“I’ve got two packets of sweets and Thomas only got one,” said Chris triumphantly. “And I’ve got a slime ball.”

“Here’s your money, Miss Blake.”

From her tone of finality, it didn’t sound as if we would be asked back.

“Thanks.” I shouldered all my gear again and turned to go.

“Good luck,” I said to the young nanny.

“Thank you.”

We lingered in the hall together. I couldn’t leave yet. Zach was going back on his own. I had to say good-bye to him.

“Was it a robbery?”

“No,” she said.

“He wrote letters,” Chris said brightly.

“What?”

Lena nodded and sighed.

“Yes,” she said. “It was horrible. Letters saying that she would be killed. Like love letters.”

“Like love letters,” I repeated dully.

“Yes.” She picked up the little boy and he wrapped his legs round her waist. “Come on, Chris.”

“Wait. Wait one minute. Didn’t she call the police?”

“Oh yes. There were many police.”

“She still died?” I said, feeling icy cold.

“Yes.”

“What were they called?”

“What?”

“The policemen. What were their names?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Can you remember their names?”

“Remember? I am seeing them every day. There is Links, Stadler. And a psychologist: Dr. Schilling. So. Why? What is it?”

“Oh, nothing important.” I smiled at her while my insides burned. “I thought I might know them.”

NINE

“You all right, Nadia?”

“What?”

I looked round, startled, hardly knowing where I was. I was sitting next to Lynne in her car. She was leaning across to me with the concerned look of a friend.

“You look pale,” she said.

“I’ve suddenly got a blinding headache,” I said. “Is it all right if we don’t talk for a while?”

“Can I get you anything?”

I shook my head and lay back in the seat with my eyes closed. I didn’t want to look at her. I couldn’t trust myself to speak. Lynne started the car and began the drive home. I felt as if my skull were full of boiling liquid and I had to hold it tight in my hands to stop it bursting apart. I suddenly remembered I’d forgotten to say good-bye to Zach. I’d left him there in the wreckage of the party. Well fuck it.

I’d been dropped into a new world, a horrible dark world, and I needed to work out where I was, but before that I would have to wait for the boiling buzzing in my head to die down. Most of all, on the short car journey home, I had to concentrate on not throwing up all over Lynne’s nice new metropolitan police-issue vehicle. I thought of the moment when you spill boiling water on your hand. There is no pain but you know that in about one second you are going to have to deal with a current of scouring agony tearing up through your hand and arm. I knew that I was going to have to settle down and properly experience what it was that I had heard. For the moment there was just a voice, somewhere far away, deep in my mind, telling me over and over again that another woman had received letters like mine, that she was dead, murdered. A woman had gone through what I’d gone through, and at the end of it she’d been killed. And just a couple of weeks ago. When I’d last been squabbling with Max she had been alive and worried about the threat and wondering when it would end and now there were children who didn’t have a mother.

The car stopped. I was taking deep breaths now.

“We’re home,” a voice said in my ear. “Do you want some help?”

“I think I’ll just go and lie down for a while.”

“Would you rather I stayed outside in the car?”

Abruptly, I felt as if my face had been plunged into ice-cold water. My mind was clear now. From now on I would just be pretending to be ill.

“No, no, definitely not. I want you inside where you can do some good.”

“If you’re sure?”

“It’s just that I won’t be very sociable. I think I may have a migraine.”

“Do you need to take anything?”

“I just need to lie down in a darkened room.”

We went inside and I left her and retreated to my bedroom. I shut the door. And I checked that the window was firmly closed. And I pulled the blind down. Like Cameron. Like fucking Detective Inspector Cameron Stadler. I lay on the bed, facedown. I felt like I was five years old. I wanted to climb into the bed, to pull the covers over my head, so that I would be safe, so nobody could find me. Except that I wouldn’t be safe. He could find me. For the first time in my life, lying in the bed I didn’t feel safe. I needed to be able to see. I pulled the pillow up against the headboard so I could lean back on it. I could see every part of the room. But what good was that? Maybe it was just better to be killed and not see it.

I tried to go over the conversation I’d had with Lena. I had difficulty reconstructing it. For a feverish few minutes I tried to construct an optimistic version of it. Maybe she was mad. But even in my feverish state, I wasn’t able to convince myself of that. She had named Links, Grace Schilling, Cameron. She’d lived nearby, hadn’t she? That was a thought.

A strange free local paper is pushed through my door every Friday. I never even look at it. I’m not interested in new one-way streets, inquiries in the social services department of the local council, and I put it straight into a cupboard under the sink ready to be used for things like screwing up and shoving into wet shoes. My shoes hadn’t got wet for some time, so the last couple of months of them would still be in the pile. I walked out of my bedroom and told Lynne I was feeling a bit better. I’d go and make some tea for us both. I filled the kettle and switched it on. That would give me the couple of minutes I needed.

I started five issues earlier. Nothing there and nothing in the following issue either. Just a drugs raid in the market, a fire in a warehouse, and articles marked “Advertising Feature.” But in the following issue, which was just over two weeks ago, there it was, small and on an inside page, and my hands started to shake so much that I thought Lynne’s attention would be attracted by the rustling.

The headline was PRIMROSE HILL MURDER. I quickly tore out the page of the newspaper. The kettle had boiled. I poured water over the tea bags.

“Biscuit, Lynne?”

“Not for me, thanks.”

I had another couple of minutes. I smoothed out the article on the work surface: “A mother of three was found murdered in her £800,000 Primrose Hill home last week. Police announced that Jennifer Hintlesham, 38, was found dead on August 3rd. Police suspect that she stumbled on an intruder in the late afternoon. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Links as he announced the setting up of a murder inquiry this week. ‘If anybody has any information I would urge them to contact us at Stretton Green Police Station.’ ”

That was it. I read it and reread it, as if I could suck out some more information through sheer desperation. No mention of any letters. Again I tried to cobble together a version in which the nanny and I had been talking at cross purposes. But then the truth forced itself on me with a bleakness that I could almost taste-dry, metallic. Lena had volunteered the information. I had told her nothing. The policemen were the same.

I picked up the two mugs of tea, but my left hand was compulsively shaking. Scalding tea splashed on my hand. I had to put them down and fill the mug again. I carried one mug through to Lynne and then returned with another for myself, and a shortbread biscuit as well. I sat down near Lynne and looked at her. Had they brought her in to look after me because she hadn’t known the previous woman or because she had? Had she sat like this with Jennifer Hintlesham, drinking tea, pretending to be her friend, saying that everything would be fine, that she was safe? I took a sip of my tea. It was too hot and I burned my tongue and started to cough. When I had recovered I dipped the biscuit in the tea and bit off the warm soft edge. When I spoke, I tried to imitate a woman making conversation.