'I'd forgotten how tiny they are,' the brunette was saying. 'Her little feet were lost up the legs of her babygrow.'

'They grow so fast,' said the blonde. 'The first-size clothes only fit them for a week or two.'

'Those tiny little fingers ... and all that hair when she was born.'

'Brandon looked as bald as his grandpa, but he wasn't really. His head was covered in hair, but it was so fine and pale you couldn't see it.'

'And they have a lovely smell,' the brunette eulogized. 'You know, I'd have laughed if anyone had said that to me before I had Ca.s.sie. But I used to press my face against her hair and just smell her.'

They all smell unique, Jo wanted to say. I read it somewhere. Someone somewhere did experiments with mothers and their new babies. They found out that mothers could pick out the garments their own babies had been wearing, just by the smell.

'I'd forgotten the smell,' said the blonde. 'You know, before I had Brandon, I used to think all babies looked alike at least, they did to me ...'

And to me, Jo added, silently. I know what you're going to say next and it was the same with me, just the same.

'... but once I'd got him, I would have been able to pick him out from a thousand other babies.'

'Your own baby looks completely different to anyone else's,' her friend agreed. 'There must be some sort of primitive mechanism going on. You know, some sort of instinct.'

And surely you must go on knowing them. Even if you haven't seen them for years, you would still recognize your own child. There would be something about them there would have to be something ... The tight band of pain around her chest took her by surprise. A constriction of grief so fierce and unexpected that for a moment she feared some actual physical illness had overtaken her. She put her empty wine gla.s.s on the low table beside the chair, before getting to her feet. The two women on the striped sofa were facing out towards the view and paid her no heed, but Mrs Tanner and Mrs Cohen from the tour glanced at her as she pa.s.sed them in the hall. She forced herself to nod in their direction and, rather than run the risk of meeting other members of her group on the main stairs, she fled into the ladies' cloakroom. It smelled of perfumed handwash and pot pourri, refreshed daily. There were stacks of individually folded white towels, daintily sized for single use. A huge vase of fresh flowers stood on the marble counter, neatly placed between the inset oval basins. The flowers were reflected again and again in the mirrors all around the room, so that there appeared to be dozens of vases in front of her, behind her, all around her. It reminded her of a game she and her mother had sometimes played when she was very little, in which they angled the moveable side mirrors of her mother's dressing table until they reflected dozens of faces which seemed to people the whole bedroom, all of them looking like herself and her mother, all of them pulling the same faces, mocking them.

She grabbed the edge of the counter as if to steady herself. She must not cry. If her make-up got smudged, there would be no chance of escaping upstairs to repair it without being seen. She ran cold water into one of the basins, splashing some on to her wrists, then cupping some to her mouth. Using one of the pristine towels to dry herself, she watched the last of the water gurgle down the plughole. More memories gone. She would have forgotten this in a few days' time. The women talking on the sofa, the heady sensation of too much wine. She had been a fool to gulp down a whole gla.s.s on an empty stomach.

Now that the water had stopped running, she was aware of a faint hum; the electric lights, perhaps, or a discreet fan. She smoothed her hair and checked herself in the mirrors, front, side and rear views. It was like being in a dressing room backstage. She had that same sense of being about to partic.i.p.ate in something which was not quite real; getting herself into character, moulding herself into the part she was to play. In a moment or two she would emerge as Jo Handley, a director of M. H. Tours (in a.s.sociation with Flights of Fantasy) Ltd. Calm, clear-headed, professional to her fingertips: someone who would sit down to a dinner she did not want, delivering lines about Arthur Ransome in response to appropriate cues.

At around the same moment Jo was emerging from the ladies' cloakroom in the Linthwaite Hotel, Harry was vigorously working the knocker at the front door of The Hideaway. It was Marcus who admitted him, necessitating a fidgety exchange of pleasantries in the hall, before he was free to mount the stairs and tap at Sean's bedroom door. Sean appeared gratifyingly pleased to see him, which rea.s.sured Harry that the coming days would bring plenty of remission from 'family fun' back at The Hollies.

For the first hour of his visit, Harry managed to subdue his curiosity, hoping that the matter uppermost in his mind would be raised spontaneously by Sean, but when the minute hand had begun another circuit round the face of his watch, and the older boy had still made no reference to their parting conversation at the end of half-term, Harry cautiously broached the subject himself.

