She had managed to create a wide gulf between herself and her childhood, but Gilda would span the gap in the s.p.a.ce of a few short minutes. If only Marcus could be persuaded to move away, start again somewhere; but then there was the postcard, the sh.e.l.ls, Lauren ... She had answered 'yes' to the card, and it was only a question of sticking it out until the next message came.

She realized that she was driving without any purpose. When she reached the main road, she turned east towards Newby Bridge. The A590 was busy with holiday traffic Sat.u.r.day was changeover day. She felt sorry for these newcomers, trying to put a brave face on it as they switched on their wipers and scanned the sky above the estuary, hoping in vain to spot a break in the clouds.

This time next week the school holidays would have begun. Sean would be at home all day, every day, lying in bed or closeted in his room with his computer games. Of course Harry would probably be around his family generally came up in the school holidays and then it occurred to her that Gilda's daughter would be back too.

Was it really so outrageous the idea that Gilda might have abducted Lauren?

'Stop it,' she said aloud. She knew it was her own voice, but it could have been Marcus, travelling alongside her like an extra conscience. She could almost hear him talking about doctors again or maybe actually talking to a doctor. 'My wife has developed an obsession with a woman who lives nearby. There's a history of animosity between them, and my wife has become convinced not only that this woman is watching and following her, but even that the woman has her missing daughter.'

She drove in the direction of Bowness, but that was a mistake. The roads around Windermere crawled with holiday traffic, and there were no free parking s.p.a.ces to be had. The mountain tops were hidden by low cloud. Everywhere you looked there were figures shuffling along in damp cagoules, probably wishing they were somewhere else. Cafe windows were misted by a combination of hot drinks and tourists' breath, while the colourful window boxes outside bed-and-breakfasts drooped in the rain. From Windermere she drove to Ambleside, and from Ambleside back to Grizedale. The pointlessness of the excursion made her slam her hands on the steering wheel in frustration. What was the point of running away, and where did she imagine she was running to? No doubt Sean would be reporting her abrupt departure to Marcus when he arrived home, and then Marcus would want to know where she had been. She would either have to invent some lame-sounding excuse, or else admit that she had been upset, both courses leading inexorably to another episode being filed under 'irrational behaviour'.

The car clock reminded her that it was after 4.30 p.m., which meant that Marcus should be home fairly soon. He was calling in to see his mother, but that didn't usually delay him too much. She half expected to find his car on the drive when she reached the house, but it was not there, and when she got inside, her eye was immediately caught by the blinking light on the answering machine. She pressed the b.u.t.ton and waited while the nasal voice of the machine informed her, 'You have one new message. Message one.' The voice turned into Marcus: 'I'm calling to say I won't be coming home tonight. My mother's taken a turn for the worse, so I'm staying here with Sandra.'

She tried to call him on his mobile but it was switched off.

'Sean,' she shouted up the stairs. 'Didn't you hear the phone earlier?'

'Yeah. The machine got it.'

'Why didn't you take it?'

'It's never for me and the machine has always cut in by the time I get there, anyway.'

Jo let out a small scream of exasperation. If Marcus was staying over, that must mean his mother was finally dying. For once there had been an opportunity for her to be supportive, but she had not been there for him. He had reached the answering machine instead ... 'because you were needlessly driving halfway round the South Lakes,' an inner voice chided her. She slammed her hand down hard on the telephone table to quiet the voice, then ran up the stairs.

'Sean,' she said angrily, accompanying his name with a brisk rat-tat on the door.

'Don't come in. I'm getting changed.'

Something in his voice told her that this was not true. 'Why?' she called.

'Why what?'

She could tell from his voice that he was moving across the room. 'Why are you getting changed?'

'I felt like it. I was trying something on.'

She knew he was lying. She had been planning to remonstrate with him about ignoring the phone, but this now became secondary to wondering what he was up to behind the bedroom door. She reached for the handle, then hesitated. There had probably been enough time for him to hide whatever it was by now. No point in provoking a scene.

