“Wait. Just to see if there’s any communication.”

“OK. Give us the word.”

Simon stepped back and looked up at the house. Then he walked off in the opposite direction, to think.

Inside the Armed Response Vehicle, six men waited.

“Always the bloody same,” Steve Mason said. “Go like a bat out of hell then sit cooling your heels.”

“Probably a water pistol,” said Duncan Houlish.

“Somebody’s shadow.”

“His own arm.”

“Kids. Often kids.”

But they were tensed as they waited, on the ready, pepped up and wanting to go. They were trained for it, trained to do, yet 90 per cent of their time was spent not-doing.

Clive Rowley looked at his feet. “Get on with it,” he said under his breath.

“Could be linked with the other one,” Steve said.

“What? Melanie Drew?” Clive looked at him.

“Once you’ve got a lunatic with a gun out there c”

“What’s to say he’s a lunatic?”

Clive picked at the skin on the side of his finger. They yammered on. He preferred to stay quiet. Ready. Not that the others wouldn’t be ready, but they talked too much.

It was hot inside the vehicle.

Steve’s chewing gum went to and fro, round and round, with a wet clicking sound.

“Liverpool to win three–nil,” someone said.

“Be a draw. They haven’t got the strikers.”

The talk shifted. Shifted back.

“Need air conditioning in here.”

“Your wife due her baby this week, Tim?”

“Next. She’s had enough. Heat gets to her.”

“What’s that, three?”

“Three up.”

Clive Rowley’s right foot itched inside his boot. It was the kind of thing that could drive you mad, itching where you couldn’t get at it. But the minute he unlaced the boot the balloon would go up.

Five minutes later, as Serrailler was walking briskly back, plan made, the door of the house opened and a man came out, hands up, shaking his head. A young woman followed him, clinging to his hand, crying that it was all nothing, he hadn’t done anything, it had been a row about nothing.

The weapon was a popgun belonging to the woman’s five-year-old son.

Inside the ARV the mood was deflated and irritable. They were trained for it. Up for it. Tensed for it. Swore liberally at another false alarm, another shift spent hanging about.

Outside the house, two PCs wound up the tape. The street emptied. The circus moved on.

“They should fine people like that, for wasting our time. A grand would do it,” the DS said, on the way back to the station.

“‘People like that’ don’t have a grand. More to the point, a young woman was murdered and we haven’t found her killer. You think we should have ignored this?”

She sighed. “Trouble is, everybody gets twitchy. A popgun for God’s sake.”

He decided to leave it. They would all be grumbling for the rest of the shift, not least the AR officers. They all knew that there were likely to be a lot more incidents of the same kind until Melanie Drew’s killer was found because no one was going to be taking chances, anything halfway suspicious would get an overreaction.

He went up to his office. There were new files on his desk and he had to write up his report on the afternoon’s incident. It was twenty past six. The report would take him fifteen minutes or so and the files could wait till tomorrow.

His father had returned from Madeira the previous evening. Simon thought he ought to go over there, offer to take him out for a drink which might lead on to a congenial dinner—in the unlikely event that Richard Serrailler would be feeling mellow in the aftermath of his holiday.

Fourteen

When he was four he had told his Mam he was going to marry her and when she’d stopped laughing and said he couldn’t because she was already taken, he said he’d marry Stephanie then, only his sister had said she hated boys and hated him the most so that had been that, until he’d met Avril when he was fifteen.

He’d pined for Avril Pickering. He’d worked out how long before he could ask her out, then how long before he could get a job and start saving, how long till they could get engaged, how long till he had enough to rent a house and they could be married. He’d put it all down, figures in columns, everything. On paper it had looked all right to him. Fine. Then Avril Pickering had gone out with Tony Fincher. He’d seen them, walking down Port Street holding hands. He’d hated Avril Pickering. Not Tony Fincher, oddly. It wasn’t his fault. It was hers.

He had planned to do something to her, make her regret it, but before he had worked out what it was going to be, it was the summer holidays and when they went back to school in September Avril wasn’t there. The Pickerings had moved away. Scunthorpe, somebody said; London, somebody else. No one really knew.

He had gone out with a few girls after that. Four or five girls. The usual sort of girls. Nothing special. He began to wonder what the fuss was about. He told Stephanie. She laughed. He told Dad, one day when they were shooting. His dad had given him a look and said he’d got something there. What was all the fuss about? Right.

Then he had met Alison, introduced by Stephanie’s fiancé, as he was then. Soon to be husband.

And everything had changed. Alison.

He sat nursing a pint, on his own, remembering, because there was a new girl on the front desk and her name was Alison and it had all clicked into focus again. Vivid. Seeing Alison. Hearing her. Watching her. The tiniest things. He could rerun it like a film going through his head.

Not that he’d ever forgotten. But when something happened, the same name, a little link, it went full on. Colour. Vivid.

He drank the rest of his pint slowly and steadily to slake the anger that always blazed up. Sparks. A breath of wind. A fire, running out of control, and for years nothing would dampen it down.

But then he found it.

Fifteen

Hallam House. It was dark when he approached it down the lane. The lights shone out onto the drive.

Simon stopped. It was still hard. He still hated coming to the house knowing that he would not see his mother, that Meriel would not be pruning or weeding or cutting something back in the garden or else visible in the kitchen or at her desk in the window of the small sitting room. He saw her now. The shape of her head, the way her hair was done, the way she glanced up and her expression when she saw him.

She had not always been there if he had called unannounced. Even though her busy life as a hospital consultant was over and she had stood down from several committees, she was still on the board of this and a trustee of that, often out. But when she was there, she made time for him at once, sat down, listened, caught up with news. Family first, last and always, she had said.

Simon missed her with a strength of sadness that was still raw and painful. He thought about her, had meant to say this or that to her, ask about someone or something.

He looked again at the house. The lights on and welcoming. But his father had never learned the knack of making his family feel especially welcome.

The kitchen curtains were not drawn and as Simon got out of the car, his heart lurched because she was there, he saw her, saw her standing beside the dresser, her arm raised to take something down, saw her as clearly as he saw the two stone urns filled with the white geraniums she had always planted in them, beside the front door.

He looked away quickly, terrified. How could his dead mother be there?

And when he looked again of course she was not.

“Simon? Have I missed a message from you? I don’t remember your saying you were coming.”

“I wasn’t far. Thought I’d drop by and see if you enjoyed your holiday.”