She led him along a flagstone path between two borders. Young deciduous trees grew out of the rich black soil on either side, their highest branches scratching the sloping glass roof. Streaky traces of hoar frost lingered around their roots.

Both of them were in thick polo neck sweaters, although Julia still felt the cold pinching her fingers. She rubbed her arms, shaping her mouth into an O and blowing steadily. Her breath formed a thin white ribbon in the air.

Robin stared at it, fascinated. Then he started blowing.

"Polar bear breath," she said, and smiled at him. He looked gorgeous with his face all lit up in delight.

"I've never seen that before," he said.

"You must remember some winters, surely?"

"No. They finished a couple of years before I was born. My parents told me about them, though. How about you?"

"I grew up in Arizona. But I saw some snow when I was at school in Switzerland. We took a bus trip up into the Alps one day."

"Lumps of ice falling out of the sky." He shook his head in bemusement. "Weird."

"It's not solid, and it's fun to play in."

"I'll take your word for it." He tapped one of the trees. "What's this one?"

"A laburnum. It has a lovely yellow flower at the start of summer, they hang in cascades. The seeds are poisonous, though."

"Why do you keep this place going? It must cost a fortune."

"I can't get into fine art; it always seems ridiculous paying so much money for a square metre of turgid canvas. And of course that whole scene is riddled with the most pretentious oafs on the planet. I'll take my beauty neat, thank you." She pointed at a clump of snowdrops which were pushing up around a cherry tree. "What artist could ever come close to that?"

The conservatory always affected her this way, inducing a bout of melancholia. It was the timelessness of the trees, especially the oaks and ash, they were all so much more stately than the current usurpers. They made her cares seem lighter, somehow. She was afraid she might be showing too much of her real self to Robin.

He was gazing at her again, quite unabashed this rime, thick hair almost occluding his eyes. "You're nothing…" His arms jerked out from his sides, inarticulate bafflement. "You're not what I expected, Julia."

"What did you expect?" she teased.

"I dunno. You come over all mechanical on the 'casts, like everything you do is choreographed by experts, every move, every word. Absolute perfection."

"Whereas in the flesh I'm a sadly blemished disappointment."

"No!" He bent down and picked one of the snowdrops. "You should get rid of your PR team, let everyone see you as you are, without pretending. Show people how much you care about the small things in life. That'd stop all those critics dead in their tracks." He broke off and gave the flower a doleful look. "I don't suppose it'll happen like that."

"'Fraid not. Nothing is ever that easy."

He tucked the snowdrop behind her ear, looking pleased with himself.

When she kissed him he was eager enough, but he didn't seem to know what was expected. Her mouth was open to him for a long time before his tongue ventured in.

She was struck with the thrilling thought that he'd never had a girl before. After all, it took a lot of training and devotion to reach his level of performance, a dedication which cost him every spare minute.

Her arms stayed round him as he gave her a delighted boyish grin. He had exactly seven days left to court her, then she'd have him. And this time she would be in charge in bed, so it would be a considerable improvement on the way it was with Patrick.

They rubbed noses Maori-style, then kissed again. This time he wasn't nearly so reticent.

The conservatory door was opened with a suspiciously loud rattle.

"Julia?" Caroline Rothman called.

Robin disentangled himself, looking extraordinarily guilty as Caroline walked round the end of the border.

"Sorry, Julia," Caroline said. "Phone call."

She wanted to stomp her foot in frustration. "Who?" Whoever, they were already dead.

"Greg. He said it was urgent."

She sat down at the head of the study table, and jabbed a forefinger down on the phone button. The call was scrambled, she noticed, coming through the company's own secure satellite link. Greg and Eleanor materialized on the flatscreen. They were on the settee in their lounge, Eleanor at right angles to Greg, leaning against him, his arm round her. Perfectly content with each other.

The sight simply deepened Julia's scowl. She never shared such a homely scene with any of her boys. Not that she wanted to be stuck in all evening being boring, she told herself swiftly.

"This had better be truly astonishingly important," she told the two of them loftily. "I'm very busy."

They looked at each other, pulled a face, and looked back at the camera. "Doing what?"

They were so in tune, she thought despairingly, it wasn't fair. "Financial reviews," she said with a straight face.

"Sure," Eleanor crooned.

"What did you want?"

"Couple of things," Greg said. "Firstly, I want my Home Office authority reconfirmed."

"What? Why?"

He gave an awkward grimace, which made her take notice. Something which could faze Greg was always going to be interesting.

"There are some aspects of the Kitchener case which I need to review, and what I don't need is a whole load of flak from Oakham CID right now."

"What aspects? Nicholas Beswick did it."

"It would appear so."

"You saw him. Both of you. You went back in time and saw him!"

"Yeah. Well. Tell you, my intuition is playing up about this."

"Oh." Greg placed a great deal of weight on his intuition. A foresight equal to everyone else's hindsight, he always said. She wasn't about to question that. Greg didn't act on idle whims. But— "Just a minute, there was the knife as well."

"Yeah. That's what makes this all so embarrassing."

"Julia, we had Beswick's parents come to see us this morning," Eleanor said.

"Oh dear Lord, that must have been awful."

"No messing," Greg said. "Look, Julia, just humour me."

She listened to him explaining his hunch about an earlier incident at Launde, and MacLennan's idea that some form of amnesia might be responsible for shielding any guilt in Nicholas Beswick's mind.

Julia requested a logic matrix from her nodes, her mind condensing what she was hearing into discrete data packages, loading them in. The matrix parameters were easy to define: assign all the case information to the two suppositions, that Beswick had committed the crime and forgotten it, and that some previous incident was involved. See what fits, what supports either notion.

"If it turns out there isn't anything to this incident of mine, then it was probably amnesia all along," Greg concluded glumly. "Which brings us to the second point. I'd like you to run a search program through every national and international news library to see if you can find a reference to Launde Abbey at any time during the last fifteen years."

"Oh, is that all?" Which was letting him off lightly, she could just imagine what Grandpa would say.

"Julia Evans, you yanked both of us into this investigation," Eleanor said. "We only did it for you. Just because it isn't working out all neat and tidy doesn't mean you're allowed to back out. You started it, you damn well see it through to the end."

Why was it all suddenly her fault? She wished she'd never heard of bloody Dr Edward Kitchener. "I wasn't backing out," she muttered.

Eleanor nudged Greg. "You ought to ask Ranasfari if he can remember anything happening at Launde."

"Good idea," he said.

"Cormac was there over twenty years ago," Julia said.

"Yeah, but he kept in touch with Kitchener."