“Where did you get these?” I said, showing I wasn’t being shaken down.

“I took them,” he said quite proudly. “Donna didn’t agree to using these. She didn’t like herself in these ones.”

Stevie carried on flipping through: Donna smiling with red eyes; Dragon Donna (little trails of smoke trickling out of her nostrils); Donna outside, her back to a strong wind (the skirt of her coat blown up); Donna at a bus stop with one eye shut and the other rolled back. You could see her teeth in that one, which was unusual.

“Stevie, why do you think I would want to buy publicity shots of the woman my wife is accused of killing?”

“For your book,” said Stevie simply.

I looked at Lara. She shook her head. Stevie nodded and carried on going through the photos.

“I’m not going to write a book, Stevie. And I’m not going to buy any photos from you, either. If I did you’d only go to the papers with the story.”

He thought about it for a moment, then came around the other side, sat down on the settee, and looked up at me. “But,” he said, “that’s not much of a story, is it? Man buys photograph?”

I didn’t want to fight with them, so we sat looking at the photos until we had all finished our cigarettes. Stevie turned to an indoors one of Donna leaning toward the camera across the top of a wooden surface. She was wearing a purple and white tie-dye top that swept down to her cleavage and a gold crucifix dangling between her boobs. She was smiling, pressing her lips tight together the way she always did in photos. It was quite a good picture.

“What’s that scar there from?” I said, pointing to a pink mark that had caught the light.

“That’s where she broke her collarbone when she was wee,” said Stevie. “It was a bad break. She was in a cast for months.”

I laughed but they didn’t. Of course they didn’t. They never went to medical school. They couldn’t know that you can’t use plaster to set a fractured clavicle. Old MacDonald used the same joke every year: it’s like using an envelope to try to set jelly, he’d say, and the second-years would titter. Nor would Stevie know that a bone breaking through skin wouldn’t leave a perfectly straight, small scar at ninety degrees to the bone. Donna’s scar looked like a deep paper cut, it was so straight. And he wouldn’t know that pink scar tissue is relatively recent.

He could see how intrigued I was by it. “You take that picture,” said Stevie as I stood to leave.

“I don’t want it,” I said. He shoved it toward me.

“Take it, take it,” he insisted, pushing it into my hands.

I’m sure it was meant kindly. Lara scrunched up her nose and crossed her arms, watching Stevie struggle hard to do the right thing.

“Okay,” I said. “If you tell anyone I took it, I’ll tell the papers about you two, right? And about the state of your hall.”

Lara blushed at the thought. Stevie followed me outside. “You’ll write a book about all of this,” he said. “One day. You’re clever.”

“No,” I said, “I won’t write a book.”

“Of all of us, you’ll write the book.”

“No, I won’t.”

He smiled imploringly. “Just make me nice in it.”

I put the photo of Donna up here, stuck her to the edge of the shelf in front of me. Donna McGovern: curiouser and curiouser.

chapter thirty-three

I CAME UP HERE TO WRITE ABOUT NURSERY, BUT AS I WAS SETTLING down in the chair, putting the cup of tea down, etc., I was thinking about evington.doc, and I looked at the first letter Donna sent to Gow. It was sent from Evington Road, Evington, in Leicester, but Donna’s address was not Evington. Her father’s house was in Highfields, and her husband moved out a year before her father died. Two months after his death, she was still living there alone when she wrote to Gow. But why would she need a different correspondence address if she was living alone? She’d lived in North Street all her life and sold the place when she came up here. Susie must have called the file “evington” for some reason, perhaps to highlight the discrepancy?

I’m drawn to write about nursery. The women there are so nice and supportive, and the herd of wee wild kids reminds me that life goes on whether I want it to or not. I only went because Yeni refused to go back and collect Margie. I begged her and then acted stern but it had no effect whatever. I even tried bribery. I offered her a tenner (cheap, I know, but you don’t want people to know you’ve got money; that’s how you end up with none). She turned her nose up at the note and refused me on the pretext that she had “sjchores.”

“Yeni, leave them,” I said, slumping to my knees. “For the love of God, return my daughter to me, please.”

“ Lachlan.” She stood above me, her hands firmly on her hips, speaking as if to a naughty brother. “Jyou cannot hide in this house. These story papers: no one believe that for you.”

I protested for a bit longer, but I felt she was probably right. I’m an unlikely swinger, having a morbid fear of both indignity and public nudity. It’s not written on my T-shirt, but I think it’s probably clear from the shamed way I carry myself. Anyway, I wore my new coat and walked slowly through the park.

Before Susie’s arrest, the women at nursery were a bit suspicious of me and kept me out of their warm circle. Now when they see me approach the door, they make a point of waving and catching my eye and saying hello. They don’t even really know anything about me other than I’m being made a monkey of in the papers. If I had walked in there this afternoon carrying a severed head, someone would have come up to me and said, “Poor you.”

Some mums were gossiping at the top of the steps but stopped when they saw me coming. They said hi, calling me by name, and an unknown hand squeezed my elbow compassionately as I brushed past and went downstairs. Inside everyone smiled at me or waved. Harry’s mum wasn’t there, which was a relief and took the onus off me to make conversation or deal with any kind of situation. The small woman who once had vomit on her back came over and said, “Everyone knows that’s crap,” before scuttling off. I don’t think she should swear in front of the kids so much, but I appreciated the gesture of solidarity.

Margie had bitten a boy on the tummy, and Mrs. McLaughlin needed to talk to me about it. She explained that Margie’s gums hurt and she doesn’t understand that biting doesn’t feel good to everyone else as well as her. She needs the fact brought home whenever she bites anyone. As she talked, I could see her eyes trail across the shoulder and sleeve of my coat, taking in the quality of the material. I put my hand in my pocket so that the front flapped open and she got a glimpse of the lining. I saw her eyes widen at the shock of pale blue. I love this coat. I wonder what else they’ve got in that shop. Later, when we got home, Margie tried to bite me on the arm.

I’ve been thinking all afternoon about Stevie Ray and Lara Orr. It was eleven-thirty before I worked out that Donna’s body’s being found with Susie’s wedding ring has been a terrible shock, and Lara and Stevie’s romance, another shock, may well be completely unrelated. It feels as though one has something to do with the other because they both have a strong emotional resonance for me. It’s the mental equivalent of mashing two mismatched jigsaw pieces together. I was hoping in some way that one might cancel the other out, like red and white wine on a carpet.

The ring is a giant, tectonic shock because it makes me think that Susie must be guilty after all. I look at my own ring now and feel sick. I took it off and put it on the shelf up here. The overhead light catches the gold, and the ring winks at me. We know, the ring and I, we know she may have done it. Everyone else in the world recognized it ages ago, dealt with it, accepted it, but not me. Only now, a full three months after she was charged, only now can I see her with a small knife in a dark bothy, the ragged, gaping neck of a family packet of wine gums sticking out of her pocket, leaning over Gow, reaching into his open mouth, his hands swelling up, big and purple enough to be mistaken for gloves.