And then, miraculously, she heard footsteps and, looking round, saw a woman approaching. She was dressed in trousers and a trench-coat and had a mane of fair hair beneath a tight-fitting beret. At her side on a leash trotted a small, smooth-haired dog. Immediately all her anxiety vanished. Here was someone who would help her push the car into the side of the road, who would know in which direction lay the nearest house, who would be a companion on her walk. Without even troubling to slam the door of the car she called out happily and ran smiling towards the horror of her death.

The dinner had been excellent and the wine, a Chateau Potensac '78, an interesting choice with the main course. Although Dalgliesh knew of Alice Mair's reputation as a cookery writer he had never read any of her books and had no idea to what culinary school, if any, she belonged. He had hardly feared being presented with the usual artistic creation swimming in a pool of sauce and accompanied by one or two undercooked carrots and mange-tout elegantly arranged on a side plate. But the wild ducks carved by Alex Mair had been recognizably ducks, the piquant sauce, new to him, enhanced rather than dominated the taste of the birds, and the small mounds of creamed turnip and parsnip were an agreeable addition to green peas. Afterwards they had eaten orange sorbet followed by cheese and fruit. It was a conventional menu but one intended, he felt, to please the guests rather than to demonstrate the ingenuity of the cook.

The expected fourth guest, Miles Lessingham, had unaccountably failed to arrive, but Alice Mair hadn't rearranged her table and the empty chair and unfilled wineglass were uncomfortably evocative of Banquo's ghost. Dalgliesh was seated opposite Hilary Robarts. The portrait, he thought, must have been even more powerful than he realized if it could so dominate his physical reaction to the living woman. It was the first time they had met although he had known of her existence as he had of all the handful of people who lived, as the Lydsett villagers said, 't'other side of the gate'. And it was a little strange that this was their first meeting; her red Golf was a frequent sight on the headland, her cottage had frequently met his eyes from the top storey of the mill. Now, physically close for the first time, he found it difficult to keep his eyes off her, living flesh and remembered image seeming to fuse into a presence both potent and disturbing. It was a handsome face, a model's face, he thought, with its high cheekbones, long, slightly concave nose, wide, full lips and dark, angry eyes deeply set under the strong brows. Her crimped, springing hair, held back with two combs, fell over her shoulders. He could imagine her posed, mouth moistly open, hips jutting and staring at the cameras with that apparently obligatory look of arrogant resentment. As she leaned forward to twitch another grape from the bunch and almost toss it into her mouth he could see the faint freckles which smudged the dark forehead, the glisten of hairs above a carved upper lip.

On the other side of their host sat Meg Dennison, delicately but unfussily peeling her grapes with pink-tipped fingers. Hilary Robarts's sultry handsomeness emphasized her own very different look, an old-fashioned, carefully tended but unselfconscious prettiness which reminded him of photographs of the late thirties. Their clothes emphasized the contrast. Hilary wore a shirtwaister dress in multicoloured Indian cotton, three buttons at the neck undone. Meg Dennison was in a long black skirt and a blue patterned silk blouse with a bow at the neck. But it was their hostess who was the most elegant. The long shift in fine dark brown wool worn with a heavy necklace of silver and amber hid her angularity and emphasized the strength and regularity of the strong features. Beside her Meg Dennison's prettiness was diminished almost to insipidity and Hilary Robarts's strong-coloured cotton looked tawdry.

The room in which they were dining must, he thought, have been part of the original cottage. From these smoke-blackened beams Agnes Ppley had hung her sides of bacon, her bundles of dried herbs. In a pot slung over that huge hearth she had cooked her family's meals and, perhaps, at the end had heard in its roaring flames the crackling faggots of her dreadful martyrdom. Outside the long window had passed the helmets of marching men. But only in the name of the cottage was there a memory of the past. The oval dining table and the chairs were modern as were the Wedgwood dinner service and the elegant glasses. In the drawing room, where they had drunk their pre-dinner sherry, Dalgliesh had a sense of a room which deliberately rejected the past, containing nothing which could violate the owner's essential privacy; no family history in photograph or portrait, no shabby heirlooms given room out of nostalgia, sentimentality or family piety, no antiques collected over the years. Even the few pictures, three recognizably by John Piper, were modern. The furniture was expensive, comfortable, well designed, too elegantly simple to be offensively out of place. But the heart of the cottage wasn't there. It was in that large, warm-smelling and welcoming kitchen.

He had only been half listening to the conversation but now he forced himself to be a more accommodating guest. The talk was general, candlelit faces leaned across the table and the hands which peeled the fruit or fidgeted with the glasses were as individual as the faces. Alice Mair's strong but elegant hands with their short nails, Hilary Robarts's long, knobbled fingers, the delicacy of Meg Dennison's pink-tipped fingers, a little reddened with housework. Alex Mair was saying: 'All right, let's take a modern dilemma. We know that we can use human tissue from aborted foetuses to treat Parkinson's disease and probably Alzheimer's. Presumably you'd find that ethically acceptable if the abortion were natural or legal but not if it were induced for the purpose of providing the tissue. But you can argue that a woman has a right to the use that she makes of her own body. If she's particularly fond of someone who has Alzheimer's and wants to help him by producing a foetus, who has the right to say no? A foetus isn't a child.'

Hilary Robarts said: 'I notice that you assume the sufferer to be helped is a man. I suppose he'd feel entitled to use a woman's body for this purpose as he would any other. But why the hell should he? I can't imagine that a woman who's actually had an abortion wants to go through that again for any man's convenience.'

The words were spoken with extreme bitterness. There was a pause then Mair said quiedy: 'Alzheimer's is rather more than an inconvenience. But I'm not advocating it. In any case, under present law, it would be illegal.'

'Would that worry you?'

He looked into her angry eyes. 'Naturally it would worry me. Happily it isn't a decision that I shall ever be required to make. But we're not talking about legality, we're talking about morality.'

His sister asked: 'Are they different?'

'That's the question, isn't it? Are they, Adam?'

It was the first time he had used Dalgliesh's Christian name. Dalgliesh said: 'You're assuming there's an absolute morality independent of time or circumstance.'

'Wouldn't you make that assumption?'

'Yes, I think I would, but I'm not a moral philosopher.'

Mrs Dennison looked up from her plate a little flushed and said: 'I'm always suspicious of the excuse that a sin is justified if it's done to benefit someone we love. We may think so, but it's usually to benefit ourselves. I might dread the thought of having to look after an Alzheimer patient. When we advocate euthanasia is it to stop pain or to prevent our own distress at having to watch it? To conceive a child deliberately in order to kill it to make use of its tissue, the idea is absolutely repugnant.'