'You know that stuff you were saying last time?'

'What stuff?'

Sean sounded genuinely innocent but Harry proceeded carefully, still wary of a wind-up. 'That story about there being a murderer in Easter Bridge.'

'That oh, yeah.'

'You were kidding me, right?'

'Deadly serious.'

'So, who is it?'

Sean hesitated. For a split second his eyes darted in the direction of the bedroom door, as if afraid of an unseen listener out on the landing. 'Let me show you something,' he said. He brought his laptop on to the bed and positioned it so that they could both see the screen. Harry watched while Sean woke the machine, then located a file identified only by a series of apparently random letters and numbers, like a code. 'I started hunting around on the net,' Sean said. 'There was loads of stuff about it. I've downloaded quite a bit.'

The file seemed to take an age to open. When it eventually did, the front page of a newspaper appeared onscreen: a block of text on the left and a picture on the right, which unrolled downwards like a slow-reveal picture question on a TV quiz show.

'It's a kid,' said Harry. 'A missing kid.'

'Not just any kid. Ever noticed that photo on the dresser in our living room?'

'No,' said Harry. 'I've hardly ever been in there.'

'Well, it's the same kid.'

'Hunt Continues for Baby Lauren,' Harry read aloud.

'They never found the body,' Sean said. 'So they couldn't charge anyone. Now look at this.' He moved the cursor, shrinking the first image and clicking on another item, which opened a different newspaper article.

'Tragic Sequel in Lauren Mystery,' Harry read aloud again. 'Father's body found on beach. So?'

'It's her, you idiot. My dad's wife. Don't you recognize her?'

Harry looked back at the woman in the picture, then stared at Sean.

'First her daughter, then her husband,' Sean said.

'Jeez ...' Harry made a whistling sound. 'Hang on, though you said it was murder.'

'Look,' Sean was putting up yet another page of newsprint, 'there's loads more. You have to put everything together to work it out. I knew about the kid. Dad told me ages ago, so I wouldn't upset her by asking about the girl in the picture like I would be interested in some baby picture. The official story is that she was kidnapped from outside a shop, but no one saw anything. No witnesses. Only the parents' word for it that the kid had ever been outside the shop in the first place. They found the empty buggy chucked over the cliffs, but they never found the kid's body so officially she's still a missing person. Then a couple of years later, some people found the dad's body on the beach, pretty much near the same place. Again, there's no witnesses. Some people think he chucked himself off the cliffs, some that he fell but if you look at the evidence, the most likely thing is that she pushed him off.'

Harry opened his mouth, then shut it again. 'How is that the most likely thing?' he asked at last.

'I've googled it. It's all there in the papers, what everyone said, because there had to be an inquest that's what they do when someone dies and it's suspicious. The two of them were staying at a caravan site, near where their daughter was supposed to have disappeared. Some people saw them set off together, but when she came back to the caravan she was on her own. Said her shoe strap had snapped, so she'd come back while he walked on. As if ...' he finished scornfully.

'But the kid in the buggy surely someone must have seen '

'They appealed for witnesses, but no one saw anything. The first thing anyone seems to remember is her screaming out that her baby had been stolen, but who's to say the baby was outside the shop in the first place?'

'Why would she do it?'

'Because she's a nutter. She belongs in the bin. I'm telling you, she's not just one sandwich short of a picnic, she's missing the pork pie and the crisps as well.'

Harry was visibly struggling to take it all in. 'She always seems all right,' he said, doubtfully.

'All right? Let me show you "all right".' Sean pointed to the smashed cupboard door. 'She did that while I was out at school. Does that look "all right"?'

Harry conceded that it was not the kind of thing his own mother would do. Up until now, he had still been able to think the whole thing a kind of game. A putting together of two and two, the sum of which made an exciting five something you could accept without entirely believing it. The splintered wreck of the door was far more solid and immediate than a bunch of images on the net. It was there in the room with them, thrusting him abruptly into a real world of murderous stepmothers who wrecked your things and pushed people off cliffs.

'What about your dad?'

'What about him?'

'Does he know about all this stuff?'

