He referred to the new chair I had acquired from a friend that sat behind my desk. It allowed me to lean right back and reduce the pressure that the shell made on my groin.

‘I might just keep it anyway,’ I said to him with a laugh. He had found me asleep in the chair two or three times when I had first returned to chambers about three weeks previously.

‘There’s another one of those hand-delivered envelopes in your box,’ Arthur said, immediately wiping the smile from my face. ‘It came while you were out.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

Arthur looked me in the eye and I thought for a moment that he was going to ask me straight out what was in the envelope, but he didn’t, instead returning his attention to something on his desk.

I went over to the boxes and looked into mine. I had been temporarily promoted to the top row as I was unable to bend down to my usual level, and there, on its own, was a slim A5-sized white envelope, just as before.

I was sure that Arthur was watching me so I picked it up casually and stuffed it into my trouser pocket before negotiating the corridor on my crutches to the safety and privacy of my room. Thankfully, the two others junior barristers who also shared this space with me were both away in Manchester acting for a big local football club that was up to its neck in a taxevasion scandal involving half a dozen of their most highly paid players.

I sat in my recliner chair and carefully opened the envelope. As before there was a single sheet of folded paper, and a photograph. On the sheet of paper there were just two short lines, again in black capital letters.

JUST REMEMBER, LOSE THE CASE

MITCHELL GETS CONVICTED

The photograph showed Eleanor in her blue scrub tunic and trousers walking along the gravel path between the house she lived in and the equine hospital in Lambourn.

CHAPTER 11

Why was it, I wondered, that I felt like I was being dangled on a string by an unknown hand, being made to dance a jig by some puppet-master hidden from the light. My house, my job, my father and even my friends were somehow under his spell. Sometimes I even began to wonder if my fall at Cheltenham had been his doing, but I knew that was ridiculous.

I sat at my desk and turned the photo of Eleanor over and over in my hands. Even if Julian Trent had seen her call and wave to me at Cheltenham, how did he know where she worked or how to get her photograph?

Photograph, photograph. Why did I keep thinking about the photograph taken from Scot Barlow’s house the day he was murdered? Why not steal the frame as well? If someone had wanted to keep that picture then, surely, wouldn’t they have taken the frame with it? Not, I supposed, if it had been highly individual and easily recognizable. But it hadn’t. It had been a simple silver frame available in any high-street jeweller or department store.

So had the photograph been taken simply to destroy it? Was the image in fact a clue to whoever had been the murderer?

I was pondering these questions when my phone rang.

I picked it up with some trepidation but there was a familiar voice at the other end, one I was beginning to hope might become more familiar still.

‘What did the doctor say?’ Eleanor asked immediately.

‘He told me I can go on living,’ I replied with a smile.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘So he must have told you that you were quite well enough to take me out to dinner tonight?’

‘He said that it was completely out of the question,’ I replied. ‘He insisted that I should eat in at my place, alone. Matter of life or death.’

‘Well, you’ll just have to die then,’ she said laughing. ‘Because you, sunshine, are taking me out to Maximillian’s tonight whether you like it or not.’

I liked it.

‘How’s the conference?’ I asked her. She was attending a two-day international equine-medicine symposium at the London Veterinary School.

‘Boring,’ she said. ‘Look, I must dash. They’re about to start a lecture about the caecum and its role in colic.’

‘Sounds like fun,’ I said.

‘Anything but,’ she said. ‘See you at the restaurant at seven thirty.’ She disconnected before I had time to say goodbye.

I think she had applied to attend the symposium only so that she could spend a night in a London hotel, and spend the evening with me.

I had seen her four or five times since my fall at Cheltenham.

‘Typical,’ she had said when she first came to see me in hospital after I had woken up.

‘What’s typical?’ I’d replied.

‘I sit here beside him trying to wake him up for nearly three whole days and nights and then, when I have to go to work, hey presto, he opens his eyes.’

I had smiled at her. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ I’d said.

‘I didn’t have to,’ she’d said. ‘But I wanted to.’

That was nice, I’d thought.

She had been back to see me a couple more times during the week that they had insisted on keeping me in Cheltenham hospital, and then she had helped me on the day I went back home to Ranelagh Avenue, SW13.

Strangely, for the first two weeks after hospital I had been permitted only to lie flat on my back or to stand upright. Sitting, other than for a few minutes at a time, had been banned by the doctors. It had made life very complicated as it was impossible to travel anywhere by car. An ambulance had been needed to take me home on a stretcher, yet I was able to climb the stairs to my house, albeit on one leg and a pair of crutches, with Eleanor standing behind me so I didn’t topple over backwards and do myself more mischief.

She had stayed that first night I was home, sleeping in the room that, seven and a half years before, Angela and I had so gleefully decorated with teddy bears’ picnic wallpaper as a nursery for our unborn son, and which I hadn’t yet bothered to change. I realized that, since my father had gone home soon after Angela’s funeral, Eleanor was the first person other than me to have slept in my home. It wasn’t that I was particularly averse to having guests, it was just that I hadn’t yet got round to actually asking anyone to stay. I kept thinking that there was plenty of time, and the last seven years had seemingly passed in a flash.

But I think Eleanor had felt uneasy sleeping at my place, as uneasy as I had at her being there. She had stayed only one night in Barnes before returning to Lambourn, and she hadn’t been back, although we had twice met elsewhere, on neutral territory, as it were, and we had spoken often on the telephone.

I liked her. I liked her a lot. But I still wasn’t sure if I was yet ready for a serious relationship. I had become used to my solitary existence. I had grown accustomed to looking after myself and not having to worry about getting home from work at a reasonable time. Maybe I was set in my ways, and not very sure that I was prepared to change them.

However, I was greatly looking forward to seeing her again for dinner, and I had a spring in my one-footed step as I finally left chambers at seven o’clock and went in search of a taxi.

Julian Trent was standing next to the gate onto Theobald’s Road, leaning on the brick-built gatepost, and I saw him immediately when I walked out of chambers. He was making no attempt at concealment as he had done before, the previous November, when he had hidden between the parked cars before stepping out to hit me with his baseball bat.

I realized there was no point in me trying to run away. The best speed I could manage on one leg and two crutches would have hardly outrun a two-year-old toddler let alone a fit and healthy young man of twenty-four. I turned towards him and he watched me as I carefully and slowly covered the sixty or so yards between us. He stood up straight and stopped leaning on the brickwork as I approached. I hoped he couldn’t actually see my heart beating fast inside my chest.