She took her finger out of Maureen's face and tugged at the pockets in her jacket. She found a packet of cigarettes, flipped it open, and shoved one in her mouth.

"Christ, Leslie, man," said Maureen, holding tightly on to the edge of her coat/blanket and pulling it up a little. "Calm down."

"I'm sorry," she said sharply, rummaging in her pocket for matches.

"You should be," said Maureen. "What was that about?"

"I hate that, I hate it."

"You hate what?"

"Just that when we act so powerless, like there's nothing we can do, they smack us and we say please stop, they smack us and we say please stop. We should smack them fucking back."

"But if we use violence how are we different from them?"

"Morally?"

"Yeah, morally there'd be nothing to separate us."

Leslie shook her head. "God Al-fucking-mighty, Maureen, have you thought about this at all? It's all right for you and me to worry about our moral standing – neither of us are getting our faces kicked in every night in the week. These women are treated as if they were born on the end of a boot and we set up committees and worry about our moral standing. It's a fucking joke, the movement's turning into the WRVS, it pisses me off. We're not fucking helpless, we're fucking cowards."

She lit the cigarette and Maureen saw her face in the match's flare. She was frowning angrily, her eyebrows knitted tightly together. "Specifically in what context does it piss you off?" said Maureen, now sure that it was nothing she'd done.

"It just does, okay?"

"Tell me the story, though."

She drew heavily on her cigarette. "I don't really want to," she said and exhaled.

"All right, then," said Maureen.

The smoke swirled above Maureen's head.

"Do you remember the woman who was raped by the three men in the West End?" asked Leslie quietly. "They threw acid in her face afterward."

"I read about it in the paper. It was a while ago."

"It was two and a half years ago. She was called Charlotte. She'd been in the shelter for a while."

"I didn't know that."

"Yeah." She puffed at the cigarette.

"Give us some," said Maureen, holding her hand out for the fag. As Leslie passed it to her their fingertips touched momentarily and Maureen felt how cold Leslie was.

"Her husband had been beating her and she came to us. She had these facial scars-you know, the kind that make you shudder when you first see them. Her nose was flattened and one of her eyes was higher than the other. Ina said it was a cheekbone fracture that hadn't been set, it'd just been left. You could see the bone sticking out sometimes when she was eating. She'd scars all over her cheek, there." She gestured to her left cheek, drawing a circle on it. "The really vicious ones cut across cuts so that the doctors can't sew it up. There's nothing to sew it onto, just bits of skin hanging off. They can't patch it up, they just have to let it scar. That's how out of control these fuckers are, they've got the presence of mind to go over the cuts a second time." She took the cigarette from Maureen and sucked it hungrily.

"Anyway," she said, "she started getting it together, really together. She went on a course and got a job doing landscape gardening. She was going to set up her own business, once she'd saved some money, went to see the bank manager with a business plan and everything. She got herself a wee flat and moved out.

"Four months later I read in the paper about a rape. They dragged this woman off the Byres Road in the early morning and took her to a house and raped her for eight hours. Then they threw acid in her face. She crawled out into the hall after they left and managed to get into the close. They said she was in a critical condition. We were all talking about it in work and Annie came in and said it was Charlotte."

Leslie paused uncharacteristically and rubbed her eye hard with the ball of her palm. Her long slim neck was bent and the wispy hairs and bumpy vertebrae were lit in stark relief by the streetlight.

"She was on her way to work out in Lanarkshire when they got her. I knew it was the husband, we all fucking knew. He used to rape her, he'd dragged her off the street and everything – he'd even got his pals to rape her before. So we phoned the police and told them we thought it was him. Anyway, Charlotte died and the police said they couldn't do anything about it, no evidence or witnesses to any of it.

"The husband knew we'd told them and he started coming by the shelter and d'you know what we did? We hid. He was out there every day for fucking weeks. We phoned the police and they picked him up and gave him a doing but he came straight back, standing across the road at a bus stop with a black eye and his arm in plaster, staring in the window, looking at everyone who came out of the house. Three women left the shelter because they couldn't take it anymore. We hid and I'm never fucking doing that again."

"But that was the responsible thing to do," said Maureen. "There was nothing you could do without harming the shelter."

Leslie wasn't buying it. "Yeah. Right."

"What happened then?"

Leslie slumped. "It gets worse. One of the women used to wait at the bus stop across the road and he started talking to her. We warned her about him, we fucking told her. Then she left. The last time I saw her she had scars on her face." She motioned to her cheek again. "Same mark, like he was branding his cows or something. Her eyes were empty, way past scared. I tried to talk to her but she ran away from me."

Leslie stared into the dark room for a few moments. "You can't just stop now because he's getting closer and scarier, Mauri. This Martin bloke, he was a good man, wasn't he? He'd want you to get the guy."

"Yeah, he was a good man but he didn't want any trouble and I brought it to him."

"I'll be there, Mauri, I promise."

Maureen lay down next to Leslie, her hand resting on the beeper, and tried to sleep.

Leslie was right, she couldn't walk away. Whoever it was knew she'd been to see Martin, they'd been following or watching or something. Any one of them could be killed at any time and Maureen couldn't be ready for it always. If she could flush out the killer, make him come to her when she was expecting it, when she was ready.

She couldn't have blood on her hands, not a rapist's, not anyone's. And yet when she thought of Yvonne's snakeskin anklet, she knew that she didn't just want to stop the man who'd put it there, she wanted to hurt him, to make him feel a little of what the women had felt. It wasn't enough to stop it happening again. She fell asleep with the image of Martin's hand resting on his stomach, pointing at nothing.

She woke up at nine and went in to see how Siobhain was doing. She was lying on her back with her hands and chubby arms resting on top of the bedspread. Her head was sunk deep into the pillow, her mouth and eyes were open but she wasn't moving.

Maureen sat down softly on the side of the bed. "Siobhain?" she said.

Siobhain didn't move. Maureen reached up and brushed a hair off her face. "Did you sleep?"

Still Siobhain didn't move. Maureen had a sudden surge of adrenaline and grabbed Siobhain's shoulders, shaking her and shouting into her face, "Wake up! Siobhain, wake up!"

Siobhain raised her hand slowly. "Stop doing that," she said, lowering her eyes and looking at Maureen. "Help me out of the bed."

Maureen pulled the blankets back and lifted Siobhain's feet onto the floor.

Siobhain got out of bed and took off her clothes slowly, stripping down to her pants and vest. She took a gray V-neck jumper out of the chest of drawers and put it on. It was washed-out and flared at the bottom. She put on a pair of purple nylon trousers and a blue windcheater. The sleeves were elasticized at the ends and dug into the fat on her wrists.