'He must do. He knows about the kid disappearing because he told me about it. He must know that her first husband's dead.'

'Doesn't he suspect? I mean ... it's like she's the black widow, or something.'

'I don't know. I don't think he could have realized how strange she was to start with, but he must have noticed by now. He tries to make excuses for her when she's being weirder than usual.'

'You wouldn't marry someone if you thought they'd murdered people.'

'You think, Genius?'

'So he must believe what she's told him about it.'

'Yeah.'

'What are you going to do?'

'How do you mean?'

'About her?'

'It's a waiting game. One day she'll flip and do something really extreme, and then maybe Dad'll get the message and get rid of her. And in the meantime, if she goes for me or Dad ... well, I've got a few tricks up my sleeve, too.'

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Jo had been looking forward to getting home, not least because she and Marcus had tickets to hear the Manchester Camerata in Ulverston that night. It was a rare treat for a night at home together to coincide with a concert date, so it was aggravating to be slowed down by the ever-present roadworks on the M6, then delayed by an accident just after Junction 34. When she phoned Marcus on her mobile to explain that she was going to be late and they should go ahead and eat without her, he sounded rather cool, but then lateness always wound Marcus up punctuality was one of the ten commandments by which he ran his life.

'h.e.l.lo,' she called from the front door, dumping her bags on the hall floor and following the sound of their voices into the kitchen, where she approached Marcus for a homecoming kiss, which he appeared accidentally to avoid by turning to put something back in the fridge. Sean studiously ignored her greeting.

Slightly thrown by this chilly welcome, but attributing it to Marcus's displeasure at her lateness, Jo continued cheerfully, 'Sorry I got held up, but it will only take me two ticks to have a quick shower and get changed. We won't be late for the concert.'

She was surprised when he followed her up to their bedroom, not saying a word until he had closed the door behind them. 'Sean showed me what you did to his cupboard.'

She was caught completely off guard. The truth was that she had forgotten all about the episode with the cupboard, partly because it suited her to do so, and partly because once several days had gone by without Sean making any reference to it, she thought he had let it go. It had not occurred to her that he would merely wait his opportunity to snitch to Marcus when she wasn't around.

'I was trying to find the knife.' She could see her own expression reflected in the mirror doors of the wardrobe, shifty and unmistakably embarra.s.sed at being caught out.

'But you didn't find a knife, did you?' Marcus's voice was a shade louder than it needed to be. He sounded both exasperated and angry. 'Basically, you hunted through his room and smashed your way into his cupboard, after I had specifically said we shouldn't search his room.'

There was no real evidence that she had searched the room, but it seemed pointless to deny it. 'I was sure I saw a knife.'

There was a brief silence while the phrase drifted around the room, pathetic as a half deflated balloon waiting to be kicked aside. This is how it was between my father and my mother, she thought. He not wanting to make a direct challenge, not wanting to say outright that she was imagining things. A shudder ran down her spine a sensation that her mother had been wont to describe as a goose walking over your grave.

'Sean was very upset.' Marcus began to speak in an oddly controlled voice. 'He doesn't understand why you smashed his cupboard up. I think ...' again the pause was unbearably long '... I think he was a bit scared. It's not a normal thing to do, going into someone's room and smashing their things. He's not used to anything anything so violent.'

'I'm not violent.'

'You know what I mean.'

She stood beside the bed, frozen in the act of removing her sweater, suddenly afraid of what Marcus might say next: that there was no knife and never had been, that Brian had not harmed Sh.e.l.ley, that no unseen stalker had dogged her movements for years, mocking her with picture postcards of her vanished baby daughter. She wanted to say that she had changed her mind about the concert, and didn't want to attend that she suddenly had the strangest sense of foreboding about it. However, Marcus might interpret that as sulking or deliberate spite or worse, as madness. There. She had allowed herself to think the word.

Marcus was still standing with his back against the bedroom door, almost as if he was expecting her to make a run for it and was ready to stop her. 'You need to get ready,' he said. 'Otherwise we are going to be late.'

She nodded, dragging the sweater over her head, then fumbling with the hook of her skirt, while he continued to stand there watching her. She felt as if his scrutiny went deeper than her outward appearance, that he was examining things she could not see herself.