'In future, can you please answer the phone instead of letting the machine get it. That was your dad to say that your grandmother is very poorly and he won't be able to come home tonight, so it would have been nice if he had been able to speak to one of us.'

'Oh OK sorry.' From his position behind the door, Sean listened as the stairs creaked beneath her descent. His heart was still thumping, as it had been ever since that banshee shriek from downstairs had sent him diving for his knife. Now he wondered if he would have had the guts to use it if she had burst into the room, as he thought she was going to. He replaced it carefully in its latest hiding place, behind the box sets of Star Wars and Lost. He was a lot more careful about hiding places since that time she had almost caught him out.

It got to supper time, and she had still heard nothing further from Marcus. She made a special effort with Sean whose grandmother was dying, after all encouraging him to have a second helping of the chorizo and sweet potato bake, which she knew he liked.

Sean seemed willing to meet her halfway, complimenting the meal and remarking a propos of nothing in particular, 'Some people stopped to look at your sculpture today.'

'Really? Did they? Who?' She tried to keep the excitement out of her voice.

'Just some family who were out walking.'

'With children?'

'Yeah.'

'Boys or girls?'

Sean eyed her a little uneasily. 'I didn't really notice. They'd all got waterproofs on, so you could hardly tell. I saw some scouts looking at it once, too. One of them took a picture over the wall with his digital camera.'

'Oh.' Marcus had been right, of course. It would attract random interest from all sorts of people, not just the ones it was meant for. Sean had almost finished his second helping. She tried a different line. 'Summer holidays next week. Do you know if Harry and his family are coming up?'

'I think so.'

'And now there's that new girl, too. The one across the road, who's at boarding school.'

'She's only twelve,' said Sean dismissively. 'Charlie might want to hang around with her.'

Sean had known her age all along. For the first time it occurred to Jo that Sean might be a valuable source of information. 'Did you meet her when she was home last holidays?'

'Yeah, a couple of times.'

'How about her mother? She's a bit weird-looking, isn't she?'

'Who the woman you thought was following us that day?'

Jo flushed. Sometimes she forgot that Sean was neither blind nor deaf. 'I'm sure she wasn't really following us. But she does look a bit odd, don't you think?'

'Don't know. She looks a bit old to have a daughter.'

'That's only because she doesn't do anything with her hair, and the way she dresses. She's actually the same age as me.'

'How do you know?'

'Oh it came up.'

He left the table soon afterwards. She had been so enthused by this burst of communication that she wanted to prolong it, to say, 'Don't go upstairs let's watch a DVD together or something. You can choose,' but she knew her offer would be rejected. It was only a partial thaw, not the coming of spring.

She was clearing the table when the phone rang again. She raced to pick it up, but it was a recorded message, offering her no-win, no-fee representation in the event that she had had an accident. As she was replacing the receiver it occurred to her that she could ring the hospital. That would show she cared. She had to go into the office to root out the ward number. She tried the back of the telephone book, where they usually kept numbers acquired on loose bits of paper, but then she saw that both the ward and telephone number had been pinned to the cork notice board next to the big wall chart which showed with coloured stickers who was out on tour at any given time. Her eye fell on the chart, where her little yellow stars had all been annotated with the initials of whichever guide had been deputed to pick up her tours while she was 'taking a break'. Marcus's green dots and Melissa's red triangles sat smug and unsullied while the defaced stars mocked her. A red triangle and a green dot were snuggled up next to one another in the box marked with today's date, but there were no symbols at all in tomorrow's square. Marcus's and Melissa's tours had both finished that morning. She flopped into the leather office chair and continued to stare at the two little symbols. They had been stuck on at the beginning of the year she could not even remember who had done the chart this year but instead of keeping a decent distance, the green dot and the red triangle were almost touching: you couldn't have got the edge of a ten-pence piece between them.

