“Yes.”

“I’d like to have the tea now please. And something to eat. You promised that.”

“OK, Max, but please, this isn’t going to achieve anything, it c”

He stood silently, waiting. She went ahead of him into the kitchen. Max followed, shut the door and put a chair up against it. He sat on the chair. She remembered what had happened to her mother, how they had taken everything and then beaten her about the head. She looked at Max Jameson. No, it wasn’t like that. This was about something else.

“I need to tell you something.” She heard her own voice, hoarse as if she had an obstruction in her throat. The obstruction was fear. “I had to go to London urgently c I had a call from my mother c she’s a child psychiatrist, she lives on her own. When I got there, I found the house turned upside down, a lot of things taken c and my mother on the floor in her own blood. She’d surprised them. They thought the house was empty. It was very, very frightening. I c I can’t get it out of my head. Now you. It’s—”

“I’m not a burglar. There’s nothing here I want.”

“I don’t understand what you dowant.”

“Answers.”

“I have no easy ones, Max.”

“Miracles.”

“If I could bring Lizzie back to you I would c I can’t. It doesn’t work like that. God doesn’t. It’s complicated.”

She wondered what she was saying. She had always felt that, on the contrary, everything was not complicated but simple. Not easy, never, but gloriously simple. Now, she knew nothing. Her mind was a jumble.

Say nothing. Say nothing. Just do.

Yes.

She lit the gas, set the kettle on, opened a cupboard to take out the china, the fridge for milk. Think nothing. Say nothing. Just do.

Max sat in silence, hunched down into the wooden chair, watching her.

A strange sense of calm came over her and a sense of unreality, as if she were sleepwalking, but untouchable, unreachable. She cut bread, sliced tomatoes and cheese, found a fruit cake left for her by someone the day she had moved in. The kettle boiled.

When he had eaten and drunk the tea, he would come to, Jane thought, realise where he was, and then things would fall back into place. She would drive him home and make sure he was safe. It was like looking after a child.

“Please come and eat,” she said.

She waited for him to do so. Waited for everything to shift back again to normal. Waited.

Watched. Max watched.

She was like Lizzie. Her hands, cutting the bread, gripping the handle of the kettle. Her eyes. Lizzie.

He knew that she was not Lizzie but he was too exhausted to sort out the confusion that seemed to sway him now one way, then the other, Lizzie, not Lizzie, Lizzie alive, Lizzie dead. Lizzie/Jane, Jane/Lizzie.

He looked around every few moments and wondered why he was in this unfamiliar house, rooms smaller than the one he knew, darker, with more objects, books, furniture and strange pictures. Then he remembered. His mind cleared and it felt as if he had been rinsed through with ice-cold water and his purpose was firm-edged and obvious.

But he felt so tired he wanted to lie on the floor and sleep. Sleep for ever. He could not be with Lizzie any other way. Then he saw her, as he had seen her the last time, her eyes wide and blank, her expression inscrutable, vanishing away from him as he looked down into some other, dark, empty, silent world.

When Nina had died, he had not been there. She had been in hospital, hidden under masks and tubes, attached to machines, yellow and thin and ugly, a hundred years old, the pain dragging her life and looks from her. He had been asleep, unable to remain by the bed to watch, terrified of the moment of her death. By the time he had gone to see her, she had become someone else, waxen and still, in a chapel that smelled odd, of sickly artificial flowers, masking the antiseptic of hospital death.

He had not expected to have to watch another wife die, a wife who had come to him like a miracle and been loved greedily, desperately.

He looked up. There was a teapot on the table, a plate with food.

Inside him was a simmering anger and hatred which terrified him, a strength of emotion he had never known before. It was pure, uncontaminated by anything other than the need for retribution.

She was wiping her hands on a towel. Her red hair was like a halo round her face, her robe topped by the ludicrous white collar, a symbol of everything that he had to destroy. He did not believe any of the things she believed, and yet they had a dreadful power.

“Who do you have?” he asked. She started at the sound of his voice.

He was pleased that he had frightened her.

“You have a mother c who else? Brother, sister, lover?”

“I’m an only child. My father died ten years ago.”

“And did he suffer?”

“I c I’m not sure. He had a stroke c Why?”

“I want you to have felt it. Why shouldn’t you?”

“What makes you think I haven’t? There are people suffering like Lizzie every day, people left behind feeling as you’re feeling.”

Max got up and went towards her. He saw her creamy skin and the red hair, her slim throat beneath the white collar, and raised his hands. Up.

She said: “I know what you want to do to me. But, would Lizzie want me to be dead?”

“Don’t talk about Lizzie.”

“Why not? This is all about her. I can’t believe she would be happy that, because she died, you killed me.” She moved. “Let me pass.”

He hesitated. He wanted to kill her for something other than hatred now, he wanted to know how it would feel. How it would feel to hold his hands round her throat. He had always been a man quick to anger, had terrified people with his sudden, violent rages—Nina had always fled the house. Only Lizzie had not cared. Lizzie had simply laughed. But he had never been angry with her, only with things around her, things to do with himself. And her laughter had been enough.

He let Jane Fitzroy pass him. He did not touch her. She sat down at the kitchen table. She looked small and very young, he thought. A child. Only a child would be so naive. What could she possibly know?

“I’d like a cup of tea,” he said.

She reached for the pot. “Then home?”

“No.”

Abruptly, she began to cry.

Fifteen

Edwina Sleightholme had said nothing when charged with the abduction of Amy Sudden. She had not spoken apart from confirming her name.

Once they had left the helicopter, Serrailler had barely set eyes on her. He wanted to. He wanted to interview her, to drag the truth out of her about David Angus. He was not allowed to speak to her, of course. This wasn’t his patch or his case. All he could do was put in the formal request to interview her at a later date, when the Yorkshire cases were under way.

“Wish you’d stay another night,” Jim Chapman said. They were eating bacon sandwiches, brought up to his room by a willing DC. The entire HQ was on a high, amazed at what had happened, buzzing about the arrest of a woman.

Simon shook his head, mumbling through his bacon. “I’m fine. Hospital said so.”

“Sufficiently fine to drive two hundred miles?”

“Yep.”

“Great, isn’t it?”

They looked at one another in understanding.

“Nothing to beat it,” Serrailler said, “even on a ledge halfway up a cliff face in a storm. But I have to get back. I want my hands on the David Angus file again.”

“It’s her.” Jim Chapman took a huge mouthful. The whole room smelled savoury.

“I know. Got to prove it though. She’s not going to cooperate.”

Chapman wiped his mouth and took a swig of tea. “It’ll have the shrinks on the hop.”

“I can’t get my own head round it. It goes against everything we know.”

“Not quite. Remember Rose West. Remember Myra Hindley”

“Hindley wasn’t on her own, she was drawn into it by Ian Brady. OK, she was corruptible, but would she have done it alone? I doubt it. Same goes for West.”