“What are you doing with Mike’s phone?” Helen Grundy asked, confirming Lisa’s suspicion that a call from any other instrument would probably have been blocked out.

“Mike’s not here,” Lisa said. “I sent him away. I’m alone. This is between you and me.”

“Well?” Helen said after another pause for thought. “What do you want?”

“It’s a matter of hours now, Helen. The computer people are working on the corrupted phone records. It’ll take them a while to figure out the obvious, but they’ll do it. The computers will leave a safety margin before they feel a hundred-percent confident of the link between the Real Woman we arrested with Stella Filisetti and Arachne West, but Smith has people searching for her already. It won’t matter how well hidden you are or how quiet you can keep—your blackout didn’t last long enough to make your movements untraceable. Even if it takes a small army to intercept the couriers carrying the mice, they won’t get away.”

“I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about, Lisa,” Helen replied stubbornly. “Just put Mike on, will you?”

“Mike knows everything, Helen. For the moment, he and Chan Kwai Keung are the only two who do know—but as I said, it’s a matter of hours. Going after Chan was a mistake, by the way. His guilty conscience was reflecting on sins of his own. I can see why Stella and her friend jumped to the wrong conclusion, but it really was a masterpiece of bad judgment.”

“I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this,” Helen said. The ambiguity was so neat that Lisa felt free to assume that the other woman had regained most of her composure.

“I’m trying to make it clear to you that you no longer have anything to lose by talking to me, and maybe everything to gain. I want to make you an offer.”

“An offer I can’t refuse?” Helen countered, although the attempted wit rang hollow.

“I don’t blame you for thinking I must be involved,” Lisa said. “It was a perfectly natural assumption. I don’t blame you or Stella for refusing to take my denials seriously. If I can’t understand why Morgan never let me in on his little secret, how could you? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I must be lying now. If I were in your position, that’s exactly what I’d be thinking. But consider this, Helen. In a few hours, everyone else will know what I know. I could tip them off right now if I wanted to heed the call of duty. I could have called Judith Kenna, Peter Grimmett Smith, or the mysterious Mr. Leland instead of you, and then I could have gone back to the Renaissance Hotel to sleep all day, knowing that I’d wake up to find the whole thing tidied up—and I’m certainly tired enough. For the first time in months, I’m tired enough to do exactly that. My job was as good as lost already, but the moment I phoned you instead of Smith, I made absolutely certain that I’m finished. Careerwise, the fact that I’m talking to you now is suicide.”

“It sounds more like madness to me,” Helen Grundy observed, still careful not to commit herself to any recordable admission that she knew what Lisa was talking about.

“Maybe,” Lisa admitted. “But the fact is, I want to know.I want to know why every initial assumption I made about this case has proved false. I want to know why I was so ludicrously mistaken about the nature of my relationship with Morgan Miller that I was unable to believe he’d kept a secret from me for all these years. I want to know why he never gave me the opportunity to be the kind of traitor you and Stella Filisetti think I am.”

“I don’t see how any of this concerns me,” Helen Grundy said, a faint trace of contempt creeping into her voice.

“Use your imagination, Helen. You haven’t got anything tangible out of Morgan. You haven’t found anything on the hard disks of his old PC’s and you haven’t found any backups among the wafers and sequins you stole from my apartment. All you’ve got today is what Stella managed to put together before she told you that if you didn’t act quickly, you’d never get another chance, because her spying activities were bound to be uncovered. You can’t get anything you can trust out of Morgan, because he knows as well as you do that it’s just a matter of hanging on till rescue comes. If I know Morgan only half as well as I thought I did, I’d guess that he’s been feeding you bullshit by the ream ever since you picked him up, and I’ll bet a million euros to a bent bingo token that it would take an army of scientists thirty years to sort out fact from fantasy.

“I presume that you and Arachne and the hard core of the sisterhood are more than willing to accept martyrdom for the cause, but I know that you’d be willing to risk anything to get what you want before you go down—to get something you can broadcast to all the other sisters. But you have only one chance of getting that, because there’s only one person who has the moral clout necessary to demand the truth from Morgan Miller and get it. In brief, Helen, you need me.

“It wouldn’t have done you any good to lift me when you lifted Morgan, because I’d have been just as stubborn and just as inventive in stalling you, and I guess there must have been quite an argument about whether it was safe to leave me on the outside to help with the investigation. My guess is that it was my old acquaintance Arachne who persuaded the team to go for the bug option—which might have been a valuable information feed if Mr. Leland hadn’t stuck his paranoid oar in—but that doesn’t matter. The point is that it was the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons. I’m ready to help you, Helen. I’m ready to do what you can’t, and demand the truth from Morgan because I want to know, before my life goes down the toilet with all of yours, exactlywhat it is that’s flushed me away.

“I need to know, Helen. It’s the one thing left that I really do need. And the beauty of it is that from your point of view, it’s cost-free. You have nothing left to lose, and any chance to win is worth taking.”

It had been an exhaustingly long speech, and she was shivering in the night-born cold that the sullen morning light hadn’t yet contrived to banish, but Lisa felt more alive than she had for many a year, and it certainly wasn’t Ginny’s pep pills that were responsible. She was prepared to go on if she had to; Helen might still need time to think about it, and in a situation of this kind, it was best to keep piling the pressure on until something gave.

Fortunately, something had already given. “I can’t trust you,” the other woman said pathetically.

“You don’t have to,” Lisa said. “Your worst-case scenario is that you might be arrested two hours early. I can’t guarantee that even I can get anything out of Morgan—after all, whether you believe it or not, he’s been keeping me in the dark for the best part of forty years—but at the very least, you’d have an extra hostage to bargain with. I have my car. You name the time and the place—but make it soon. If there aren’t enough sisters where you are to constitute a quorum, somebody had better make an executive decision.”

“Bitch,” was Helen Grundy’s reply—but she said it offhandedly, with no real feeling. Lisa was confident that it hadn’t been Helen who’d shot the phone out of her hand or sprayed “Traitor” on her door, but she now figured that Helen, not Stella, must have been the principal shaper of the burglars’ script.

“We don’t have time for insults,” Lisa said. “Where? When?”

Whether Helen was alone or not, the executive decision was made. “The mall straddling North Parade Road, where the old recreation ground and cricket field used to be,” she said defeatedly. “There’s a shop called Salomey on the ground floor, just to the right of the Johnstone Street entrance. Come to the dressing rooms. Come on foot, alone. You have ten minutes.”

“I’m too far away. Make it fifteen.”

“Break the speed limit and leave the car on a double yellow. You have ten.” Helen rang off.