She reached for the telephone and keyed in the direct line for the ward. It rang for quite a long time before being answered by a young female voice.

'I'm ringing about Mrs Handley,' Jo said. 'I'm her daughter-in-law. I was wondering how she is.'

'She's comfortable.'

'Well, yes ... but has she got any worse?'

'She's about the same. I'm sorry, who did you say you were again?'

'I'm Mrs Handley, too. I'm her daughter-in-law. My husband is there now. Could you let him know that I rang, please?'

'I will if I see him.'

'He's there now,' Jo said, a touch crossly. 'He's sitting by the bed.'

'There's no one by the bed at the moment. I can see it from here.'

'Oh ... thank you.' Jo put the phone down. It had become quite dark in the office. No one looking at the rain-streaked windows would have guessed that it was July. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn back to the wall chart. It was too dark now to make out the initials etched on to each of her yellow stars; the symbols representing Marcus and Melissa were turning an identical shade of muddy brown in the dusk, becoming no more than a series of dark blots against the shiny white background. His mobile was switched off, and he was not at the hospital. She picked up the phone again and pressed the speed-dial code for Melissa's home number. The phone rang out half a dozen times, before Melissa's 'h.e.l.lo?' sounded at the other end of the line. Jo instantly cut the call off.

A minute went by and then the phone began to ring. The caller display lit up with Melissa's name. Jo let the machine take it. 'h.e.l.lo I think you just called me. Is everything OK, Jo? Call me if you need anything, otherwise I'll just a.s.sume you hit my number by mistake. Byeee.' The line went dead.

Jo stepped into the hall and replayed the message, turning up the volume in a vain attempt to detect any sounds in the background. Then she rewound the tape and listened twice more. Jo. How had Melissa known that it must be herself and not Marcus on the end of the phone? She grabbed her fleece from the peg in the hall and yelled up the stairs as she pushed her arms into the sleeves, 'Sean I'm going out.' She picked up her bag and ran to the door without bothering to wait for his reply. By way of an afterthought, she turned back to the kitchen and grabbed the largest knife out of the block.

As she gunned the engine into life her fury increased. How many times had they contrived to be away together this year already? Joint tours and nights off which coincided ... She worked through the coming confrontation in her mind; what she would say to them, what they might say to her and what she would do. She had to force herself to focus on the road. The rain was driving down in straight lines, a million tiny silver javelins in the headlights. It was not yet nine o'clock, but already dark as an autumn night.

She had not gone very far before she saw the loom of an undulating blue light above the walls and hedges. She quickly realized that it was static a police car or an ambulance, pulled up some little way ahead. Then she rounded a bend in the lane and was waved to a halt by a policeman in a dayglo yellow waterproof coat. As he approached the car, she experienced a momentary wave of panic. Did he know what she was thinking, and why she was heading for Melissa's house? Without taking her eyes off the approaching officer, she tried to see whether the knife was visible in the pa.s.senger foot well. She lowered the window as he reached the car, noticing the way water cascaded from the peak of his cap as he bent down to talk to her, holding her breath but he had merely come to tell her that the road ahead was closed due to an accident.

'But I have to get through.'

'Sorry love, but the road's completely blocked. Are you local? Yes? Well if you take the Oak Bank turn, then do a right at c.o.xley Beck Farm; that'll bring you down to the main road. Best thing is to reverse a couple of yards and turn round in that gateway. Plenty of room back there, and it's solid concrete in front of the gate.'

From within her bag, her mobile trilled.

'Shouldn't have that switched on when you're driving,' he said.

'I didn't know it was switched on. I wouldn't have answered it.'

'Better pull in on that side if you're going to see who it is and mind you turn your engine off first.'

'Right yes thank you.'

She turned the car on to the wrong side of the lane as the policeman had indicated, so that she wouldn't be blocking any other vehicles which happened to come along and needed to turn round. The phone had stopped ringing by the time she silenced the engine, but she saw that the missed call was Marcus's mobile. With trembling fingers she returned the call.

