It was a warm evening and still light and the pavements were busy. Simon took Diana’s arm, leading her across the road towards a bar he knew. The outside tables were full but there was a circular verandah upstairs. He felt light-hearted, as so often in London, a different person, less inhibited, more spontaneous.

“Champagne cocktail,” he said, steering Diana to a seat.

“Perfect.”

Yes, he thought. This is good. Just this. Nothing more. Nothing heavier. This is exactly right.

Diana wore a pale green silk dress. She was the best-dressed woman in the room and the most beautiful. He touched her shoulder.

“Where would you like to eat?”

“You say. But I want to talk to you c talk and talk. How long is it since we did, Simon?”

“Too long. You go first. You sold the restaurants?”

“Months ago. And haven’t decided what to do next, as that is your next question. Not another business which eats up my life, I can tell you that. I bought a small house in Chelsea and put the rest of the money on deposit.”

“But you’ll need a challenge. You thrive on them.”

“No.” She looked directly at him. She had tiny lines at the corners of her eyes, more on her neck. She was ten years older than him and sometimes he could see those years. It had never troubled him in the slightest. “I want something absorbing and wholly peaceful. I had fifteen years of stress and a high mileage. Enough for anyone. Maybe I’ll open a gallery?”

He laughed and began to talk about the exhibition. As always, he found it impossible to talk about his drawing, easy to tell stories about the room, the hanging, the buyers, the private view, the frames, the prices, who else was showing in London. Gossip. Unthreatening.

“And Lafferton?”

He shook his head. He preferred not to talk about that either, and his police work he never mentioned at all.

They had a second drink, then went out, to walk through the London dusk towards Piccadilly.

“In a couple of days, your private view will be over and every drawing sold,” Diana said. “I hope I have an invitation.”

“Of course.”

They stopped by Fortnum’s. “Choices,” Simon said. “Restaurant? My hotel?”

“Or my house.”

But she caught his hesitation.

“Right,” Diana said lightly, “I’m hungry. I ate a tomato sandwich at twelve fifteen and I’ve just had two champagne cocktails. I might faint.”

Simon took her arm, laughing, and steered her down Duke Street towards Green’s.

Twenty-seven

Natalie woke, heard the noise and pulled the pillow over her head. But the sound still came through so in the end she had to get up.

“Now what? Bloody hell, Kyra, it’s two o’clock, what’s up with you?”

Kyra was standing beside the window. Her curtains were open and she was staring across at next door.

“I said before, you let it alone. Come on, back in bed. Who was you talking to?”

Kyra pressed her lips together but let herself be led back and settled under her duvet.

“Kyra, you worry me. Talking to yourself, making them noises.”

Natalie sat on the edge of her daughter’s bed. Her blonde hair was matted and she smoothed it with her fingertips. Funny, how kids were different at night, how you could love them more because they seemed smaller. Funny that.

“You want to tell me anything now?”

They hadn’t let her come in the room when they’d talked to Kyra. There were two of them, both women, a young doctor they said was the psychiatrist only she didn’t look old enough, and a woman family police officer.

It had taken over an hour. Natalie had started to fret in the end. She felt angry and she felt sick. There’d been stuff in the papers and on the telly. There’d been the posters everywhere, when the little boy went missing first, and she’d talked about it, they all had and she’d been with them like any of the people in Brimpton Lane. Natalie had talked to a couple of the others in the past week and they’d said the same, how different they felt now. Their houses, their road, their neighbours, everything c their everyday lives. They felt different and they would never not feel different. They felt soiled and scarred, as if they needed to wash. A few had said they wanted to move. Someone had said they wanted to get up a petition for the council to change the name of Brimpton Lane when it was all over, only what would changing the name do to help, what difference could that make? They lived there, she’d lived there, the house was there. Only who’d have it now? Who would ever buy it and walk about in her rooms and sleep there and eat there and cut the grass and clean the windows? Knowing.

It was bad enough having to be next door. Bad enough going over and over it, remembering. Bad enough having doctors and police ask your kid questions for more than an hour.

“What did you tell them?” she’d asked Kyra as soon as they got into the car. But Kyra’s mouth had firmed up, the way it did, and she hadn’t spoken. Not at all, not once, not until after television and her tea and her bath and then it had been about a holiday she wanted. In a caravan.

“Where’d you hear about caravans?”

But Kyra hadn’t answered.

“Did you tell them about what happened at Ed’s?”

Nothing.

“About making cakes and that?”

After a long time, Kyra had nodded.

“Did they say it was all right, then? To make the cakes and stuff?”

Nothing.

“What else did you tell them? About when you went round there. What did they ask you? What’d they say?”

Nothing.

“Hell, Kyra, I’m trying to make it OK, I don’t want them upsetting you, I’m trying to make sure it was all right.”

“It was all right.”

Natalie had given up.

Now, she stroked Kyra’s thin fair hair, wispy as dandelion clocks over her ears. Kyra’s eyelids drooped, and then snapped open again.

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“What?”

“Anything. Anything that happened.”

Kyra frowned.

“Did Ed c?”

Kyra closed her eyes fast.

Natalie waited. Nothing.

Kyra’s eyes stayed shut.

Natalie went downstairs and put the kettle on, lit a cigarette and sat at the breakfast bar. It was warm. A dog barked somewhere down the street. She wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe they could. She could work in a call centre in some city, go back to where her family were, try London even. Every day she woke up now, she felt bad, sour. Old. And she was twenty-six. She didn’t deserve to end up in a house next door to a child murderer. No one deserved that.

For a moment, she thought she heard a sound upstairs, but when she went out into the hall it was quiet. For company, Natalie turned on the all-night radio and spent half an hour listening to the phone-ins, sad people needing to chat to strangers about being sad people at three in the morning.

When Kyra heard the voices coming faintly from the radio, she went back to her post at the window. Ed’s house was lit by the street lamp. It looked sad.

They had asked her what she thought about Ed’s house. When she had told them that she liked it more than being in her own house, and being with Ed more than being with her mother, they’d looked strangely at her. Asked her why and if she was sure and if she meant it and whether Ed had ever told her to say that, which seemed to Kyra the most stupid question of all. They’d asked her to tell them what Ed had said and whether Ed had taken her in her car anywhere or swimming or to shops or into the country and had she had any of Kyra’s friends to the house, to do cooking and things, when Kyra was there or when she wasn’t.

Questions. All about Ed. Weird questions, rude questions, stupid questions, but when she’d asked them questions they hadn’t answered, not properly. She had wanted to know where Ed had gone and whether she knew about the people going in and out of her house and when she was coming back and if she could go and see her and they hadn’t answered a single one of those questions. Not one.