Friends had invited him to things but he would never turn up. “I wasn’t going to go to this dinner party, only someone was detailed to fetch me—they practically had to haul me out physically. When I walked into that room I was thinking of a way I could walk right out again, find some excuse to turn round and run. Then I saw Lizzie standing by the fireplace c actually I saw two Lizzies—she was in front of a mirror.”

“So you didn’t turn and run.”

He had smiled at her, his face blazing up with sudden recollected joy. Then he remembered what Cat was now trying to tell him. “Lizzie has mad cow disease?”

“That’s a hideous term. I won’t use it. Variant CJD.”

“Oh, don’t hide behind words. Jesus Christ.”

There was no way of discovering how long the disease had been lying dormant in her.

“And it comes from eating meat?”

“Infected beef, yes, but when, we can have no idea. Years ago probably.”

“What will happen?” Max had stood up and leaned across her desk. “Plain words. What Will Happen? How and When? I need to know this.”

“Yes,” Cat had said, “you do.” And had told him.

The illness had run its terrible course very quickly. From depression to ataxia, with other mental symptoms that were harder for Max to bear—violent mood swings, increasing aggression, paranoia and suspicion, panic attacks and then hours of sustained fear. Lizzie had fallen over, lost her sense of taste and smell, become incontinent, been repeatedly sick. Max had stayed with her, nursed and cared for her, twenty-four hours a day. Her mother had come from Somerset twice but was not able to stay in the loft flat because of a recent hip replacement. Max’s mother had flown from Canada, taken one look at the situation and flown back home. He was on his own. “It’s fine,” Max said, “I don’t need anyone. It’s fine.”

Cat went out of the apartment and down the strange, brick-lined stairwell, which still had the feel of a factory entrance, to the street, where she could get a signal on her phone and leave Max to be quiet with Lizzie.

The Lafferton hospice, Imogen House, had a bed, and Cat made the necessary arrangements. The street was empty. At the end of it, there was the curious blackness which indicated the presence of water, even though there was nothing of the canal to be seen.

The clock chimed on the cathedral tower, a short distance away.

“Oh God, You make it very difficult sometimes,”Cat said aloud. But then prayed a fierce prayer, for the man in the apartment above, and the woman being taken away from it, to die.

Five

The bleep of a mobile interrupted the orderly calm of the cathedral chapter meeting.

The Dean paused. “If that’s important, do take it outside and answer it.”

The Reverend Jane Fitzroy flushed scarlet. She had arrived in Lafferton a week earlier and this was her first full chapter meeting.

“No, it can wait. I do apologise.”

She pressed the off button and the Dean moved the agenda smoothly forwards.

It was over an hour later before she could check the caller display. The last number was her mother’s, but when she rang back the answerphone was on.

“Mum, sorry, I was in a chapter meeting. Hope you’re OK. Call me when you get this.”

She spent the next couple of hours at Imogen House, to which she was now Chaplain, as well as being the Cathedral Liaison Officer at Bevham General hospital. The work would take her out into the community but bring her back to her base at the cathedral, where she would take a full share in the worship and ministry.

At the moment, the most important part of her job was to get to know people, and let them size her up in turn, to listen and learn. It was an absorbing afternoon, at the end of which she sat with a man a few weeks off his hundredth birthday and determined, as he said, “to go for the telegram.” He was like a bird, a fledgling of skin and bone, tiny in the bed, his skin the colour of a tallow candle, but his eyes bright.

“I’ll get there, young Reverend,” Wilfred Armer said, squeezing Jane’s hand. “I’ll be blowing out all those candles, you’ll see.”

Jane doubted if he would live through the next twenty-four hours. He wanted her to stay with him, to listen as he wheezed out story after story about his boyhood, of fishing in Lafferton’s canal and swimming in the river.

As she left the building, she switched on her mobile again. It beeped a message. “Jane?” Magda Fitzroy’s voice sounded distant and strange. “Are you there? Jane?”

She pressed “call.” There was no reply and this time the answerphone did not come on. She sat under a tree, wondering what to do. There was only one of her mother’s Hampstead neighbours whose number Jane knew and he was in America for three months. The house on the other side belonged to a foreign businessman who seemed never to be there. The police? The hospitals? She hesitated because it seemed too dramatic to involve them when she was not even sure if anything was wrong.

The clinic. That number was on her phone. Other numbers might be somewhere among her things which were still in boxes in the garden cottage of the Precentor’s house.

A boy bounced past her on a bicycle doing wheelies over the cobbles. Jane smiled at him. He did not respond but when he had gone by, turned and stared over his shoulder. She was used to it. Here she was, a girl, wearing jeans, and a dog collar. People were still surprised.

“Heathside Clinic.”

“It’s Jane Fitzroy Is my mother there by any chance?”

Magda Fitzroy still saw a few patients at her former workplace, though she had officially retired the year before and was now working with a fellow child psychiatrist on an academic textbook. She missed the clinic, Jane knew, missed the people and her own role there.

“Sorry to keep you. No one’s seen Dr Fitzroy today, but she wasn’t expected. She hasn’t any appointments here at all this week.”

Jane tried her mother’s number several times during the course of the next hour. Nothing. Still no reply and still no answer machine.

Then she went across to the deanery. Geoffrey Peach was out and she left a message. By the time she was away from Lafferton heading towards the motorway it was early afternoon.

The London traffic was dense and she sat on Haverstock Hill for twenty minutes without moving. From time to time, she dialled her mother’s number. There was never a reply and she turned the corner into Heath Place wishing she had called the police after all.

As she drew up outside the Georgian cottage she saw that the front door was ajar.

For a second Jane thought the hall seemed as usual; then she realised that the lamp usually on the walnut table was lying broken on the floor. The table itself had gone.

“Mother?”

Magda spent much of her time in the study overlooking the garden. It was a room Jane loved, with its purple walls and squashy, plum-covered sofa, her mother’s papers and books flowing from desk to chairs to floor. The room had a particular smell, partly because the windows were almost always open, even in winter, so that the garden scents drifted in, and also because her mother sometimes smoked small cigars, whose smoke had melded into the fabric of the room over the years.

The study had been taken apart. The walls had been stripped of their pictures, the shelves of every piece of old china, and both the desk and a small table had had the drawers pulled out and overturned. There was an unmistakable smell of urine.

It was only as Jane stood looking round in shock, trying to take everything in, that she heard a slight sound from the kitchen.

Magda was lying on the floor beside the stove. One leg was buckled beneath her and there was dried blood on her head, matted into her hair and crusted down the side of her face. She was grey, her mouth pinched in.