‘They wish for him not to be dead?’ Cordy guessed.

I smiled. You have to word it in exactly the right way or else the story doesn’t work. ‘The couple closed their eyes, held the monkey’s paw in their hands and said, “Please, please, bring back our only son-that is our wish.” That night, there’s a knock at the door. They rush to open it, and it’s him. Except it’s not him as he used to be: it’s a walking, breathing, bloody mangled mess, a grotesquely twisted lump of meat brought back to life, unrecognisable as human-’

‘Yuck!’ Cordy elbowed me in the ribs. ‘Shut up.’

‘I always think of that story when I think about working mothers.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’ Cordy asked.

I told her: because, for Gart’s sake, when a woman returns to work after having a child or children, she is not the same. She is a semi-destroyed version of her former self. Mangled, virtually falling apart, she goes back to her workplace and she knocks on the door, and her colleagues are horrified to see how she’s changed.’

‘Christ on a bicycle,’ Cordy muttered. ‘Maybe I ought to give up work straight away.’

‘No!’ I snapped at her. She had entirely missed the point. ‘The monkey’s-paw mother doesn’t care what she looks like. She doesn’t give a damn! She knows where she belongs and she’s determined to go back there, no matter how inconvenient it is for everybody else.’

Cordy looked at me as if I was weird.

‘Don’t sacrifice your career,’ I begged her. ‘Think of all the other monkey’s-paw mothers struggling on, turned inside out but still fighting. If you give up, you’ll be letting them down.’

She told me she’d think about it, but I had the sense she was only saying that to placate me. Later, I realised my little sermon had been pointless. You can’t tell anyone anything; no one listens. Look at Mark and me. He thinks I’ve sold myself short, thrown away all my talents. And I think he’s wrong. He would like me to paint or sculpt. He says I’d be more fulfilled, but that is utter rubbish. He wants these things for me not for my own sake but because it would make him feel better if I earned ‘pocket-money’.

12

8/9/07

‘Overpriced and ugly,’ said Sellers, looking up at number 2 Belcher Close. ‘I hate these new dolls’ house estates.’ He knew this would be his girlfriend Suki’s view. She’d prefer a converted church or stable block-something centuries old and unusual.

‘I don’t mind ’em,’ said Gibbs. ‘They’re better than your place. Debbie was after me to buy her one a while back. I told her to dream on. The four-bedroomers go for about half a million.’

Sellers’ mobile phone started to ring. Gibbs began to mutter beside him, ‘All right, love, wipe yourself, your taxi’s here…’ His crude impression of Sellers had become a regular performance piece.

‘Will you give it a rest? Sorry, Waterhouse.’ Sellers turned away. ‘Yeah, no problem. If they know.’

‘Know what?’

‘He wants us to find out Amy Oliva’s dad’s first name.’

‘Why doesn’t he ring St Swithun’s?’

‘School’s closed, dickhead.’

Sellers rang the doorbell. A man’s voice yelled, ‘Coming!’ They waited.

He was red-faced when he opened the door, pulling off his tie. Hair dishevelled, sticking up in odd places. Late twenties, early thirties, Sellers guessed. His suit jacket lay in a crumpled heap on the stairs behind him and his briefcase was open in the middle of the hall, its contents scattered around it.

Well-meaning but fucking useless, Gibbs was thinking.

‘Sorry. Just got in from work and I’ve managed to lose my wallet. I was upstairs looking for it. It’s been one of those days, I’m afraid. I’m sure I brought it home, but…’ He looked down at his feet, then turned to look behind them. ‘Anyway…’

‘DCs Sellers and Gibbs, Culver Valley CID,’ said Sellers, showing the man his ID.

‘CID? What… Are my children all right?’

‘We’re not here with bad news,’ Sellers told him. ‘We’re trying to trace the Oliva family. Was that the name of the people you bought this house from?’