He answered right away. 'Jo, is everything all right? They gave me the message when I got back to the ward, but when I called home I got the answering machine again. Where are you?'

'I'm out in the car.' She felt so sick that she could hardly speak. She thought of arriving on Melissa's doorstep, demanding to be let in, insisting that Marcus was inside ... when all the time he had been at the hospital in Manchester.

'Why are you out? What's happened?'

'Nothing's happened. I rang to see how your mum is. I thought you'd be with her, but they said you weren't there.'

'Sandra and I slipped out for a bite to eat. But why aren't you at home?'

'We'd run out ... of something. I was going to Booths, but there's a road block. There's been an accident, so I'm going back home.'

'Are you sure you're OK? You sound very shaken. You weren't involved, were you?'

'No. I don't even know what's happened. A policeman was standing in the road, making people turn back.'

'Booths won't be open, will they? Don't they close at eight on a Sat.u.r.day?'

'I'd forgotten,' she said. 'Is your mum much worse?'

'It's difficult to say. Sandra seemed to think this might be it, but you know the hospital won't ever commit themselves. I'm staying to please Sandra, really. I don't believe Mum knows whether we're here or not.'

As they talked she felt colder and colder. It was as if the car had turned into a deep freeze, and the blood in her veins was slowing, turning to ice. The flickering lights of the police car made everything seem unreal: they might not have belonged to a police car at all, because her own car could have been anywhere, the windows obscured by streams of rain and every other external sound eliminated by pellets of water crashing into the metal a thousand times a minute. The policeman must still be out there keeping a lonely vigil against oncoming motorists, but she could not see him. The thought that there was someone standing unseen in the darkness, someone who could be right up beside the car for all she knew even if he was a policeman gave her a shivery feeling. Even the interior of the car had become a place of uncertainty in the undulating blue light, which illuminated now the dashboard, now a section of her thighs, now a pale hand, resting against the sill of the window. It might almost have been someone else's hand because in the transient fragmentary light she could not see where and how it joined up with the rest of her. To prove whose hand it was, she made the fingers move, but they seemed to mock her, each of them tapping in turn, forwards and backwards like someone playing a scale on an invisible piano When she made the fingers stop, she fancied that they carried on wriggling a while longer, just to let her know that she was not entirely in control. It was the same hand which had drawn the pictures of Melissa in her sketch book.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Marcus's mother did not die on Sat.u.r.day night, contriving to expire instead at a moment on Sunday afternoon when neither Marcus nor his sister were at her bedside. Sandra wanted to arrange the funeral for a week on Monday, but Marcus persuaded her to put it back two days so that it would fit better with his work schedule. It seemed to Jo that every detail of the arrangements became the subject of a spat between brother and sister, with Sandra insisting that the service include 'The Lord's My Shepherd', while Marcus protested that his mother had never really liked it and complaining that Sandra had vetoed his idea of including a Rossetti poem among the readings.

Jo tried to be supportive, but found it difficult to relate to any of their disagreements. Her own mother's funeral had been arranged by the authorities. There were people in 'secure facilities' whose job it was to register deaths and make the appropriate arrangements. They had contacted her and asked if she wanted to attend, but she had replied that there was no point. Her mother had not wanted to see her in life, so it was hardly likely that she would have wanted her around at the funeral. The details of her father's funeral had become obscured among those tangled memories of his death: a blur of uncomfortable silences and shuffling feet, people in dark clothes; herself in the front pew flanked by Aunty Joan and Grandma Molesly, with her father's family keeping separate from her mother's. Two families previously bound together by a marriage, now abruptly disunited because one of their number had destroyed another, a chasm opening up between the two sides and herself being swallowed by it.

