“Roof garden,” said Kit. “She’s got a mattress.”

The huge officer ran his fingers through thinning hair and wiped his hands on his trousers. The sheer smallness of Mary’s flat seemed to be giving him problems. “Mattress?” he said, before deciding not to take it further.

Digging into his pocket, the man produced a leather wallet and flipped it open. A badge inside introduced him as Sergeant Samson. That was all Kit had time to see before the Sergeant flipped it shut and stuffed the wallet back into his jacket.

“I’ve got some questions,” he said. “I’d be grateful if you’d answer them honestly…”

“If I can,” Kit said.

“You were a friend of Mary O’Mally?” The Sergeant obviously had no doubts that Kate’s daughter was dead.

Kit nodded, embarrassed to feel almost sick with relief. It seemed the questions were about Mary, rather than him.

“When did you last see her?”

“About three days after the funeral of a friend…”

“And how long ago was this?”

PART II

CHAPTER 35 — Flashback

The love affair of Kit’s life began to unravel two weeks after Kit and Mary first made love and three weeks before Josh crashed his bike. It began unravelling in Mary’s bedroom at Seven Chimneys with an argument about cars.

“Gently,” she said. Mary wasn’t happy to be squatting naked on top of Kit and kept glancing at her stomach. The first two fucks of that day had been great, but this was one too many and it was Kit’s fault for being greedy.

“Here,” he said, folding a sheet around her shoulders. “Better?”

Mary nodded.

It was complicated, because Mary was going out with Josh. Well, technically…except Josh was in Paris for a fortnight with his parents. So he and Mary would need to talk when Josh got back.

“You love me?”

They’d been through this. The first time two weeks earlier, beside the potato field, as the sun edged its way between two hills and stained the spire of St. Peter’s with the first rays of dawn. Kit had been impressed that Mary waited until after he took off her clothes. “Of course I do,” said Kit, which had been his answer then.

“Say it,” Mary demanded.

So Kit did.

“Mean it,” she said.

“I’ll love you forever,” said Kit, and inside that second it was true.

When he was done, Mary wiped between her legs and folded the soiled tissue inside a clean one, then stuffed three foil wrappers into the crumpled cardboard of a condom packet and folded a tissue around this. She left Kit to collect up the used rubbers and add these to her fist-sized ball of rubbish.

“Take it with you,” said Mary.

Kit looked at her.

“We have a cesspit,” she explained. “Dad makes enough fuss about the pipes getting clogged with toilet paper. He’d freak if he discovered we’d blocked them with these.”

“Okay,” said Kit. It felt odd to be in Mary’s bedroom, but not as odd as actually being at her house. Patrick Robbe-Duras and Kate O’Mally keep themselves to themselves. Jumped up, said half the village; the other half wondered which of the two had most to hide.

A high wall ringed the garden and electric gates guarded the entrance with its white pillars and two stone eagles. A turning circle in front of the huge yellow-bricked house was scuffed with tire marks from half a dozen cars and Kit’s own motorbike. Legoland, Josh’s father called it, but obviously not to Mary’s face.

A black BMW 5 Series, a red XK Jaguar, a metallic blue Mini Cooper S convertible, and a new Land Rover were among the vehicles parked outside. They were all still there, visible from Mary’s bedroom window.

“How many cars have you got?”

“One,” said Mary, pulling a sheet over her breasts. “The Mini. The others belong to Mum or Dad…Why?”

“Just wondered.”

“Mum started out dirt poor,” Mary said. “You need to remember that.”

He’d made her cross, Kit realised. Mary’s relationship with her mother was as complicated as his own with his father was simple. Kit hated the man, Kit’s father hated him, both of them knew exactly where they stood. “It doesn’t matter,” said Kit. “I was only wondering.”

“Yeah, right…”

At the gate Kit had to lean over to punch numbers into a keypad that hid itself beneath a stucco-coloured plastic cover. He entered Mary’s birthday from memory, and had just kicked his Kawasaki into gear when Kate O’Mally pulled up on the far side of the gate in a dark Mercedes. Armani sunglasses examined Kit, flicked to his bike, and returned to his face.

The woman was busy lowering her window when Kit blipped his throttle, let slip the clutch, and roared out onto Morton Road, only just missing her wing mirror as he went past.

Josh died in an accident on the B342. The evening was warm, the light was still good, and the road was dry. His Suzuki went out of control on a bend in the road and crashed into a two-hundred-year-old oak tree near the edge of Woodham Common. He died instantly, at least that was what the police told his parents.

A piece in the Advertiser talked about the danger young men on bikes posed to themselves. A kinder piece, under a smiling photograph, highlighted Josh’s achievements, the grades he got at A level, and the fact he’d been offered a place by Trinity, his father’s college at Oxford.

A picture showed a Josh who was younger by three or four years, in the days before he grew his hair, discovered amphetamines, and took to wearing shades. Josh was dressed in a blue blazer, with a white shirt open at the neck. Maybe that was how his family remembered him.

The funeral was delayed by an autopsy, to the outrage of Josh’s father. All the autopsy proved was that Josh had not been drinking. At first it seemed the funeral would be private, then someone must have talked to Colonel Treece, because it was agreed the service would be immediate family, but Josh’s friends could attend the burial and come back to the house afterwards. Mary O’Mally was the only exception. She got to go to the whole thing.

Mary looked terrible, that was the first thing everyone noticed. As she followed Josh’s coffin and its bearers up the lane towards the new graveyard, she looked like someone else. She’d lost weight and dark circles had sunk her eyes into her skull. She was crying, not discreetly, but openly and with sobs that shook her entire body.

Josh’s mother, a tiny Korean woman in a dark coat and gloves despite the heat, had one arm around Mary, trying to console her. Kate O’Mally trailed a couple of paces behind her sobbing daughter, looking out of place in a blue skirt and jacket. When she caught Kit watching her daughter, Kate’s eyes filled with something very dark indeed.

Mrs. Treece, however, simply nodded to Kit, and handed Mary to her mother, as if entrusting the woman with something infinitely fragile, while the pall bearers fiddled with canvas straps and the priest shuffled through an open prayer book, finding his place.

“You’re Christopher Newton,” she said.

Kit nodded.

“I remember. You were in Josh’s band with Mary…” Which was one way of putting it. “So you know Mary well?”

Another nod.

“She’s going to need her friends,” said Mrs. Treece. “It’s strange,” she added. “All the things that matter until something like this happens. Josh wanted to stay here with Mary, you know. His father insisted he go with us to Paris. Now all David can remember is the argument.”

David had to be the Colonel.

“Such a waste,” Mrs. Treece said, before returning to the graveside. As Kit watched, the Colonel tried to wrap an arm around his wife’s shoulder. She shook him off without even noticing what she’d done.

It had taken Josh a week after his return from Paris to track Kit down and thirty seconds and a handful of words to make him go away, there being nothing like the truth for fucking best friends over.