'Actually something came up. And I am. Working.'

'Drive carefully,' Louise said as she finally escaped the breakfast table. 'I always drive carefully.' 'Other people don't.'

She could have walked round to the Hunters' but she didn't, she drove.

Ifyou had a good arm you could probably have stood on the roof of their block of flats and thrown a rock that would have landed in the Hunters' driveway. Yesterday Joanna Hunter, today Neil Hunter. Two completely different visits with two completely different goals, but it seemed a very strange coincidence that she should need to drop in on both husband and wife in the space of two days. A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen, Jackson Brodie had said to her once but no matter how you looked at it there was no relation between Andrew Decker's release and Neil Hunter's present troubles. And just because Jackson Brodie said something didn't make it true. He was hardly the oracle of crime-solving.

The Hunters' house was dead-eyed and quiet. Louise parked next to Mr Hunter's showy beast of a black-badged Range Rover, a bigger threat to the planet than Mexican raspberries.

Louise rang the front-door bell and when Neil Hunter answered she showed him her warrant card and with her best rise-and-shine smile said, 'Good morning, Mr Hunter.'

Neil Hunter looked rough, although still on the good side of haggard. Louise could see why someone like Joanna Hunter would be attracted to him. He was everything she wasn't.

He was wearing Levi's and an old Red Sox T-shirt, a wolfin wolf's clothing. She could smell last night's whisky still breathing out from his pores. He looked rumpled enough in both face and clothes to have just got out of bed except that Louise could smell coffee and see that there were plastic files and papers scattered across the kitchen table as if he had been up all night doing his accounts. Perhaps he'd been working out if the insurance payout from the arcade fire would cover his tax.

The table was a big old-fashioned thing that you half expected to see a Victorian cook kneading dough on. Bridget and Tim's wedding present to them, hauled out of the boot of the car yesterday, had been a breadmaker. 'A good one,' Bridget said, 'not one of the cheap ones.' Louise wondered how long she would have to wait before she could drop it into a charity shop. There were not many things in life that Louise was sure of but she would bet the house on the fact that she was going to go to her grave without ever having made a loaf of bread.

Neil Hunter glanced at the warrant card and said, 'Detective Chief Inspector,' with a sardonic lift of the eyebrow, as if there was something amusing about her rank. His voice was a gravelly Glaswegian that sounded as ifhe'd breakfasted on cigarettes. Twenty years ago she too would have found his moodiness attractive. Now she just wanted to punch him. But then she seemed to want to punch everyone at the moment.

'Mind if I come in for a minute?' she said, no slippage in her jaunty persona. She was over the threshold before he could protest. Police weren't like vampires, they didn't wait to be invited in.

'I'd like to have a word, about the arcade fire.' 'The fire investigation report's come back?' he said. He looked relieved, as if he'd expected her to tell him something else.

'Yes. I'm afraid the fire was started deliberately.' He didn't exactly throw up his hands in shock and horror. Resignation, if anything. Or maybe indifference. The house was surprisingly quiet. No sign of Dr Hunter or her baby. Or the girl. The one good thing about the train crash, ifyou could say that, which you couldn't really, was that it had got in the way of any lurid stories about Andrew Decker's release or the current whereabouts ofJoanna Mason. The dog pattered into the kitchen, sniffed her shoes and then flopped down on the floor.

'Do you mind if I ask where Dr Hunter is?' Louise asked Neil Hunter.

'Do you mind if I ask why?' The question seemed to fluster him. He hadn't looked nervous when she talked about the fire but he looked downright jittery at the mention ofhis wife. Interesting. With an impatient sigh he said, 'She's gone down to Yorkshire, an aunt of hers was taken ill. What's Jo got to do with any of this?'

'Nothing. I was here yesterday, didn't she tell you? I came to tell her about Andrew Decker's release.'

'That,' he said with a grimace. 'He's out?'

'Yes, that, I'm afraid. She didn't tell you?'Wasn't that what marriage was for? The sharing ofyour deepest, darkest secrets? Perhaps she had more in common with Joanna Hunter than she had first thought.

'The news of his release has been leaked to the press, I wanted to warn Dr Hunter that the past was about to be dredged up again. She really didn't say anything?'

'She was in a hurry to get away. Happy coincidence, I suppose, if she's in Yorkshire she might be able to avoid the stushie.'

'I don't think Yorkshire's a no-go area for the press,' Louise said. 'But I suppose it might throw them off the scent.' Unless they came looking for the aunt, of course. 'An aunt by marriage or by blood?' she asked. 'On the mother's side or the father's?'

'Is that relevant in some way?'

Louise shrugged. 'Just curious.'

'Her father's sister, Agnes Barker. Happy?'

'Cheers,' Louise said. She grinned at him. He had 'liar' written all the way through him, like a stick of rock. 'She did say something about escaping for a bit.'

Neil Hunter seemed suddenly tired and he gestured to her to take a seat at the table and said, 'Coffee?', pouring beans into a hopper in an expensive espresso machine that did the whole process from grinding the beans to steaming the milk, looked as if it would grow the beans as well if you asked it nicely. The smell was too good to resist, Louise would sooner give up an arm than coffee in the morning. That was an unfortunate thought. She had a flashback to last night, picking up an arm from the track and searching desperately for the owner. A small arm.

'Where in Yorkshire?'

'Hawes,' Neil Hunter said.

'Whores?'

'H-a-w-e-s. In the Dales.'

Joanna hadn't mentioned an aunt when Louise met her last week (although why should she?). Perhaps he was right, the aunt's illness had happened serendipitously at just the right time for her escape. A very handy aunt.

'So .. .' Louise said brightly, 'can you think of anyone who might have wanted to burn down your property, someone with a grudge against you, perhaps?'

'Plenty people I've pissed off in my time,' Neil Hunter said.

'Perhaps you could draw up a list for us?'

'You're joking?'

'No. We're also going to need all your accounts, business and personal. And your insurance policies as well.' 'You think I burned it down for the insurance money,' he said wearily, a statement rather than a question.

'Did you?'

'Do you think I'd tell you if I had?'

'Someone will be back later this morning with a warrant for your documentation,' Louise said. 'It's not going to be a problem for you, is it? The documentation?' She liked it when guys like Neil Hunter got stroppy with her because at the end of the day she was police and they weren't. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, warrant. Trumps.

'No,' he said. 'Nae problem, doll.' Ironically self-referential Glaswegians, what were they like? The phone rang and Neil Hunter stared at it as if he'd never seen one before.

'Problem, doll?' Louise said.

He snatched up the phone just as it went to the answer machine and said, 'Do you mind if I take this?' and without waiting for her to answer left the room with the phone. Before he closed the door she caught a glimpse of the living room across the hall. She could see the winter honeysuckle and Christmas box still in the blue-and-white jug. From here they looked dead.

She took her coffee over to Joanna Hunter's noticeboard and studied it. She had looked at it the last time she was here and afterwards had driven out to Office World at Hermiston Gate and bought one for their own kitchen but she had been unable to think of anything that she wanted to put on it.