Great Expectations JACKSON WAS WAITING OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL, COLLAR HUNCHED UP against the cold. She ignored him and walked past but he reached out and grabbed on to her hand. Her skin was dry and cold. She snatched her hand back and carried on walking. He caught up with her.

'I'm sorry about your boy Marcus.'

They sat in her car and he held her while she cried. When she finished crying she shook him off as if he was a nuisance and blew her nose.

'You know we found her?' Louise said. 'Don't you?'

'Dr Hunter? Yeah, I heard that. Reggie told me.'

'How?'

'She phoned me.'

'You don't have a phone.'

'Yeah, that's true.'

'Aren't you even going to try and lie?' she said. 'I know you've been up to something, it's written all over you. You're a terrible liar.'

What was he going to tell her? That he pulled the pen out of the guy's eye, that he had put the knife into a household bin on the street minutes before it was collected by the refuse men. That he had set fire to a house and destroyed a crime scene and had been complicit in covering up a double murder? She was police and he used to be.

There was a chasm between them now that could never be bridged because he could never tell her the truth. She was always going to be in his past, never in his future.

'You should go home, Louise.'

'So should you.'

He caught a coach. He didn't know why he didn't think of that before. It was surprisingly comfortable, an overnight express that handily deposited him at Heathrow before first light. His odyssey was, finally, over. He went and had a coffee and waited for his wife to reach earth.

According to the arrivals board in Terminal 3, Flight VS 022 had landed at Heathrow twenty minutes ago. It took a while to decant a huge bird like an A-340 Airbus and then, of course, there was the further ordeal of baggage reclaim to be undergone by the passengers, so Jackson had shifted into waiting gear, an unreflective Zen-like state he had learned to be comfortable in when he worked as a private detective, tutored by endless hours of sitting in a car waiting for missing husbands and unfaithful wives to cross his radar.

The arrivals gate was crowded with people ready to welcome passengers off the flight. Jackson had never seen such an assortment of nationalities in one place, certainly not in such benign good humour, especially considering the early hour. A line of considerably less enthusiastic drivers and chauffeurs held the outer perimeter, corporate signs and hand-written names aloft. Technically speaking, Jackson belonged in the first group but it was the latter band of brothers that he identified with.

There had been a lull for several minutes and an edge of anticipation was growing in the crowd, anticipation that turned suddenly to excitement as the automatic doors opened with a hiss and the advance guard of passengers strode through -First-Class men in suits with cabin baggage, heroically indifferent to the waiting crowds.

'Have you come off the Washington flight?' Jackson checked with a harassed-looking man who mumbled an affirmative as if he couldn't believe a complete stranger would address him at this time of the morning.

A few minutes later and a steady flux of people began to disgorge from the plane and be absorbed into the arrivals concourse. After a while the flow slowed down until it was only exhausted-looking families with children and babies straggling through. Finally, the wheelchairs brought up the rear.

There was no sign whatsoever of his wife.

There were several explanations of course. Her luggage might have been lost and she was still filling in forms in the baggage hall. Or she had been stopped by Customs or Immigration or Passport Control, a check or a mistake. Jackson had once been held up for hours because the laminate on his battered passport had begun to lift. He waited another twenty minutes to see if Tessa would appear, no Buddhist-like patience this time for him, just sheep-dog agitation.

She must have missed the flight, he said to himself. She would have phoned or texted him. Perhaps Andrew Decker had read a cheery message from her on Jackson's BlackBerry (Had to change my flight or Been bumped! Rebooked on next flight).

Maybe he was wrong about what flight she was on, his brain had been scrambled by the train crash, mince for brains, Louise had said.

He tried ringing Tessa's mobile from a payphone but he had no credit card and soon ran out of change. Reggie's money had been almost used up on the coach fare.

Eventually he went looking for an airline official and a woman (,Lesley') who was dressed in a uniform that would have allowed her to drown in a vat of Heinz tomato soup without anyone noticing informed him that no one by the name ofTessa Webb was on the passenger manifest.

'She missed the flight then,' Jackson said.

'She was never booked on the flight,' 'Lesley' said, scrutinizing her computer screen. 'Or on any flight. In fact, there's no one by that name in our entire database.'

Perhaps she'd got the carrier wrong, he had never seen her ticket, perhaps she'd been booked with British Airways, notVirgin. The BA woman didn't seem keen to talk to him -could have been the bruises, he supposed, or the sling, or his general air of desperation, there were a lot of reasons for not engaging with him -but she did say that the next BA flight from Dulles was due to land in an hour.

So he waited for that one as well. No Tessa. In fact he waited all morning before giving up and catching the Heathrow Express to Paddington from where he walked all the way to Covent Garden.

After all, he didn't have anything else to do.

He used the last of Reggie's money to buy a bag of croissants. He was looking forward to a cup of good coffee made in his industrial machine. He hadn't had a good cup of coffee since he set off early on Wednesday morning.

What he hadn't considered, what now seemed entirely logical, was that Tessa had arrived already, on an earlier flight, or even yesterday, and would be completely bailled by his absence from their flat. He quite talked himself into this view of affairs and was whistling with optimism by the time he climbed the stairs to their little eerie, lovenest' he had called it once and she burst out laughing, at his sentimentality or the cliche, he didn't know).

He rapped loudly on the door. He didn't have any keys, of course, but his wife was at home, what did he need keys for? She was sleeping off her jetlag. Sleeping soundly. Or she had popped out to buy a bag of croissants. Fresh coffee for her beloved, to bring back to their nest of love. The beams of their house were cedar and their rafters were of fir.

Where the fuck was she?

Unbeknown to their downstairs neighbour, Jackson kept a spare key to their flat above the lintel of his front door. A thief might look there for a key but he was unlikely to realize it was for a different door. Thieves, generally speaking, were opportunistic and stupid. He thought of the Prius's keys behind the tin of Clouded Pearl. It would have been a good name, in another life, for Joanna Hunter. An inscrutable, Chinese life. She said she killed the two guys who were holding her in the house because they were intending to kill her and the baby but he didn't know that for sure. She would have got off on self-defence, he was pretty sure, but the house was a bloodbath, she would never have escaped the notoriety. For the rest of her life she would have been the woman who killed her kidnappers, and the baby would have been the son of that woman. He could see her point. She'd spent thirty years running from one nightmare only to crash headlong into another.

It was with a sense of relief that he slipped the key into the lock. It turned and he was home. Finally. No sign of Tessa. No bag of fresh coffee on the counter. No croissants. Whither is thy beloved gone?