Marcus insisted on driving them down for the funeral himself. It was a predominantly silent journey, with Sean in the back seat, wearing his school trousers, white school shirt and a black tie specially purchased for the occasion. Jo half wondered whether Sean's mother would put in an appearance, but she did not come. Sandra wept openly during the service, but Marcus looked straight ahead. Jo squeezed his elbow when the coffin slid away, but he gave no sign that he was aware of her. That's the trouble, she thought. I can never be there for him, because he's self-contained and doesn't actually need me.

She offered to drive back, but Marcus preferred to take the wheel himself. As they approached the motorway, Marcus began to outline the relationships of the various mourners to Sean, who listened politely while his father explained that the old lady wearing the hat with black net across the top was Aunty Kate, who had been married to Uncle Tom, who was wounded at Monte Ca.s.sino, while Uncle Derek was the son of Tom's long-deceased brother Kenneth ...

Jo let it roll over her. She reflected that this was the second funeral she had attended in a matter of weeks. Grandma Molesly always said deaths came in threes. In the old days, when families were much larger and people didn't live so long, that prophecy had probably been more easily fulfilled, but now that Marcus's mother was gone, she could not think of anyone she knew of who was particularly old or ailing.

At least Marcus would not have to be forever paying duty visits to Manchester any more or staying overnight there. She shuddered at the recollection of how close she had come to doing something very foolish. If only she and Marcus were not apart so often. That was the root of the problem a lack of quality time together although when they were together these days, she could rarely think of much to say to him, while his own attempts at communication seemed forced or superficial and their s.e.x life was non-existent. There had been a period in their relationship when s.e.x had been joyful and abandoned. Not at the beginning, when Marcus had a.s.siduously avoided putting any pressure on her, preferring to become first a friend and confidant, wooing her gently with romantic gestures, so that s.e.x, when it happened, was a wonderful confirmation of what they already knew. Marcus had put so much effort into making her happy. Her happiness and well-being had been the most important thing in his life he had actually said that to her once. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps she had been his project of the moment. Marcus had put his heart and soul into turning her life around, but once he believed that he had made her happy, his main focus had transferred elsewhere. Maybe he had intended for Sean to become a project too, but the trouble was, Marcus could only devote himself to one big thing at a time: he might want to be the good son, the good father, the good husband, but his number-one priority now was the business.

Two days after the funeral, he set off to guide the inaugural Daphne du Maurier tour. Jo watched his meticulous preparations with renewed interest. Maybe he wasn't cheating on her with Melissa, so much as disregarding her in favour of Daphne and a host of other dead literary folk, long-departed generals, kings and queens. She waved him away with a pang of envy. She had once been as enthusiastic about it all as he was.

Sean rose late, and after eating a large bowl of Shreddies, ambled down to Harry's. Soon afterwards she happened to be looking out of an upstairs window and saw Harry's sister emerging from the gateway of The Old Forge, walking side by side with Gilda's daughter, the two of them also heading in the direction of The Hollies. Mindful of recent near-catastrophic events, Jo no longer allowed herself to entertain any speculations about this coincidental child. She and Gilda were the same age, and therefore it was quite likely that they would be producing children at around the same time. Whatever happened, she must not allow her imagination to run away with her again. She moved back from the window and resumed stripping the bed.

By coincidence, Suzanne Wheaton also happened to be changing the beds down at The Hollies. When she and John originally bought the place, they had been determined to buck the stereotype of second-home ownership. Not for them the Friday-night arrival, complete with bags of groceries brought from home, all too swiftly followed by the Sunday night departure with nary a word to their country neighbours in between. On the contrary, they told one another that they would make every effort to be part of the community, using the local shops and fraternizing to a degree which guaranteed their acceptance. When conjuring up this idyllic vision of chatting over the gate with a pipe-chewing farmer, or buying a jar or two of homemade marmalade from his apple-cheeked wife, they had reckoned without the nature of a hamlet like Easter Bridge, where the only emporium was an expensive gallery, and even regular residents like the Handleys were, as often as not, working away for days at a stretch.