‘Huh!’ said the man. ‘Wait here. Just wait.’ He dashed down the hall and disappeared into a room at the far end. When he came back he was carrying a pile of envelopes, about ten inches high, in both hands. ‘When you find them, you can give them these. They had their post redirected for the first year after they moved, but obviously they didn’t renew it because…’ He tried to pass the letters to Gibbs, who stepped back to avoid taking them.

‘Do you have a forwarding address?’

The man looked peeved. ‘They left one, and a number; turns out they were fake.’

‘Fake?’ Sellers felt a prickle of excitement. There was about to be a development. He could often feel it, just before it happened. Suki said he was intuitive.

‘I rang the number and the people there had never heard of the Olivas. I asked a few more questions and found out that the phone number didn’t belong to the address they gave me. So either they got the number wrong, or they lied, didn’t want us to know where they were going.’ The man shrugged. ‘Lord knows why. The sale went through amicably enough. We didn’t bicker over curtains and light fittings, like the stories you sometimes hear.’

Sellers took the letters from him. Most were junk mail, addressed to Encarna Oliva, Encarnación Oliva and Mrs or Ms E. Oliva. There were a couple of envelopes addressed to Amy. Nothing for her father, Sellers noticed.

‘Mr Oliva: what was his first name?’

‘Oh… um… hang on.’ The man at the door chewed his thumbnail.

‘Was it a Spanish name?’ said Gibbs.

‘Yes! How did you… oh, right, because they were Spanish and went to Spain.’ The man laughed, embarrassed. ‘That’s why you work for CID and I don’t. And why I’ve lost my wallet. Oh-Angel, that was it. Spanish for angel, but it’s pronounced Ann-hell. Different countries, different customs, I suppose. I wouldn’t like to be an English bloke called Angel.’

‘Do you know what he did for a living?’ asked Sellers.

‘Heart surgeon at Culver Valley General.’

‘And what’s your name?’

‘Harry Martineau. That’s e-a-u at the end.’

‘When did you buy the house from the Olivas?’

‘Um… oh, God, you’d have to ask my wife. Um… last year, May some time, I think. Yes, May. I remember because it wasn’t long after the FA Cup final. We watched it in our old house, but we’d already started packing. Sorry, I’m very shallow! ’ He laughed.

Gibbs disliked Martineau. There was nothing shallow about remembering where you were for the FA Cup final. Gibbs had missed it this year for the first time in his adult life. Debbie had had a miscarriage; they’d spent the whole day and a night in hospital. Gibbs hadn’t told anyone at work, and he’d told Debbie not to say anything in front of Sellers or the others. He didn’t mind her workmates knowing, but he didn’t want it talked about at the nick.

‘Have you still got that address and phone number?’ Sellers asked Martineau.

‘Somewhere, but… look, could you pop back tomorrow, about the same time? My wife’ll know where it is. Or, tell you what, why don’t you come in and wait? She won’t be long. Or you could nip back first thing in the morning. We don’t leave the house until-’

‘If you find it, ring me.’ Sellers gave Martineau his card, keen to staunch the flow of unappealing offers.

‘Will do.’

‘Tosser,’ Gibbs muttered as he and Sellers walked back to the car.

Sellers was already talking to Waterhouse. Gibbs listened to one end of the conversation, heard Sellers’ tone change from satisfied to frustrated to baffled.

‘How can that be?’ Sellers wondered aloud, tapping his phone against his chin as they got into the car. Where was his intuition now? Maybe he had none; Stace never mentioned it. Maybe Suki was patronising him. ‘Waterhouse says he’s heard the name before,’ he told Gibbs. ‘Recently. He sounded worked up-you know the way he gets.’ Sellers pulled the list of names Barbara Fitzgerald had given him out of his pocket: the owl sanctuary trip list. No, it wasn’t there. Suddenly, all the names on the list struck Sellers as familiar somehow. Was he going mad? Was it because he’d read the list already, when the headmistress had first given it to him?