“All right. Where do you-”

“Six, Godolphin Terrace. I’ll expect you about three thirty.”

“OK. I-”

“See you then. ’Bye.”

By the time I got back to bed, I was alert and fully awake. Had she delayed her call until her husband was asleep? I wondered. If so, why should she want to keep our appointment secret? Anyone would think it was an illicit liaison. And why-yes why-was she not just willing but eager for us to meet?

Such thoughts pushed sleep effortlessly aside and left me to toss and turn through the brief summer’s night, tracing and retracing in my mind the sequence of events leading from Louise Paxton’s murder to her daughter’s suicide. Rowena’s self-destruction was in some senses the more awful death. She was so fragile, so vulnerable, so patently in need of protection. There should have been some way to save her. There should have been and probably there had been. But it had been neglected, overridden in the pursuit of other claims, other fleeting impulses. By me among others. And what did the others really matter when I closed my eyes and saw, in images I couldn’t suppress, that slender figure falling from the bridge, arms outstretched, with a diary left behind her on a call-box shelf and my face blurred and flickering on a television screen?

Dawn was only a few hours away. When it came, I was already washed and dressed. The idea of spending a solitary Sunday lying low at Greenhayes wasn’t just intolerable. It was quite simply inconceivable. Bella had told me to leave them alone and so I would. The living, that is. But nobody could stop me going in search of the dead. I’d stood in the room where Louise had been murdered. Now I had to stand on the bridge from which Rowena had leapt. It wasn’t a matter of choice. It was something I had to do.

Clifton was still and quiet as the grave so early on a Sunday morning. But the sun was already warm on my back as I walked up Sion Hill and risked a glance along Caledonia Place. A milk float was humming towards me from the far end. I watched as it chinked to a stop near Sarah’s door and wondered, if I waited, whether I’d see her come out to collect a bottle. She’d be awake, I had no doubt. She wouldn’t have slept any better than me. But at the thought of what might happen if she spotted me, I pressed on.

Now I was probably retracing Rowena’s footsteps of three days before. Following the curve of Sion Hill, with the suspension bridge dominating the view to my left. The hangers looked no thicker than twine from this distance. And the depth of the gorge wasn’t apparent. It could have been a footbridge across a shallow stream. Except I knew it wasn’t.

A path led up across a broad grass bank to the bridge road. As I turned onto the pavement, all possible routes converged. For there, ahead of me, was the call-box Rowena had used. I paused beside it and pulled the door open. I don’t know why, really. There was nothing to distinguish it from a thousand others. The phone. The printed instructions. The rank smell. The sundry graffiti. And an empty shelf.

I moved on. Past the control-box and the toll barriers. Round the giant left foot of the pylon. And out onto the bridge. The railings were about five feet high, fenced in with flimsy mesh and topped with blunt wooden spikes. No real obstacle for the desperate or the determined. And Rowena must have been both that day. They said she’d jumped from the centre. I glanced ahead and behind as I went to make sure I knew when I’d reached the point where she must have stopped. When I had, I stopped too. And looked down for the first time.

So far. So awesomely far. Sunlight twinkled benignly on the winding river and gilded the fat wrinkled mud-banks. The Bristol to Avonmouth main road hugged the eastern side of the river and the height I was above it sowed a fleeting illusion in my mind. That it and the few cars moving along it were toys I’d laid out on my bedroom floor as a child. Toys I could pick up or dismantle at will. Then the huge gap of empty air rushed into my consciousness and I stepped back, appalled. Good God almighty. What a thing to do. What an act to have not just the wish but the courage to carry out. To find a foothold and climb onto the railings. And then what? Leap from there? Or lower yourself down until your toes were resting on the narrow sill at the foot of the railings, then turn round and let yourself fall? The deliberation. The decision. And the deed. All reversible. All nullifiable. Until the fraction of a second after letting go, when wind and gravity plucked your freedom away. And your life had only that long plummeting moment to last.

Why had she done it? Standing there in the centre of the bridge, I felt a wave of nausea sweep over me. I stared up into the sky until it had passed. Then I looked down again. And knew. It wasn’t the lies we’d told you, was it, Rowena? It wasn’t the thought that we’d implicated you in a possible miscarriage of justice. Nor the fear that you’d never known your mother for what she truly was. It was none of those things. Not in the end. Not when you came to the point of no return. “She was on the brink,” you’d said of her. “She was about to step off.” I remembered now. “Into the void.” Your words. “She knew it.” Your every word. “And still she stepped.” You had to know, didn’t you? You had to find out. “Why?” I couldn’t tell you. Nobody could. You knew that. And, watching the video, you must have realized it would never be any different. Unless you followed her. Unless you surrendered to the impulse you’d tried to bury. “The thought of it can be so exhilarating.” Yes. Of course. “So tempting.” And so very very final.

It was mid-morning before I left Bristol. I drove slowly, hardly knowing whether it was better to stay or to go. Somewhere near Warminster, I turned on the radio and found myself listening to the cricket commentary from Lord’s. The Test Match was still going on. When it had started, I’d actually been quite interested in the outcome. But Rowena had been alive then. Now it seemed like a transmission from another planet. There were tears filling my eyes as I stabbed the “off” switch. And there was comfort in the silence that followed.

Tuesday came. And with it my appointment in London. After putting in a desultory morning at work, I walked to the station and caught a lunchtime train to Waterloo. Then I took the long way round the Circle line to Bayswater and tracked down Godolphin Terrace.

It turned out to look less grand than it sounded. The houses had all the traditional touches: four stuccoed storeys plus attic and basement, complete with pillared porch and dolphin door-knocker. But some were beginning to look dilapidated. One or two would be ripe for squatters if the residents didn’t watch out. Though Sophie Marsden, I felt sure, could be relied on to do that.

Number 6 was in good order, brasswork polished, paint gleaming. When I rang Sophie’s bell, she answered promptly.

“Robin?”

“Yes.”

“Push when you hear the buzzer. I’m on the second floor.”

I was in. And when I reached the second landing, she was waiting at her door. Newly coiffured, I reckoned, though presumably not for my benefit. But her close-fitting dress made me think, as I followed her into a tastefully furnished lounge, that I might be wrong. Perhaps flirtation was to be her counter to whatever line she expected me to take. If so, I didn’t propose to let it work.

“There’s tea, of course. But I fancy a gin and tonic myself. You?”

“All right.”

I moved to the window while she poured them and gazed down into the street. Sooner than I’d anticipated, she was at my elbow, glass in hand, smiling enigmatically. “Afraid someone might be following you, Robin?”