'Why don't you come downstairs and have some breakfast with me?' Martina said, smiling encouragingly at her. 'Some oatmeal? Or some eggs? You like eggs, darling.' And so Joanna climbed obediently out of bed and allowed the rest of her life to begin.

Martina was brought up in Surrey but her mother was Swedish, from a small town near the Finnish border, and Martina carried a northern gloom in her blood. She fought it as best she could but whereas Joanna's mother's down-turned smile had signalled happiness, Martina's cheerful upturned one often meant the opposite. Martina the poet. (Bitch-cunt-whore-poet.) Martina, with her straight fair hair and broad features, her burden ofpenitence. Martina who longed for a child of her own and who was persuaded into two terminations by the great Howard Mason. 'My Scandinavian muse,' he called her, but not in a way that was kind.

Nothing left of Martina now. Her one Faber volume of poems, Blood Sacrifice, long forgotten (The ghosts at the table, their pale Jaces lighting our Jeast/ We will not be put out, they say. No, not ever.). It was only a long time afterwards that Joanna realized that the poems were about her lost family. For years, she had owned a dog-eared copy but it disappeared at some point, the way things do. Written on water. Martina had lain down with two bottles, one of sleeping tablets and one of brandy. My bottle oj salvation. That was Sir Walter Ralegh, wasn't it? 'The Passionate Pilgrim'. Give me my scallop-shell ifquiet, my something something something. Martina had given her poetry but poetry had failed them all in the end. Sing, sing, what shall I sing? The eat's run ciff with the pudding string.

They had caught the man during the month that followed the murders. He was young, not yet twenty, and his name was Andrew Decker and he was an apprentice draughtsman. Martina called him 'the bad man' and when Joanna had one of her sudden hysterical fits she would hold her and murmur into her hair, 'The bad man is locked away for ever, darling.' Not for ever, it turned out, just thirty years.

Decker came to trial the following spring and pleaded guilty. 'At least she'll be spared the trial,' her father said to Martina. Joanna was always 'she' to her father, not said in a malicious way, he just seemed to find the naming of her difficult. She had been his least favourite of the three of them, and now she was the only one and she still wasn't the favourite.

Decker was given a life sentence and ordered to serve the whole of it. He was considered fit to plead, as if there was nothing insane about slaughtering three complete strangers for no apparent reason.

Nothing the least deranged about felling a mother and her two children in cold blood. When asked in court why he had done it he shrugged and said he didn't know 'what had come over him'. Joanna's father had been there to bear witness to this brief and unsatisfYing conclusion.

Looking back now,Joanna could see that she had not been spared a trial but cheated of her day in court. Even now she imagined herself standing in the witness box, in her best red velvet dress, the one with the white lace Peter-Pan collar that was a hand-me-down from Jessica, and pointing dramatically at Andrew Decker and saying, in her high, innocent child's voice, 'That's him! That's the man!'

And now he was out. Out and free. 'I have to tell you that Andrew Decker was released last week,' Louise Monroe said.

Andrew Decker was fifty years old and he was free. Joseph would have been thirty-one, Jessica would have been thirty-eight, their mother sixty-four. When I'm sixtyjour. Never. Nevermore, nevermore.

Sometimes she felt like a spy, a sleeper who had been left in a foreign country and forgotten about. Had forgotten about herself. She had a pain in her chest, an ache, sharp and sore. Her heart was thudding. Knock, knock, knocking. Rapping, rapping at my chamber door--

The baby woke with a squawk and she held him tightly to her chest and shushed him, cradling the back of his head with her hand. There were no limits to what you would do to protect your child. But what if you couldn't protect him, no matter how much you tried?

He was free. Something ticked over, a click in time, like a secret signal, a cue, implanted in her mind long ago. The bad men were all out, roaming the streets. Darkness now for evermore.

Run,joanna, run.

Chapter IV

And Tomorrow.

Jackson Risen.

WHEN HE WOKE UP THERE WAS AN UNPALATABLE-LOOKING BREAKfast sitting on his bed-table. He had dreamed about Louise, at least it seemed like a dream. Had she been here? Someone had been here, a visitor, but he didn't know who it was. It wasn't the girl, the girl was there every time he opened his eyes, sitting at the side of his bed, watching him.

In the dream he had opened his heart and let Louise in. The dream had unsettled him. Tessa hadn't existed in the dream world, as if she had never entered his life. The train crash had caused a rift in his world, an earthquake crack that seemed to have put an impossible distance between him and the life he shared with Tessa. New wife, new life. He had proposed to her the day after Louise texted him to tell him she was getting married, it had never struck him at the time that the two things might have been related. But then he'd never been much good at figuring out the anatomy of his behaviour. (Women, on the other hand, seemed to find him transparent.)

He wondered if Tessa was trying to get in touch? Was she worried? She wasn't a worrier. Jackson was.

Of course Tessa hadn't got on the train at Northallerton. She was in America, in Washington, at some kind of conference. 'Back on Monday,' she had said as she was getting ready to leave. 'I'll be there to pick you up,' he said. He could see the two of them early on Wednesday morning -or whenever it had been, he had no relationship with time any more -standing in the cupboard she called a kitchen in their little Covent Garden flat (her flat, that he had moved into). She was drinking tea, he was drinking coffee. He'd recently bought an espresso machine, a big shiny red monster that looked as if it should be powering a small factory during the industrial revolution. Coffee was the one thing Tessa wasn't good at. 'I live in Covent Garden, for heaven's sake,' she laughed. 'I can't throw a stone without hitting someone trying to sell me a cup of coffee.'

The coffee machine took up half of the kitchen. 'Sorry,' Jackson said after he'd installed it. 'I didn't realize it was so big.' Although what he really meant was that he hadn't realized the kitchen was so small. They had been talking about moving somewhere larger, somewhere less urban, and had been looking in the Chilterns. Hard though it was for Jackson to believe it of himself, he was nonetheless planning on becoming a Home Counties commuter. That was what the love of a good woman did for you, it turned you inside out and into another self you barely recognized, as if all along you'd been reversible and just never knew it. The Chilterns were lovely, even the iron in Jackson's hard northern soul softened a little at the sight of so much rolling green ease. 'E. M. Forster country,' Tessa said. She was incredibly well-read, the proof of an expensive, wide-ranging education CSt Paul's Girls' School, then Keble College'). Jackson wondered if it was too late now for him to start reading novels.

A policewoman, not fuzzy at all. 'Do you have a phone number for your wife?' She smiled sympathetically at him. 'Can you remember?'

'No,' he said. The answer in his head was longer and involved not calling Tessa and worrying her, not making her come back early from the States when there was no need because he wasn't dead any longer, but the best he could manage was the 'no'.

That didn't mean he didn't want her here. He tried to conjure up her face but the best he could manage was a vague, Tessa-shaped blur. He tried to fix the last time he saw her, in the kitchen, where she had drained her cup, rinsed it and put it on the draining board (she was very tidy, she never left things undone). Her hair had been pinned up, no make-up, no jewellery except for a watch Ctravelling mode') and she was wearing black trousers and a beige sweater. The sweater felt incredibly soft when he held her in his arms. He could recall the sweater better than he could recall Tessa.