At first, Annie said nothing, then she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you hear the news?”

“From Tracy, when we went to lunch in Leeds.”

“So Sandra didn’t tell you herself?”

“You know as well I do we don’t communicate much.”

“Still, I would’ve thought… something like this.”

Banks scratched his cheek. “Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it?”

Annie sipped more wine. “Show what?”

“How far apart we’ve grown.”

“You seem upset by this, Alan.”

“Not really. Not upset so much as…”

“Disturbed?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why?”

“Just the thought of it. Of Tracy and Brian having a little brother or sister. Of…”

“Of what?”

“I was just thinking,” Banks said, turning toward her. “I mean, it’s something I haven’t thought about in years, denied it, I suppose, but this has brought it all back.”

“All what back?”

“The miscarriage.”

Annie froze for a moment, then said, “Sandra had a miscarriage?”

“Yes.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, years ago, when we were living in London. The kids were small, too small to understand.”

“What happened?”

“I was working undercover at the time. Drugs squad. You know what it’s like, away for weeks at a time, can’t contact your family. It was two days before my boss let me know.”

Annie nodded. Banks knew that she understood about the pressures and stresses of undercover work firsthand; a knowledge of the Job and its effects was one of the things they had in common. “How did it happen?”

“Who knows? The kids were at school. She started bleeding. Thank God we had a helpful neighbor, or who knows what might have happened.”

“And you blame yourself for not being there?”

“She could have died, Annie. And we lost the baby. Everything might have gone just fine if I’d been there like any other father-to-be, helping out around the place. But Sandra had to do everything, for crying out loud – all the lifting, shopping, odd jobs, fetching and carrying. She was replacing a lightbulb when she first started to feel funny. She could have fallen and broken her neck.” Banks reached for a cigarette. He didn’t usually indulge in the “one after” for Annie’s sake, but this time he felt like it. He still asked, “Is it okay?”

“Go ahead. I don’t mind.” Annie sipped more wine. “But thanks for asking. You were saying?”

Banks lit up and the smoke drifted away toward the half-open window. “Guilt. Yes. But more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was working drugs, like I said, spending most of my time on the streets or in filthy squats trying to get a lead to the big guys from their victims. Kids, for the most part, runaways, stoned, high, tripping, zonked out, whatever you care to call it. Some of them as young as ten or eleven. Half of them couldn’t even tell you their own names. Or wouldn’t. I don’t know if you remember, but it was around the time the AIDS scare was growing. Nobody knew for sure yet how bad it was, but there was a lot of scare-mongering. And everyone knew you got it through blood, from unprotected sex – mostly anal sex – and through sharing needles. Thing was, you lived in fear. You just didn’t know if some small-time dealer was going to lunge at you with a dirty needle, or if some junkie’s drool on your hand could give you AIDS.”

“I do know what you mean, Alan, though it was a bit before my time as a copper. But I’m not following. What has it got to do with Sandra’s miscarriage?”

Banks sucked in some smoke, felt it burn on the way down and thought he ought to try stopping again. “Probably nothing, but I’m just trying to give you some sense of the life I was living. I was in my early thirties, with a wife and two kids, another on the way, and I was spending my life in squalor, hanging out with scum. My own kids probably wouldn’t have recognized me if they’d seen me in the street. The kids I saw were either dead or dying. I was a cop, not a social worker. I mean, I tried sometimes, you know, if I thought there was a chance a kid might listen, give up the life and go home, but that wasn’t my job. I was there to get information and to track down the big players.”

“And?”

“Well, it’s just that it has an effect on you, that’s all. It changes you, warps you, alters your attitudes. You start out thinking you’re an ordinary decent family man just doing a tough job, and you end up not really knowing what you are. Anyway, my first thought, when I heard Sandra was okay but that she’d had a miscarriage… Know what my first feeling was?”

“Relief?” said Annie.

Banks stared at her. “What made you say that?”

She gave him a small smile. “Common sense. It’s what I’d feel – I mean if I’d been in your boots.”

Banks stubbed out the cigarette. He felt somehow deflated that his big revelation had seemed so obvious to Annie. He swirled some red wine around in his mouth to wash away the taste of smoke. Van Morrison was well into “Madame George,” riffing on the words. A cat howled in the woods, maybe the one that came for milk sometimes. “Anyway,” he went on, “that’s what I felt: relief. And of course I felt guilty. Not for just not being there, but for being almost glad it happened. And relieved that we wouldn’t have to go through it all again. The dirty nappies, the lack of sleep – not that I was getting much sleep anyway – the extra responsibility. Here was one life I didn’t have to protect. Here was one extra responsibility I could easily live without.”

“It’s not such an uncommon feeling, you know,” said Annie. “It’s not so terrible, either. It doesn’t make you a monster.”

“I felt like one.”

“That’s because you take too much on yourself. You always do. You’re not responsible for all the world’s ills and sins, not even a fraction of them. So Alan Banks is human; he isn’t perfect. So he feels relief when he thinks he should feel grief. Do you think you’re the only one that’s happened to?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t asked anyone else.”

“Well, you’re not. You just have to learn to live with your imperfections.”

“Like you do?”

Annie smiled and flicked a little wine at him. Luckily, she was drinking white. “What imperfections, you cheeky bastard?”

“Anyway, after that we decided no more kids, and we never talked about it again.”

“But you’ve carried the guilt around ever since.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I mean, I don’t think about it very often, but this brought it all back. And do you know what else?”

“What?”

“I loved the Job more. I never for a moment thought of giving it all up and becoming a used-car salesman.”

Annie laughed. “Just as well. I can’t imagine you as the used-car-salesman type.”

“Or something else. Something with regular hours, less chance of catching AIDS.”

Annie reached out and stroked his cheek. “Poor Alan,” she said, snuggling closer. “Why don’t you just try to put it all out of your mind. Just put everything out of your mind, everything except the moment, me, the music, the here and now.”

Van was getting into the meandering, sensuous “Ballerina” and Banks felt Annie’s lips, soft and moist, running over his chest, down his stomach, lingering, and he managed to do as she said when she reached her destination, but even as he gave himself up to the sensation of the moment, he still couldn’t quite get the thought of dead babies out of his mind.

Maggie checked the locks and the windows for the second time before going to bed that Saturday night, and only when she was satisfied that all was secure did she take a glass of warm milk upstairs with her. She had hardly got halfway up when the telephone rang. At first, she wasn’t going to answer it. Not at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. It was probably a wrong number anyway. But curiosity got the better of her. She knew that the police had been forced to let Lucy go that morning, so it might be she, looking for help.