Her instinct was to answer the ringing phone but she could see there was something intrusive if not unethical about that. She answered it anyway.

'Jo?' a male voice, a voice that you could hear the crack and the strain in, even in the one syllable.

'No,' Louise said. A perfect little two-footed rhyme No Jo, which was the truth. Louise realized she had been looking forward to seeingJoanna Hunter, and denying the fact to herself. Joanna Hunter was the reason she had come here this morning, not Neil Hunter.

Whoever it was rang off immediately. If this was Joanna Hunter's phone why was it in a drawer? And who was calling her -a wrong number? A lover? A crazy patient?

She replaced the phone and closed the drawer. It was down to its last squeak of battery. Neil Hunter must have been able to hear it ringing for the last couple of days. Why hadn't he just turned it off? Perhaps he wanted to know who was phoning his wife. He came back in the room and Louise said, 'I'd like to see Dr Hunter's phone ifyou don't mind.'

'Her phone?'

'Her phone,' Louise said firmly. 'We're having a problem locating Andrew Decker, I need to find out ifhe's phoned Dr Hunter in the past few days.' She was improvising. Making it up as she went along, wasn't that what everyone did? No?

'Why would Andrew Decker do that?' Neil Hunter said. 'Surely Jo's the last person he would contact?'

'Or the first. Just want to make sure,' Louise said. She smiled encouragingly at Neil Hunter and held out her hand. 'The phone?'

'She took it with her, I told you that.'

'Only there's never an answer from Dr Hunter's mobile when I call it,' Louise said innocently (or as innocently as she could muster). She dialled a number on her own phone and held it aloft as if to demonstrate her inability to reach Joanna Hunter. A few seconds later the tinny, mumed Bach started up. Neil Hunter stared at the wooden table as ifit had just kicked up its legs and danced the cancan. Louise opened the drawer and took out the phone.

'Fancy that. Jo left it behind, can you believe?' he said. He wasn't as good at mugging innocence as Louise. 'Honest to God, my wife can be so forgetful sometimes.' (What had the girl said, Dr Hunter never forgets anything.)

'You haven't spoken to her then?'

'Who?'

'Your wife, Mr Hunter.'

'Ofcourse I have, I told you I had. I must have phoned her on the aunt's number.' He handed over a piece ofpaper with an address and phone number on it. The aunt.

'When?' Louise asked.

'Yesterday.'

'Do you mind if I take her mobile?'

'Take her mobile?'

'Yes,' she said. 'Take her mobile.'

She was parked outside Alison Needler's house drinking a takeaway coffee.

Agnes Barker. The elderly aunt, like a character in a farce, not a real person at all (Enter Stage Left, 'An Elderly Aune). The aunt was seventy, not that old, not these days. Old age receded the closer you got to it. Live fast, die young, Louise used to joke, but it was hard to move fast when you were hampered by linen chests and silver napkin rings, not to mention having voluntarily shackled yourself to one man for the rest of your life. Was that what they meant by wedlock? One good man, she reminded herself.

Trawling the net, Louise had come up with some scant details about Agnes Barker -born Agnes Mary Mason in 1936, went to RADA, trod the boards in rep for a few years, married an Oliver Barker, a radio producer with the BBC, in 1965. Lived in Ealing, no children. Retired to Hawes in 1990, husband died ten years ago.

There had been a sister called Margot in The Shopkeeper -an uppity, snobbish girl -Agnes's fictional alter ego presumably. Louise was beginning to feel she could go on Mastermind and answer questions on 'The Life and Works of Howard Mason'.

Arty sister of an arty brother. In The Shopkeeper, Margot was still at school but had 'foolishly unrealistic' dreams of fame and success.

There wasn't a reason in the world to doubt either the existence of the aunt or the aunt's veracity. Except that when she examined Joanna Hunter's phone, as she was doing now, and checked it against the number that Neil Hunter had reluctantly given her for the aunt, there were no calls to or from Agnes Barker, no calls from Hawes at all. Perhaps Joanna Hunter and her husband were using the aunt as some kind ofcover, to give Joanna Hunter some space. For her escape. Long odds.

Joanna Hunter had made six calls on Wednesday and received five. On Thursday she had received -or at least the phone had received -several calls. She fished out Reggie Chase's number and, not surprisingly, most of them were from her. Any further investigation ofJoanna Hunter's phone proved impossible as the battery, on its last gasp, finally gave up on life.

She phoned Agnes Barker's home number and a politely robotic voice informed her that this number was no longer in use. She phoned the station, got hold of the handiest DC and asked him to find out when the number was disconnected. He came back in a snappy ten minutes and said, 'Last week, boss.' Disconnected and out of print. The Masons were like an illusion, all smoke and mirrors.

Louise flicked through the new Howard Mason novel, The Way Home, written a couple of years after his marriage to Gabrielle. The wife in the novel was called Francesca and had some kind of exotic parentage and a cosmopolitan upbringing, a world away from the novel's protagonist, Stephen, brought up in a claustrophobic West Yorkshire mill town -all dirty canals and soot-blackened skylines. (Louise wondered what Jackson would make of Howard's book.)

Stephen, having escaped his inheritance of northern misery, was now living a gypsy life with his new schoolgirl wife -he had eloped with her -amongst the bohemian enclaves ofEurope. There seemed to be an incredible amount of sex in the novel, on every other page Stephen and Francesca were going at it like rabbits, sucking and bucking and arching. Louise supposed it was all that fucking that had made Howard Mason fashionable in -she checked the publication date -1960. Louise yawned, it was amazing how tedious reading about sex could be at this time of the day, any time of the day, in fact.

The Needlers' front door opened and Alison poked her head out and checked the coast was clear before reappearing with the kids a couple of minutes later. She marshalled them down the street to school as ifthey were an unruly pack ofdogs but in reality they were as docile as zombies. Between the four of them the Needlers were on a pharmacopoeia of downers and uppers. Louise started up the BMW's engine and drove slowly behind them, peeling away once they were through the school gates. Alison Needler acknowledged Louise's presence with an almost imperceptible nod of her head.

It was still dark, they were hurtling towards the winter solstice and it was going to be one of those days where the sun never got out of bed. Louise checked her watch, the surgery where Joanna Hunter worked would be in full swing by the time she got back to Edinburgh. She started the engine and set offagain. Louise wondered how many miles she'd have on the BMW's clock when she finally felt she could stop moving.

No word from Dr Hunter at the surgery, no word since first thing Thursday morning when the practice had been apprised of her sudden leave of absence. Louise finally managed to track down the receptionist who had taken the call and phoned her from the car, parked outside the surgery. It was the receptionist's day off and she sounded as if she was already out Christmas shopping. 'I'm in the Gyle,' she said, her voice raised against a Slade track. The woman sounded understandably harassed, Louise would have been harassed if she had been Christmas shopping in the Gyle. What was she going to buy Patrick for Christmas? Archie was easy, he wanted cash (,Lots, please') but Patrick would expect something personal, something with meaning. Louise was no good with presents, she didn't know how either to receive or to give. And not just presents.