Pauline was released a few months after Maureen. She wasn't given a house: apparently she'd been told that she would have to wait another three months. She'd been offered bed-and-breakfast in a bad area and turned it down. Within a week of her return to the family home she went to the woods near her house and took an overdose. She was missing for three days before a woman out walking her dog stumbled across her body. She was lying on her side, curled into a ball under the base of a tree. Her skirt had blown up over her face. At the funeral a nurse told Maureen that until they found a good-bye note in her bedroom, the police thought it was a murder because they found dried semen on her back. Someone had wanked on her as she lay dead or dying. Months later Maureen traveled deep into the suburbs to visit the wood. It was a scraggy stretch of trees leading down a hill to a main road, cut back at one side for a playing field and at the other for a private driveway. The locals were proud of the old wood but only to the extent that it didn't interfere with their individual property. The trees were thin and ailing, so that a walker would nearly always be visible from either side. Burnt plastic and cigarette ends spoke of children from good homes coming here on summer nights to drink cider and touch each other up and set fire to things. Maureen lay down among the dog ends and looked up at the treetops, empty tears running into her hair, and apologized far too late for leaving Pauline alone.

At the cremation Pauline's kind, bewildered mother cried so hard she burst blood vessels in her right eye. The father stood next to her in the pew, his arm around her, patting her shoulder when she whimpered too loudly. There were two brothers. No one knew which had raped Pauline. She never told. The minister told them that Pauline was a well-loved and dutiful daughter. Her coffin slid noiselessly along the conveyor belt, off through a red curtain.

The handful of mourners who weren't family had met Pauline in hospital and knew about her family. They avoided the usual pleasantries that accompany a young death. Only her mother thought it was needless. The mother had been too distraught to make a funeral tea and since Pauline was the only daughter there was no one else to do it for her. She apologized to everyone for her breach of protocol as the mourners walked single file over the motorway pedestrian bridge to a dingy pub.

Liam bought the father a pint of heavy. Liam had known Pauline and liked her. He knew what had happened to her.

"How the fuck could you do that?" said Maureen, under her breath.

"Hush, hush now," said Liam, and pushed her outside. "I put two acid tabs in it. His head'll burst."

She told Liam he should learn to restrain himself.

"I did," said Liam. "I wanted to give him eight."

Weeks later Maureen heard through the grapevine that the father had suffered some sort of schizophrenic episode and had briefly been hospitalized himself.

She could feel Pauline's wan smile warm her heart as she crunched over the gravel to the side door.

She found Martin in the staff canteen. He was sitting with his back to her but she recognized him from his broad shoulders and muscular arms. The back of his neck was creased and weatherworn, as if he had worked outside for a long time. He was eating a greasy pie and chips. "That stuff'll kill you," said Maureen.

Martin looked up and smiled at her. His white crew cut sat like a tiny halo around his brown face, his eyes were set into a bundle of laughter lines.

"Hello, pet," he said.

He had begun to age in the two years since Maureen had seen him: his ears and nose looked bigger. He reached over the table for the sauce bottle and she noticed that his wrists were swollen and he was wearing a copper bangle. He had red broken veins on his cheeks and white tufts of hair had been carefully trimmed on his earlobes.

"How long's your break?" asked Maureen.

"I've got another half hour."

"Can I sit with you?"

"I'd be annoyed if you didn't."

Maureen went to get a cup of tea.

"I got a phone call from a woman called Louisa Wishart at the Albert this morning," he said when she sat down.

"Oh?"

"She phoned me in the general office and they had to call me over the Tannoy. She said that you'd be coming back to see the hospital and would I look after you."

"I hope you don't mind."

"No," he said, chewing his last forkful of pie and chips. "I got time off for it. Is she your doctor now?"

"Yeah. She told me she'd worked here, I thought you'd remember her."

"Ah," said Martin, wiping his mouth with a paper serviette, "that explains why she was so pally. They've all worked here at one time or another. She must have been young. You don't pay much attention to the young ones."

"She's got big glasses, they take up half her face and she does this-" Maureen clasped her hands together and stared hard at him in an exaggerated mimic of Louisa. "She looks a bit like a fish."

"Naw, pet, I can't place her."

"Well, she's pretty forgettable."

"She doesn't sound it."

Martin was not a warm man but his natural calmness was so soothing it felt like warmth. He didn't seem as calm as usual today. He kept glancing around the canteen as if he was looking for someone. Maureen sipped her tea with a growing sense of unease. Martin watched her. "I saw you in the paper," he said.

Maureen blushed. "Oh, yeah?"

"That's why you're here, isn't it?"

"Aye."

"It's nothing to do with your treatment, is it?"

"No."

"Why does she think it is?"

"I lie to her. About most things."

"Why?"

"I don't want to tell her. I think she's a twit."

Martin was suddenly interested. "Has she got dark hair?"

"Yeah, loads of it."

"I do remember her. She was here a few years ago, just for six months. You're right. She was a twit."

They smiled at each other across the table.

"Why do you still see her?"

"My family worry about me if I don't, you know, see someone."

"I'm going to get a cup of tea, pet. D'you want another one?"

She didn't. Martin came back with a tea cake for her. It was mallow and biscuit, covered in milk chocolate. It was a child's biscuit. She must seem very young to him, she thought. She didn't know whether he was married or had children. He didn't offer information about himself. He wasn't secretive, he just didn't seem to feel the need to justify his life by placing himself in context. Maureen hoped he was married to a nice woman, that his wife trimmed his hairy ears for him of an evening, and she hoped he was a father. She thought he would be a good one.

"I can only tell you some things, pet," he said. "I can only tell you what I actually know. I'm not interested in the gossip, so I don't know what other people are saying. Okay?"

"Yep."

"There's something very bad happening and I don't want to be involved in it, right?"

"What kind of bad thing?"

"I'll tell you in a bit, but you have to promise me you won't repeat it."

"Promise."

He gave her a hard look. "Listen, this is very important, don't just say it like that. Don't repeat it."

"Right, Martin, I promise I won't."

He looked anxiously around the canteen. "I don't know who's involved in this. They might be here right now, watching us."

"Then don't act suspicious. I'm just here to see the place again and you're a helpful porter who was asked to show me round again. I didn't ask to see you, my doctor phoned you, remember?"

Martin's face relaxed. "Aye," he said, "that's right."

"And if they called you over the Tannoy and told you in the office lots of people'll know about it."

"Right enough. Come and we'll make a show of it, then. I'll take you around the old place again." Martin tidied his tray away to the appointed place and the canteen women thanked him.