Part of the picture had undoubtedly been the prospect of their own children rubbing shoulders with the local kids: children who would be interested in the world around them, conversant with the names of birds and the tracks of badgers uncomplicated kids who would warm to their townie friends and invite them to come and help with lambing. The complete absence of children in the immediate area had undoubtedly put a damper on this in their previous years at The Hollies, but then Sean had arrived like the answer to a prayer, appearing at just the right time, when Harry was becoming increasingly resistant to the idea of family time spent up in the Lakes. At a stroke Harry's complaints had been cut back to token whining, and within less than a year came the sale of The Old Forge, bringing with it the prospect of a possible friend for Charlotte too.

Alas, the reality of these friendships fell well short of the dream. Harry and his country-dwelling friend, far from disappearing to hunt for badger tracks or climb trees, spent most of their time playing computer games, just as Harry would have done if he had been at home with his friends in Heswall; while Charlotte's new friend, Rebecca, turned out to be a pupil at a fee-paying school. As a good middle-cla.s.s liberal, Suzanne Wheaton disapproved of private education, preferring to 'support' her excellent local comprehensive having taken the precaution of moving into its catchment area as soon as Harry was expected. This reservation aside, Suzanne could not help being somewhat intrigued by Rebecca's mother, a woman who, in spite of inhabiting the scruffiest dwelling for miles around, could evidently afford a private education for her daughter. And although Suzanne told herself that she had hoped her children would form friendships with rough-and-tumbling rural children, products of a threatened village school, and parented by the local salt of the earth, she was not unaware of the advantages of making 'good' connections, either. John was an architect, after all, and she could not imagine Rebecca's mother would leave that house unaltered for very long. Even so, she baulked at the idea of inviting the woman round for a drink. On the handful of occasions when the two women had spoken, Suzanne had derived the impression that there was something a bit odd about Gilda Iceton. 'Just nervy,' John had said, but it wasn't that in fact, she came across to Suzanne as a fairly confident person. It was something she could not quite put her finger on, which went beyond the way the woman's voice was a bit too loud, her laugh off-key.

At least Rebecca herself unlike her mother always looked nicely turned out. In fact, she seemed to be a thoroughly pleasant girl all round, who had lovely manners and was very well spoken. Suzanne was not so sure about Sean, who had blotted his copybook with the episode of the unsuitable DVD and the dreadful stories he had told Harry about his stepmother. John had been inclined to take a more charitable view than she had. 'Kids make things up all the time, just to make themselves seem more interesting,' he said. 'Harry's probably told Sean that we're axe murderers.'

'I sincerely hope not!'

Sean's stepmother certainly didn't look like a murderess. If anything, she looked more like a victim, Suzanne thought. A nervous little woman, who all but scurried past the house with her head down, never seeming to want to meet your eye. She hadn't always been like that she had appeared quite friendly when they first came, but now she looked as if she was afraid of her own shadow. Suzanne wondered if she might be ill. She never seemed to be away working with their tour company any more.

Her uneasiness about Sean was tempered by the difficulties of actively discouraging Harry from seeing him. Having originally encouraged the friendship, it was difficult suddenly to take the opposite line, and anyway, active prohibition seemed too extreme. It was not as if there were any other young people in whose direction Harry could be pointed. Moreover, she knew that the combined presence of Sean and Rebecca had probably been the single factor which had prevented her own two from killing each other this holiday. She was starting to feel the effects of cabin fever herself, as the rain kept them penned indoors day after day.

The weather was the subject of conversation in the sitting room of The Hollies at that precise moment. The youth of Easter Bridge normally segregated itself by gender, but the whole quartet had been temporarily forced into one another's company when Mrs Wheaton ordered everyone out of the bedrooms so that she could change the beds.

'I can't believe Dad has gone walking in this weather,' Charlotte was saying.