She looked at me and didn’t respond: She had decided to take the blame full on, not slide away.

“For what it’s worth,” I plowed on, “I think that within the limits of the situation, you weren’t as dishonest as you could have been.”

“Thanks, Nadia. But I don’t think I’m going to put that on my résumé. It’s strange,” she continued. “I am always talking about taking control of one’s life, but it got out of control. One step taken-to keep the press out of Zoe’s death, not to scare the local population, not to make ourselves look incompetent, or worse-which led to the next step, then the next, and before they-we-knew it, we were on this road and couldn’t turn back. And we ended up lying and lying and not looking after the people who looked to us.” She smiled ruefully at me. “That’s not an excuse, by the way.”

“All that fear,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’ve never really been able to believe in God. Have you?”

She shook her head.

“There are these two women,” I said, “I feel connected to, though I never met them. And then there are these two men, who I did meet, of course. Did you?”

She took a deep breath.

“I met Fred when he was questioned after Zoe, and then I met Morris of course after you had discovered he knew both you and Jennifer Hintlesham.”

“I need your help here, Grace. You know about this. They seemed normal. Could you imagine them, you know, when you met them, could you see that they could be killers? Was there anything about them-I mean, Fred, for instance. Did he have a history of violence?”

“He does now.”

“I mean…”

“I know what you mean. You want me to say that these men are different, don’t you? You want to put a label on them: dangerous. Or: mad.” We stopped by the side of the pond and she lit another cigarette. “That’s what’s going to happen, of course. People like me will question Morris and they’ll discover that he was abused or neglected, that he was hit or pampered, that he saw a video or fell on his head off a climbing frame. And someone will eventually get in touch with the press to say that Fred hit them five years ago, or whatever. And then there will be politicians and various pundits getting hot under the collar and saying why wasn’t it spotted.”

“And?”

“There wasn’t anything to spot. When people commit murder most of them do it to someone they know. That’s what the numbers say. Fred was jilted by Zoe and he was humiliated and furious and then, by bad luck for both of them but especially for Zoe, found himself alone with her. And he killed her. It’s as simple as that. It happens all the time. He’s probably no more murderous than a lot of people, except he happened to commit a murder that went unnoticed because the woman happened to be receiving threatening letters from somebody else.”

“Comforting,” I said dryly.

“I didn’t think you were asking for comfort. I don’t think you have ever asked me for comfort. That’s not your style, is it? Morris, well, Morris is different, of course, and maybe you could call him mad, in the same way you can call anyone who commits senseless crimes mad. Or evil, if you believe in those kinds of terms. But that doesn’t get us anywhere, does it? Because what troubles you is that for all the terror and all the horror and the death, this has no lesson, no label.”

“Yes.”

“Exactly.” We walked on, back to the path we had left, and for a few minutes we didn’t speak.

“Can I ask you a question, Nadia?”

“Sure.”

“It’s been bugging me. How on earth did you get to see all the files?”

“Oh, that. I had sex with Cameron Stadler and then I blackmailed him.”

She looked at me as if I had just slapped her face. Her face looked comical.

“Don’t ask,” I said. “You don’t want to know.”

She started laughing then, an unsteady and not entirely cheerful sound, but I joined in and soon we were holding on to each other’s arms, giggling and chortling like teenagers. Then she suddenly stopped and her expression became grave.

“You can’t go round feeling guilty for the rest of your life,” I said.

“Want to bet?”

“Not really.”

We came to a fork in the path and she stopped. “I go this way,” she said. “Good-bye then, Nadia.”

“Bye.”

She held out her hand and I shook it. Then I started walking back the way we had come, to where the kite still swung in the air.

“Nadia!”

I looked back. “Yes?”

“You saved us,” she called. “Us, yourself, the other women who would have come after. You saved all of us.”

“It was just luck, Grace. I was lucky.”

TWENTY-FOUR

It was too cold for snow. The sky was icy blue and the pavement still sparkled with the frost of the previous night. My breath smoked in the air, my eyes watered, my nose felt red and sore, and my chin stung above the itchy wool of my ratty old scarf. The wind was a knife. I walked quickly, head down.

“Nadia? Nadia!” A young voice gusting across the street. I turned and squinted.

“Josh?”

It was. He was with a group of boys and girls about his age, all of them muffled up in thick jackets and hats and jostling against each other, but he crossed the road to me. “I’ll catch up with you,” he shouted at them, waving them off. He seemed solider than I had remembered him, less pallid and weedy. He stopped a few feet from me and we smiled at each other a bit awkwardly.

“Joshua Hintlesham, I’ve been thinking about you,” I said, aiming for the bright notes.

“How are you?”

“I’m alive.”

“That’s good,” he said, almost as if there were some doubt about the issue. He looked around edgily. “I should have got in touch,” he said. “I felt bad. Coming around with Morris, all that. Everything.”

It seemed more than five months ago since he had sat on my sofa, a pitiable heap of frail bones. I didn’t know what to say to him, because too much lay between us: a great mountain of horror and loss and fear.

“Do you have time for coffee or something?” He took his woolly hat off as he spoke, and I saw he had dyed his hair a bright orange and put a stud in his ear.

“What about your friends?”

“That’s all right.”

We walked together without talking until we came to a small Italian café. Inside it was dim, hot, and smoky, and an espresso machine hissed and spluttered on the counter.

“Bliss.” I sighed, and peeled off my coat and hat and scarf and gloves.

“I’m buying,” he said, trying to be casual, looking pleased with himself and jingling the coins in his pocket.

“Okay, rich boy. I’ll have a cappuccino.”

“Anything to eat?” he asked hopefully.

I didn’t want to disappoint him. “One of those almondy croissants.”

I sat at a table in the corner and looked at him while he ordered. Jenny’s eldest son, leaning over the counter with his orange hair, trying to be a man, trying on his cool and his confidence in front of me. He must have turned fifteen, I calculated. He almost was a man now. In a few years he’d be finished with school.

He set my coffee and croissant down in front of me. He had ordered hot chocolate for himself and he sipped it carefully, a small frothy mustache forming on his upper lip. We smiled at each other again.

“I should have got in touch,” he repeated.

We took gulps of our drinks and looked at each other over the rims of the cups.

“I heard that you fixed Morris pretty good,” he said.

“It was him or me.”

“Was it really with an iron?”

“That’s right.”

“It must have hurt him.”

“Oh yes.”

“I guess I should be pleased about that,” he said. “You know those Yakuza gangs in Japan? When they kill you, they do whatever they do until you’re unconscious. Then they drag you outside and drive a car over and over you, breaking all your bones. There’s a theory that you suffer pain on a very primitive level so you feel it even when you’re in a coma and dying.”