'No,' the receptionist said, after a moment's hesitation. 'Not Dr Hunter, it was her husband who phoned. He said there'd been a family emergency.'

'You're sure it was her husband?' 'Well, he said he was. He was Glaswegian,' she added as if that clinched it. 'She's gone to look after a sick aunt.' 'Yeah,' Louise said. 'I heard that.'

Sheila Hayes was running an ante-natal clinic at the end of the corridor. It unnerved Louise to be amongst so much fecundity, it was bad enough working around Karen but in the ante-natal clinic the air in the waiting room was saturated with hormones as a roomful of fertility goddesses the size of buses leafed through old, dog-eared copies of OK! and shifted their uncomfortable bulk around on the hard chairs.

Louise showed her warrant to the receptionist and said, 'Sheila Hayes?' and the receptionist pointed at a door and said, 'She has a lady in with her.' More ladies. Ladies of the lake, the lamp, the night. Louise waited until a woman lumbered out, already trammelled by two small infants, and slipped into the midwife's room.

Sheila Hayes smiled a welcome at her and glancing down at her notes said, 'Mrs Carter? I don't think we've met before.'

'Not Mrs Carter,' Louise said, showing her warrant card, 'Chief Inspector Louise Monroe.' Sheila Hayes's professional smile faded. 'It's a question about Dr Hunter.'

'Something's happened to her?'

'No. I'm conducting a routine investigation into her husband's affairs-'

'Neil?'

'Yes, Neil. I'd rather you didn't say anything about this to anyone.'

'Of course not.'

Louise supposed it would be all round the surgery before she was even out of the door. The receptionist was already agog at the sight of her warrant. 'I'm trying to locate Dr Hunter, she didn't tell you she was going away?'

'No,' Sheila Hayes said. 'She's gone to stay with an aunt apparently, according to Reggie -Reggie's the girl who helps to look after the baby. Jo was supposed to meet me onWednesday night but she didn't turn up, didn't answer her phone when I called to find out what happened. It's very out of character for her but I suppose it's something to do with the story in the newspaper?'

'What story?'

'Which do you prefer?' Karen Warner said, '''Mason Murderer Missing" or "Beast of Bodmin Moor". It wasn't Bodmin Moor.' 'Scottish paper,' Louise said, 'bound to be hazy on English geography.'

'L'ijter serving a full thirty year life sentence for the brutal slaying, blah, blah, blah. Face of a killer. This photo's over thirty years old. Joanna Mason) changed her name) believed to be working as a GP in Scotland, diddum, diddum ... They haven't found her yet then. Close on her heels though.'

'I kind of wish they would,' Louise said. 'Find her.'

'Do you?'

A DC called Abbie Nash popped her head round the door and said, 'Boss? You wanted me.'

'Yes, phone round the rental companies to check whether a Joanna Hunter rented a car on Wednesday. And Abbie,' Louise said, handing her Joanna Hunter's phone, 'can you get someone else to run all the numbers on this mobile, also Joanna Hunter's.'

'Right away, boss.' Abbie was a short, stocky young woman who looked as if she would hold her own in a fight. She was more imaginative than her badly cut hair suggested. 'Sandy Mathieson says she's the Mason massacre survivor,' she said. 'I googled her when he told me about her. Rumour is she's lost again.'

Louise wondered how many people had to die before murder became massacre. More than three, surely?

'Crisp?' Karen offered, rattling an open packet at them both. 'Roast beefflavour.' Abbie Nash took a handful but Louise waved the crisps away, even the smell made her nauseous. This must be how people became vegetarians.

'I just want to know where she is and if she's OK,' Louise said. 'And I want to make sure that Andrew Decker's nowhere near her.'

What had Reggie said? Has anyone actually spoken to her? No, apparently not. 'Trouble is, she's a missing person that no one's reported missing.' Louise sighed. 'I think it's a case ofcherchez fa tante.'

The thing was, as Reggie Chase would have said, Neil Hunter's reaction to the perplexing presence of his wife's phone in the house was worthy of Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight but wasn't nearly as hammy as his response to the sound of the Prius's engine purring happily when Louise started it. 'Miracle recovery?' she said innocently to Neil Hunter.

He tried to laugh it off. 'Do I need a lawyer?' he joked.

'I don't know. Do you?' she said.

Abide with Me SHE WAS NINE WHEN MARTINA DIED. SHE CAME HOME FROM SCHOOL -there was no sign of her father -and found two men carrying a sheet-draped body downstairs on a stretcher. Joanna wasn't sure who it was until she ran upstairs to Martina's room and saw the tumbled sheets, the empty bottles lying on the floor and smelt something sickly in the air that hinted at disaster.

The note that Martina had left was written in a flowery card, part of a stationery set that had been Joanna's Christmas present to her. It was on the dining-room mantelpiece and had been overlooked by the police. It contained nothing memorable, no poetry, just a sleepy scrawl that said 'Too much' and something in Swedish that would forever remain untranslated for Joanna.

She had gone looking for her father, found him in his study, where he had worked his way down to the bottom of a bottle of whisky. She stood in the doorway and held up the card. 'Martina left you a note,' she said and he said, 'I know,' and threw the bottle ofwhisky at her.

It had just been Joanna and her father for a while. At first, when she had gone to live with him, after everyone she loved had died, he had employed a nanny, a dried-up stick of a witch in severe clothes who believed that the best way for Joanna to get over her tragedy was to behave as if it had never happened.

It was a long time before Joanna was able to go to school. Her legs would collapse under her every time she got near the school gates and the psychiatrist that her father employed (a tweedy man who smelt of cigarettes and with whom she shared long, awkward silences) suggested she be schooled at home for a while and so the nanny did double duty as a governess and gave Joanna lessons every day, terrible tedious hours of arithmetic and English. If she did anything wrong, if she smudged her exercise books or didn't pay attention she was smacked across the back of her hand with a ruler. When one day Martina caught the nanny mid-whack, she grabbed the ruler and hit her across the face with it.

There was a terrible fuss, the nanny talked about getting the police involved but Howard must have got rid of her somehow. He was good at getting rid of women. All Joanna remembered was Martina turning to her after the woman had left in a taxi, saying, 'No more nannies, darling. I'll look after you from now on. I promise.' Don't make promises you can't keep, their mother used to say and she was right. She didn't use to say it to her children, she said it mainly to their father, Howard Mason, the Great Pretender.

The woman who came after the poet (who in truth came before the poet which was one of the reasons Martina lay down with her bottles of salvation) was Chinese, some kind of artist from Hong Kong, who assured Howard that Joanna would be happier, not at the local school where she had finally settled, but at a boarding school buried deep in the folds of the Cotswolds and so Joanna was duly packed off until she was eighteen, only coming home for holidays.

Her father spent years in exile in Los Angeles, trying to make a new career and she spent the school holidays with Aunt Agnes and Uncle Oliver, dreadful people who were terrified of children, and treated her as if she was a dangerous wild animal to be harried and contained at every turn. Now their contact was limited to the exchange of Christmas cards. Joanna could never forgive her aunt for not wrapping her in love, the way she would have done in her place.