"And Monday? Not Monday as well."

He'd agreed on three days before we'd started. The actuality was proving too much.

"We'll give up on Monday when it gets dark," I said.

"You're so bloody persistent."

I watched the mirrors. COME, I thought. COME.

"Joyce might have forgotten the phone calls," Malcolm said.

"She wouldn't forget."

"Edwin might have been out."

"That's more likely."

A light-coloured car rolled up the drive, suddenly there. No attempt at concealment. No creeping about, looking suspicious. All confidence. Not a thought given to entrapment. I sat still, breathing deeply.

She stood up out of the car, tall and strong. She went round to the passenger side, opened the door, and lifted out a brown cardboard box which she held in front of her, with both arms round it as one holds groceries. I'd expected her to go straight round to the kitchen door, but she didn't do that, she walked a few steps into the central chasm, looking up and around her as if with awe.

Malcolm noticed my extreme concentration, rose to his feet and put himself between me and the mirrors so that he could see what I was looking at. I thought he would be stunned and miserably silent, but he was not in the least.

"Oh, no," he said with annoyance. "What's SHE doing here?" Before I could stop him, he shot straight out of the playroom and said, "Serena, do go away, you're spoiling the whole thing."

I was on his heels, furious with him.

Serena whirled round when she heard his voice. She saw him appear in the passage. I glimpsed her face, wide-eyed and scared. She took a step backwards, and tripped on a fold of the black plastic floor covering, and let go of the box. She tried to catch it… touched it… knocked it forward. I saw the panic on her face. I had an instantaneous understanding of what she'd brought.

I yanked Malcolm back with an arm round his neck, twisting and flinging us both to find shelter behind the wall of the staircase.

We were both still falling when the world blew apart.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I lay short of the playroom door trying to breathe. My lungs felt collapsed. My head rang from the appalling noise, and the smell of the explosive remained as a taste as if my mouth were full of it. Malcolm, on his stomach a few feet away, was unconscious. The air was thick with dust and seemed to be still reverberating, though it was probably my concussion. I felt pulped. I felt utterly without strength. I felt very lucky indeed.

The house around us was still standing. We weren't under tons of new rubble. The tough old load-bearing walls that had survived the first bomb had survived the second – which hadn't anyway been the size of a suitcase.

My chest gave a heave, and breath came back. I moved, struggled to get up, tried things out. I felt bruised and unwell, but there were no broken bones; no blood. I rolled to my knees and went on them to Malcolm. He was alive, he was breathing, he was not bleeding from ears or nose: at that moment, it was enough.

I got slowly, weakly, to my feet, and walked shakily into the wide centre space. I could wish to shut my eyes, but one couldn't blot it out. One had to live through terrible things if they came one's way. At the point where the bomb had exploded, the black floor covering had been ripped right away, and the rest was doubled over and convoluted in large torn pieces. Serena – the things that had been Serena – lay among and half under the black folds of plastic: things in emerald and frilly white clothes, pale blue leg-warmers, dark blue tights; torn edges of flesh, scarlet splashes… a scarlet pool. I went round covering the parts of her completely with the black folds, hiding the harrowing truth from anyone coming there unprepared. I felt ill. I felt as if my head were full of air. I was trembling uncontrollably. I thought of people who dealt often with such horrors and wondered if they ever got hardened.

Malcolm groaned in the passage. I went back to him fast. He was trying to sit up, to push himself off the floor. There was a large area already beginning to swell on his forehead, and I wondered if he'd simply been knocked out through hitting the wood floor at high speed.

"God," he said in anguish. "Serena… oh dear God!"

I helped him to his groggy feet and took him out into the garden through the side-door, and round past the office to the front of the house. I eased him into the passenger seat of Serena's car. Malcolm put his head in his hands and wept for his daughter. I stood with my arms on top of the car and my head on those, and felt wretched and sick and unutterably old.

I'd hardly begun to wonder what to do next when a police car came into the drive and rolled slowly, as if tentatively, towards US.

The policeman I'd looked through the windows with stopped the car and stepped out. He looked young, years younger than I was.

"Someone in the village reported another explosion…" He looked from us to the house questioningly.

"Don't go in there," I said. "Get word to the superintendent. Another bomb has gone off here, and this time someone's been killed."

Dreadful days followed, full of questions, formalities, explanations, regrets. Malcolm and I went back to the Ritz where he grieved for the lost child who had tried hard to kill him.

"But you said… she didn't care about my money. Why… why did she do it all?"

"She wanted…" I said, "to put it at its simplest, I think she wanted to live at Quantum with you. That's what she's longed for since she was six, when Alicia took her away. She might perhaps have grown up sweet and normal if the courts had given you custody, but courts favour mothers, of course. She wanted to have back what had been wrenched away from her. I saw her cry about it, not long ago. It was still sharp and real to her. She wanted to be your little girl again. She refused to grow up. She dressed very often like a child."

He was listening with stretched eyes, as if seeing familiar country haunted by devils.

"Alicia was no help to her," I said. "She filled her with stories of how you'd rejected he rand she actively discouraged her from maturing, because of her own little-girl act."

"Poor Serena." He looked tormented. "She didn't have much luck."

"No, she didn't."

"But Moira…?" he said.

"I think Serena made herself believe that if she got rid of Moira, you would go back to Quantum and she would live there with you and look after you, and her dream would come true."

"It doesn't make sense…"

"Murder has nothing to do with sense. It has to do with obsession. With compulsion, irresistible impulse, morbid drive. An act beyond reason."

He shook his head helplessly.

"It's impossible to know," I said, "whether she intended to kill Moira on that day. I wish we could know, but we can't… she can't have meant to kill her the way she did, because no one could know there'd be a slit-open nearly-full sack of potting compost waiting there, handy. If she meant to kill Moira that day, she'd have taken some sort of weapon. I've been wondering, you know, if she meant to hit her over the head and put her in the car, the way she did you."

"God…"

"Anyway, after Moira was out of the way, Serena offered to live with you at Quantum and look after you, but you wouldn't have it."

"But it wouldn't have worked, you know. I didn't even consider it seriously. It was nice of her, I thought, but I didn't want her, it's true."

"And I expect you made it clear in a fairly testy way?"

He thought about it. "I suppose in the end I did. She kept on about it, you see. Asked me several times. Came to Quantum to beg me. I got tired of it and said no pretty definitely. I told her not to keep bothering me." He looked shattered. "She began to hate me then, do you think?"