'Boss?' Marcus said, appearing at her side. 'OK?'

'Fine,' she said, using the universal Scottish word for every state of being from 'I'm dying in anguish' to 'I'm experiencing euphoric joy'.

'Fine,' she said, 'I'm fine.'

And then they did what you do in places like this. They went to a cafe and had afternoon tea.

'Shall I be mother?' Marcus said, lifting a utilitarian brown teapot, all cosied up in something that looked like a bobble hat.

'I'm sure you'll be better in the role than me,' Louise said.

She tossed down a couple of paracetamol and took a sip of the tan-coloured tea that was strong enough to clean drains. 'Time of the month,' she said when Marcus gave her an enquiring look. It wasn't, but hey.

'Of course,' he said, nodding solemnly. Oh, these new boys with their respect for women, what were they like? They weren't like David Needler, they weren't like Andrew Decker, that was for sure.

Marcus had ordered a slice of fruitcake and it arrived with a large slab ofWens leyda Ie cheese on it (cheese and cake, what was wrong with these people?).

'Cheeese, Gromit,' he said. Sweet boy. Idiot boy, but nonetheless sweet.

Louise ate a toasted teacake to cushion the painkillers. It tasted doughy and stuck in her throat. Her phone rang -Reggie Chase. She groaned and let it go to voicemail but then changed her mind and dialled Reggie's number, might as well try and calm her down. She should avoid telling her about the aunt though, the girl would go into meltdown if Louise told her that the aunt was indeed sick, so sick that she was six feet under the soil. Reggie's phone rang five times before it was answered. By Jackson.

'Hello?' he said. 'Hello?' Go figure, Louise thought. Didn't it make sense that two of the most provoking people she could think of would somehow be together.

'It's me,' she said. And then realized he might not know who 'me' was, although she liked to think that he would. 'Louise,' she added.

'That's amazing,' he said and then the line went dead. What was amazing?

'Poor reception probably, boss,' Marcus said. 'Too many hills.'

Louise's phone rang again and she snapped it open, presuming it was Jackson. 'What?'

'Whoa,' Sandy Mathieson said. 'Down, Shep. "Wee jaunt" not going so well?' 'No, it's fine. Sorry. There is no aunt.' 'Interesting. It's like something out ofAgatha Christie.' 'Well, not really.' 'Anyway, I was calling to say that the North Yorkshire traffic police have been on the phone.' It was true, the signal wasn't good and Sandy's voice came and went as he battled with the ether but the triumphant tone of his message was loud and clear. 'Decker's been stopped on the A 1, near Scotch Corner. They're taking him to hospital in Darlington. You can be there in two shakes of a lamb's tail, boss.'

'Hospital?'

'Some sort of accident.'

'Weird,' Marcus said when she told him to step on it. 'It's almost like he's after you rather than Joanna Hunter.' 'That's not the really weird thing,' Louise said. 'You wouldn't believe the really weird thing.' 'Try me, boss.'

'There's something else, boss,' Sandy Mathieson said. 'You're not going to like it.'

'You could say that about a lot of things.'

'Wakefield got back to us. Decker wasn't the most popular prisoner on the block. He only had three visitors in the last eighteen months. His mother, his mother's parish priest -he converted to Catholicism while he was in there, spent a lot of time with the prison chaplain and so on -easy way of dealing with guilt, if you ask me.'

'It's the third visitor that's going to kill me, isn't it?' Louise said.

'Yep. None other than one Dr Joanna Hunter.'

*

'You're joking me. She visited him? How many times?' 'Just the once. A month before his release. She asked for permission, he gave it.'

She never said, Louise thought. She had gone to see Joanna Hunter in her lovely home and sat in her lovely living room with the Christmas box and the winter honeysuckle with their lovely scent and she had told her that Andrew Decker had been released and Joanna Hunter said, 'I thought it must be any time now.' She didn't say, yes I know, I just popped down to see him a couple of weeks ago. She didn't lie, she simply didn't tell the truth. Why?

'Victims visit prisoners, boss,' Marcus said. 'Looking for explanations, remorse, trying to make sense of the crime.'

'They don't usually wait thirty years.'

Joanna Hunter could run, she could shoot. She knew how to save lives and she knew how to take them. 'There are no rules,' she had said to Louise last week in the lovely living room. 'We just pretend there are.'What was she up to?

Louise's phone rang again. She let it ring for a long time, she wasn't sure she wanted to know anything else. 'Boss?' Marcus took his eyes off the road for a moment and gave her a hesitant glance. 'Are you going to answer that?'

'It's always bad news.'

'Not always.'

A crescendo of phone calls, bound to end in a big dramatic finish. She sighed and answered. 'Sorry, boss,' Abbie Nash said. 'Nothing dramatic. We've chased down the calls, in and out, on Wednesday for Joanna Hunter.' 'Start with the ones after she got home from work, after four o'clock.'

'One from her husband, two from a Sheila Hayes and the last one at nine thirty -same number phoned on Thursday a couple of times and again yesterday morning, a mobile, registered to a Jackson Brodie, address in London.'

Well, it would be, wouldn't it?

Arma Virumque Cano REGGIE WOKE JACKSON WITH A MUG OF TEA AND A PLATE OF TOAST. The mug had written on it 'Washed in the Blood of the Lamb' and she said to him, 'Not the mug, obviously, that was washed in Fairy Liquid.'

He had been baffled last night by the fact that the house she had brought him to (in an incredibly expensive taxi) was a matter ofyards from where the train crash had occurred, from where he had died and lived.

'I don't actually live here,' Reggie said.

'Who does live here then?'

'Ms MacDonald, except that she doesn't because she's dead. Everyone's dead.' Tnl not,' Jackson said. 'You're not.'

This was the deal, he was going home, to London, and he was going to meet his wife off the plane, and on the way he would make a detour to check out some aunt that Reggie kept raving on about, an aunt who was in some way connected to Reggie's missing doctor (Kidnapped!). When they found the aunt (whose very existence seemed to be in doubt) he would drive Reggie to the nearest train station and he would continue on home alone. Exactly how he was going to manage this he wasn't sure, perhaps in stages, like a tired old dog.

Reggie seemed to have an overheated imagination. This Dr Hunter was probably just taking some time out from her life. Jackson wasn't one to ignore a missing woman but there were some of them who really didn't want to be found. He had been sent to chase after a few of those in his days both in the police and as a private detective. Once, in the military, he had investigated the disappearance of a sergeant's wife, chased her trail all the way to Hamburg where he found her in a gay bar where the women all seemed to be dressed like extras in Cabaret. You could see she wasn't intending to go back to married quarters in Rheindahlen any time soon.

Still, it would be on his conscience if he wasn't sure and he had enough women on his conscience without adding another one to the tally.

They had gone to Reggie's building society and withdrawn money. They had an agreement. Reggie gave up her life savings to him and he spent them. That's what it felt like anyway. They also bought sandwiches, juice, a phone charger for her and a road atlas. He no longer had confidence in his ability to negotiate the Bermuda Triangle that was Wensleydale.

'You really are getting this money back,' he said, as she emptied her account in a Halifax on George Street. 'I'm rich,' he added, something he didn't usually admit to so readily.