She picked up the file photograph of him and studied the bland face that gazed back at her. Alison Needler hadn't been able to find a photograph taken of him on his own in the last few years (photographs were memories, perhaps no one had wanted to remember him), so they had lifted this image and blown it up. The original photograph was of the whole family, taken at Disneyland Paris three children and a wife gathered round, grinning as if they were in some kind of happiness competition ('It was a terrible day,' Alison said grimly. 'He was in one of his moods.'). Louise thought ofJoanna Hunter's black-and-white photograph of thirty years ago, people held in a moment that could never come again.

Marcus entered her office, waving a piece ofpaper like a little flag. He caught sight of the photograph and said, 'News of Lord Lucan?'

Everyone remembered Lord Lucan's name but hardly anyone remembered Sandra Rivett, the nanny he clubbed to death. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Gabrielle Mason and her children, also mostly forgotten by the collective memory. Who could name one of theYorkshire Ripper's victims? Or the Wests'? The forgotten dead. Victims faded, murderers lived on in the memory, only the police kept the eternal flame alight, passing it on as the years went by.

'What was the nanny that he killed called?' Louise asked Marcus. Here beginneth the catechism.

'Don't know,' Marcus admitted.

'Sandra Rivett,' Karen said.

'She has the memory of an elephant,' Louise said to Marcus.

'Gestating an elephant as well,' Karen said. 'Can't wait to get the little fucker out.'

'You have to stop swearing once you have a baby,' Louise said.

'Did you?'

'No.'

'You're supposed to be a role model for me.'

'Am I? You're in trouble then.'

'Boss?' Marcus said, handing her the piece of paper he'd been holding on to. 'Our Mr Hunter's been unlucky lately. It turns out that a couple of weeks before the fire the manager of the Bread Street arcade was attacked when he was cashing up and one of the windows in another amusement arcade was put in last Saturday night. Plus, one of his drivers was dragged from his cab outside the Foot of the Walk and beaten up, and another car had its windows smashed when it was picking up a passenger in Livingston-'

'Livingston?' Louise said sharply.

'It's OK, boss -nothing to do with our lady.'

Louise didn't know when or why Marcus had started referring to Alison Needler as 'our lady' but it always threw her. Our Lady of Livingston. Our Lady of the Sorrows.

Louise could see Karen's belly clearly through her thin jersey maternity top. Her belly button pushing out like a doorbell asking to be rung. The belly was pulsing as her baby moved around, like something from Alien. Louise remembered that odd fluttery feeling of having a freewheeling baby inside you, independent and dependent at the same time, an eternal maternal dialectic. A foot, a little foot, a tiny, tiny little foot, pushed against the thin drumskin of flesh and jersey. It didn't help Louise's queasiness.

'So?' Louise said. 'The man has bad karma, or someone's trying to tell him something? He's all yours by the way, he's giving nothing away but he looks like a very worried man to me.'

DI Sandy Mathieson, a man who had risen above his abilities as far as Louise was concerned, put his head round the door. If there was a collective noun for police like Sandy it would definitely be 'plod'.

'MAPPA have been on the phone, about Decker.'

'What about him?'

'He's disappeared.'

A black crow flapping across the sun, a dark place, a bad feeling in Louise's own belly. A real, physical feeling, probably brought on by the tub of egg mayonnaise that Karen Warner had just produced and was digging into with a teaspoon. The woman couldn't go five minutes without eating something. Something disgusting usually.

'Patrol car in Doncaster did a routine check on him this morning just to see he was where he was supposed to be.'

'And he wasn't?'

'Mother said he went out at tea-time on Wednesday and never came back.'

'He knew the press had got wind of him,' Louise said. 'He was probably just trying to escape.' That word again. What had Joanna Hunter said, I think I'll go away, escape for a bit? Were they both running from the same thing? Two people who would never be free of each other. Joanna Hunter and Andrew Decker would belong to each other for evermore, their histories twisted and fused together.

'Well, at least the train crash stopped it making the papers for a day or two,' Sandy said.

'Every disaster has a silver lining, eh, Sandy?' Karen said. 'It won't be long before the press hounds are baying at their heels again. A train crash only gets headlines for what -three days tops? Anyway, he's in England, isn't he? He's not our problem. MAPPA's emailed through a photo,' she added, placing a photograph on the desk in front of Louise.

Decker looked a completely different person from the teenager who had stared out of the papers thirty years ago (Louise had googled up his ghost). He was a different person, of course. There was a whole wasted lifetime between the two images.

On her way back from a Tasking and Coordinating Group meeting at St Leonard's Louise realized she was famished and pulled into Cameron Toll car park and bought an enormous bar of chocolate in Sainsbury's. She never ate chocolate but she ate the whole bar as soon as she was in the car and when she got to the station she had to throw the chocolate straight back up again in the toilet. Served her right for trying to put herself into a diabetic coma.

She was coming out of the toilet when her phone rang. 'Reggie Chase,' the voice said. The name was familiar but Louise couldn't place her. The girl was going a mile a minute and Louise couldn't keep up with her. The gist of it was that 'something' had 'happened to Dr Hunter'. 'joanna Hunter?' Louise said. My lady, she thought, another one. Louise's ladies. Reggie Chase, the wee girl who had opened Joanna Hunter's door to her on Tuesday. 'What do you mean something's happened to her?'

Wee girl and a big dog, it turned out. Dr Hunter's dog. It wagged its tail at the sight of her and Louise felt flattered, absurdly. Perhaps a dog would fill the space between her and Patrick that he wanted a baby to occupy. Was there a space between them? Was that a good thing?

Or a bad thing? She had driven back into town to meet the girl. They left the dog on the back seat of Louise's car while they went and had a coffee in a Starbucks on George Street. Louise hated Starbucks. Drinking the Yankee dollar. 'Someone has to make money for the evil capitalists,' she said to the girl, buying her a latte and a chocolate muffin. 'Some days it's you and me. This is one of those days.' The girl said, 'Och, we do a lot of things that we shouldn't do.' The girl had a nasty-looking bruise on her forehead that she made some excuse for but to Louise it looked like she'd been hit by someone. Reggie Chase. Joanna Hunter's nanny, like Sandra Rivett -no, not nanny, 'mother's help'. Mother's little helper. Louise had taken Valium after Archie's birth, 'Numb the shock a bit,' her GP said. The guy had been a pusher, handing out tranquillizers like they were sweeties. Louise couldn't imagine Joanna Hunter doing that. Louise wasn't breastfeeding when she took drugs, her milk had never come in properly and ran out after a week. (,Stress,' the GP said indifferently.) Archie seemed to find a bottle more emotionally comforting than his mother's breast. She stopped taking the Valium after a week, it made her into such a dull-witted person that she was afraid she would drop the baby or lose it or forget she'd ever had it to begin with.

Was Reggie old enough to look after another woman's child when she was almost a child herself? She was the same age as Archie. She tried to imagine putting Archie in charge of a small baby but the thought made her shudder.