift. On the other hand, of course, who would have expected David Needler to have a gun, or know how to shoot it?

Louise didn't know what Alison did all day, all her shopping was done on the internet and she said she was 'too wound up' to pound the carpet to an exercise video or sit peacefully and quilt a patchwork (two amongst several suggestions from a social worker). Whenever Louise went inside the house it was immaculate so she guessed Alison did a lot of cleaning. The TV was usually on, there was no sign of any books, she said she used to enjoy reading but now she couldn't concentrate. Louise remembered the Needlers' house in Trinity, it had been a good one, semi-detached sandstone, big garden back and front, the front one just right for a man to immolate himself in.

Alison Needler had two locks on every window, three each on the back and front doors, plus deadbolts. She had a security system with bells and whistles, she had a panic button, a mobile dedicated to an emergency number and her kids had personal alarms hanging round their necks when they weren't locked in school.

She'd been moved to a safe house but Alison would never be safe. If Louise was Alison Needler she would get a big dog. A really, really big dog. If she was Alison Needler she would change her name, dye her hair, move far away, to the Highlands, to England, France, the North Pole. She wouldn't be in a safe house in Livingston, waiting for the big, bad wolf to come and blow it all away.

Louise thought that perhaps she should station a car outside the house for the duration of the festive season. If David Needler was ever going to come back then Christmas seemed a likely time, season of goodwill and all that. Louise hoped he would, she would have liked to get an IRV over here, rouse the Gold Commander from his Christmas merrymaking to give the order to shoot the bastard dead.

Louise's phone rang. Patrick. He would be wondering where she was. She wondered herself. Louise checked her watch. Christ, six 0'clock. So much for twice-baked souffles, it was going to have to be an omelette for the in-laws.