“I want to see you. I want you to stay here.”

She laughed. It was a light laugh, not unkind, not mocking. But she laughed before she spoke. “Simon, you don’t know me. You’ve hardly met me.”

“I want to know you. I came to take you out because of that. This is better, to be here. But the next time we’ll go out.”

“No. No next time. Thank you. I’m flattered and I have really enjoyed your company. It wasn’t an evening for either of us to be alone. But that has to be all.” She got up. She came to the window to stand beside him, and touched his arm. “Simon, we could have been good friends, we might have worked together. Any of that. I’m very glad you came this evening. But now you should go.”

The blood did not seem to be moving through his veins. It was a warm night and he felt cold.

“Simon?”

“Why is it such an appalling idea—for us to see more of each other?”

“Because I’m the wrong person. You have to take my word for that.”

“I can’t, I need to know why.”

“I don’t want anyone. I never have. I have—other things.”

“For God’s sake, Jane, don’t waste yourself, how can you think of it?”

“I wasn’t thinking of it. I’m not staying in Lafferton, for all the reasons you heard, none of them to do with you. How could they be to do with you, you’re virtually a stranger. I’m not staying here, there wouldn’t be any point. I don’t want to deceive you, Simon. That would be wrong. You’re a nice man.”

“Why does that sound like something I don’t want to be?”

She smiled. “You deserve the right person and that can’t be me. It just can’t and I’m not prepared to try to explain any further.”

When he left to walk up through the garden back into the Cathedral Close it was almost as warm as it had been in the middle of the day. The air was quite still. Simon turned not left towards his own end of the close but right and out of the gate into the warren of cobbled streets leading to the square. People were about, sitting on benches, piling out of the pubs, eating late in a couple of Chinese and Thai restaurants. He watched two young men and a woman swaying about in the middle of the road, the worse for drink but at the moment causing no trouble. A family strolled with a toddler high on its father’s shoulders and a boy bouncing about at his feet. He remembered those nights, when it was too hot to sleep and he had leaned out of his window for hours, smelling the night smells, talking to his brother in whispers. No one would ever have suggested bringing them out to enjoy the late-night town. He smiled at the thought and remembered his mother with a sense of pure anguish at the loss of her. Loss. He felt as if he had never won. He knew he was being maudlin and could not have cared less, let alone help himself out of the pit of misery into which Jane Fitzroy’s response had tipped him. He was angry too but not with her, only with himself for being a fool.

He reached a corner where the town, the shops and pubs and cafés, started to give way to residential streets. The Old Town. The grid called the Apostles. Beyond here lay the Hill. Beyond the Hill, the broad avenues of the more prosperous Lafferton suburbs. Sorrel Drive. And so on, to the bypass and the Bevham Road, other ways to the country, to his sister’s village, to that of his parents—father, he checked, just father now. East and you eventually came to Starly Tor and then Starly, home to a fat cluster of New Age therapists and ley lines.

He turned back. He had always loved this place. He knew it better than he knew himself. But it was changing. A gang of teenage girls was sitting in the gutter. One was trying to take off her clothes. One was being sick. Two were wielding disposable cameras and shrieking. He skirted round them. Obscenities drifted after him. Even five years ago the girls would not have been there. He met the family with the small children, piling into a car, both boys asleep like felled logs.

What did he want? Jane. Love. Children. A life like his sister’s. Jane?

Yes. Her image was fixed in his mind as she sat on the floor beneath the lamp, her leg bent up, arms round it, hair like an angel’s.

He had been on the brink of falling in love with Freya Graffham and if she had lived would almost certainly have fallen out of it. Diana he had been fond of. Never loved. There had been other women but none for whom he had had any serious feeling. Some had loved him. Perhaps a lot of them. He had taken care not to know.

Jane.

He could not think of her in some ghastly habit immured in a convent—call it a monastery, call it whatever, it was a lot of women cooped up with their frustrations and hysteria together. The thought made him sick. At least if she had wanted to go back into university life there was some hope for her. No, not for her. He meant, hope for him. He would have been able to contact her, write to her, see her, pursue her, persuade her. How in God’s name could he follow her into a bloody nunnery?

He reached the archway leading to the close. The cathedral stone was bathed soft silver in the floodlights. Simon hesitated. He would go back. Make her listen to him. He had never wanted anything so much.

He stood. He could not go near her again.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said aloud.

He went quickly down the avenue, unlocked his car and got in.

Ten minutes later, he was spinning on to the forecourt of the station. No one would be about much. There was always paperwork to kill off fast while it was quiet and he was not likely to be interrupted. There was always work.

“Guv? Anything up?” The duty sergeant looked from his computer to the DCI in surprise.

“Nope,” Simon said, heading for the stairs. “Not a thing.”

“Glad to hear it.” The sergeant bent his head and resumed his soft tapping at the keyboard.

“Not a thing.”

He worked until almost two o’clock. He cleared his desk. On his way out, one of the police vans was unloading three of the girls he had seen earlier. One had dried blood down the side of her face.

“Who you fuckin’ lookin’ at? I’ll fuckin’ have you for fuckin’ harassment, fuckin’ men.”

There were two messages on his home answer-phone, one from the Chief Constable.

“Simon. Paula Devenish. I’d like to run something past you. Is there any chance you can come over to headquarters tomorrow morning around eleven?”

The other was from his father.

“I was hoping to find you in. I wondered if we might have lunch at some point. Would you be so good as to call me?”

Simon poured himself a whisky. The flat was hot. He opened all three of the tall windows to let the night air drift in.

The Chief. The previous occasions on which she had asked to see him and it had not been about an ongoing case had been to suggest he might like to head up the new drug squad and next if he were interested in something similar in the area of Internet paedophile crime. Perhaps this time it would be traffic management. Jesus. But he would have to go across to HQ, just as he would have to call his father first thing in the morning and arrange to have lunch and another bout of pressure to become a Freemason.

But there had been the faintest trace of something in Richard Serrailler’s tone, which Simon hesitated to label “need” but which was certainly a plea.

There was no one to answer it but himself.

Sixty-nine

The Chief had said she would like to see him around eleven o’clock but there was no “around” about her appointments. Her door opened to him as his watch hands touched the hour.

“Two things, Simon c the child abduction cases. If North Riding forensics eventually come up with a positive identification of David Angus’s remains, it occurred to me that his mother might want to go up there. It sometimes helps. What would be your take on that?”