Eventually she said, 'I shouldn't have broken into his cupboard. It was just that I was so sure ... Only now I'm not. I only got a glimpse maybe he was looking at one of those magazines and the light caught the page when he shoved it out of the way.'

'I think you should apologize to Sean,' he said quietly. 'Even if you can't explain to him why you did it.'

'Would you still have asked me to apologize if I'd found a knife in his cupboard?' she flashed back.

'But you didn't.'

There was another silence while she peeled off her tights.

'I didn't smash the cupboard up on purpose. I know that it looks pretty violent, but I just levered the door open and it split. It looks worse than it is.'

'It's broken,' he said. 'How can that be better or worse?' He walked out of the room before she could reply.

It was an uneasy drive down to Ulverston. She asked about his mother, he asked about the tour, but Jo felt that the issue of the knife travelled with them as surely as if it was lying on the dashboard, its shiny blade caught every so often in the headlights of pa.s.sing cars. It was possible that she had been wrong. Mistaking an innocent object for a firearm had led to people being shot before now.

It had begun to drizzle, so they hurried up the hill from the car park, she clinging to Marcus's arm as they sheltered beneath his big umbrella, partly as a matter of form, partly in order to keep up. Past the Laurel and Hardy statue and into the Coronation Hall, where the booking office doubled up with Tourist Information, showing their tickets to the dinner-jacketed stewards on duty at the front doors.

They had seats in the balcony because Marcus preferred the acoustics up there. Although Jo had been raised on pop music, she always enjoyed the Camerata, and the music seemed extraordinarily beautiful that night, a programme of Elgar and Vaughan Williams. At the end of the first half, when they joined the crowd shuffling down to the bar for interval drinks, she knew that both their spirits had been lifted: she returned Marcus's smile, and he squeezed her hand. As they entered the bar she caught sight of Maisie Perry, down at the other end of the room. 'Look,' she said. 'There's Fred and Maisie. If we had known they were coming, we could have offered them a lift.'

The Perrys had seen them in the same instant, and Maisie began weaving her way towards them, her progress considerably impeded by people moving in all directions, many carrying a gla.s.s in each hand, everyone trying to negotiate a path around the clumps of people who had chosen a spot to stand in and were now impervious to all other human traffic.

'Marcus, Jo how lucky to see you here. Now I'll be able to introduce you to our new neighbour, Mrs Iceton the lady who has bought The Old Forge.' Maisie waved an explanatory arm to where Fred was in conversation with a woman who had her back towards them.

As they followed her through the crowd, Jo turned to Marcus. 'Surely someone hasn't moved in there already.'

'A removal van came, the day you went away.'

'Goodness, but it's crowded tonight,' Maisie prattled as she shepherded them across the room. 'Still, that's a good thing, isn't it? To see the concert so well supported. We're very lucky to get the Camerata coming to the Coro, I always say.' She ended her monologue with a flourish: 'Gilda, meet some more of your new neighbours, Jo and Marcus.'

Only then did the strange woman turn and face them for the first time. It had been twenty-five years, but Jo knew Gilda instantly. She swallowed hard. Marcus was already shaking hands, ever ready with some pleasantry suitable to the occasion.

'And this is Jo.' Maisie was enjoying her role as introducer-in-chief.

'I believe we've already met.' Gilda's smile was bright, but when Jo automatically extended her hand, the one she received in return was like a dead thing.

'I don't think so,' said Jo, trying to meet the other woman squarely in the eye. 'Or if we have, then I'm afraid I don't remember you.'

'Oh, I don't think you can have come across Jo, yet,' Maisie chipped in helpfully. 'She has been away on one of their tours, until this evening. I think I already mentioned to you that Marcus and Jo run a company which specializes in historical and literary tours such an interesting way to earn a living. You'll have to get them to tell you all about it.'

Jo was too fl.u.s.tered to experience her usual level of irritation at the way Maisie was evidently au fait with all her movements. She was aware of Gilda regarding her discomfiture with cool amus.e.m.e.nt, while Maisie continued to chatter, oblivious to any possible tension. 'What a coincidence, finding that half of Easter Bridge is here this evening.'

'That's not so very difficult,' suggested Marcus. 'Given the total population of Easter Bridge.'