'Oh, I don't know,' Louise said. 'The Edinburgh property market's pretty ruthless.' She had taken round a tree the week before because you could see that Alison wasn't up to that kind of thing. She had taken presents as well, toys for the kids, anything that was plastic, noisy and garish nothing remotely tasteful or educational, she had been a kid herself once, she knew what they liked.

Today she had brought with her the things people were supposed to have at Christmas -nuts, satsumas, dates -the kind of stuff nobody really ate. A bottle of malt, one ofvodka. 'Vodka,' Alison said. 'My tipple of choice.' Now and then you saw a glimpse of another Alison, the one that pre-dated her marriage to David Needler. She retrieved two glasses from the kitchen and said, 'You're a whisky drinker, aren't you?' Louise put her hand over the glass and said, 'No, you're all right, I'll just have an orange juice or something,' and Alison raised an enquiring eyebrow and said, 'Because you're pregnant?' and Louise hooted with laughter and said, 'God, what are you, a witch? No, because I'm driving. What? What are you giving me that look for? Honest to God, hand on my heart, on the grave of my mother, I am not pregnant.' But hey.

The door in her heart had been wedged open and she couldn't shut it no matter how hard she pushed against it. And she had tried as hard as she could, even got as far as an appointment at a clinic but sometimes, once something had been opened, it could never be closed again. Not all boxes stayed locked.

She was going to leave Patrick at Hogmanay then they could start the new year with a clean slate. New broom, fresh start. Roll out the cliches, Louise. Not at Christmas, it would be a cruel thing to do to him, his last wife had left, albeit involuntarily, at Christmas. Every future Christmas would be marred by the memory of another wife abandoning him. He'd get a new one. He was good at marriage (,Lots of practice,' she could imagine him laughing to the next one.). He was a good man, shame she was such a bad woman.

Love is the important thing. That was Joanna Hunter's parting message to her on the third and last time she interviewed her. Tried to interview her. The woman was as intransigent as marble. 'You were just wandering around for three nights? You claim you don't remember anything? Not where you slept or how you ate? You had no car, no money. I don't understand, Dr Hunter.'

'Neither do I, Chief Inspector. Call me Jo.'

Louise supposed she could have pushed it, found some forensic evidence somewhere. The clothes she left the house in, for example -the black suit, where was it? Or the Prius, parked in the street and freshly valeted ofall trace evidence. To every question Joanna Hunter just shrugged and said she couldn't remember. You couldn't break her. Not Neil Hunter either. He'd recanted his whole story about Anderson and extortion.

Maybe you could have broken her if you had really wanted to.

Maybe ifyou had pushed her on the two bodies found in a burnedout house in Penicuik, guys whose identities were still in question almost two weeks later. They'd finally got one of them, the marine, through his dental records, left the service ten years ago and no one really knew what he'd been doing since. The other guy remained a mystery. No sign of the knife that had finished off the guy with the crushed windpipe, no sign of whatever had been rammed through the other guy's eye into his brain. The fire destroyed any fingerprint evidence. 'Looks professional,' the lead DI on the case said when they talked about it at a Task and Coordinating Group meeting.

There was no mention of a possibility that it might be linked to Joanna Hunter in any way. She disappeared, she reappeared. End of story. Anderson came up smelling of roses, Mr Hunter on the other hand was being prosecuted for wilful fire-raising for the purposes of a false insurance claim.

Marcus's death was big news for several days. 'Hero Policeman' and so on. His mother turned off his life support after a week so his funeral was just before Christmas. 'Makes no difference to me,' she said. 'There'll be no more Christmas now.' The day after the funeral she jumped off the North Bridge at three in the morning. Give her a medal too.

And as for Decker, Louise couldn't get her head round that at all.

'You visited him in prison,' she said to Joanna Hunter. 'Why? What did you say to him?'

'Oh, nothing much,' she said. 'This and that, you know how it is.'

'No, I don't,' Louise said.

Joanna Hunter was decorating her Christmas tree, hanging cheap glass baubles as if they were precious jewels. 'He was very remorseful for what he'd done. He'd become religious in prison,' she said, contemplating the white, top-of-the-tree angel that she was holding in her hand.

'He converted to Catholicism,' Louise said. 'And then killed himself. He must have known that means eternal damnation to a Catholic.'

'Well, perhaps he thought that would be the right punishment for him,' Joanna Hunter said, climbing on a stepladder to reach the top of the tree. 'You know how to shoot a gun,' Louise said, holding the stepladder steady. 'I do. But I didn't pull the trigger,' and Louise thought, no, but somehow or other you persuaded him to do it.

'I went to see him because I wanted him to understand what he had done,' Joanna Hunter said, as she reached to fix the angel on the top of the tree. 'To know that he had robbed people of their lives for no reason. Maybe seeing me, grown up, and with the baby, brought it home to him, made him think how Jessica and Joseph would have been.' Good explanation, Louise thought. Very rational. Worthy of a doctor. But who was to say what else she had murmured to him across the visitors' table.

She had taken the baby. The good and the evil in her life in the same room and the evil had been vanquished. If she was ever in a perilous situation, if she was at the end of a dark street on a dark night with nowhere to run, Louise would opt for Joanna Hunter to be fighting on her side. She'd certainly rather fight with her than against her.

And had it satisfied her when Decker blew his brains out? It hadn't satisfied Louise when David Needler shot himself. It was the easy way out -Shipman, West, Thomas Hamilton, still in control even of their own deaths. She would rather have seen Needler in front of a firing squad, facing the moment when he knew that he too had been vanquished.

Joanna Hunter climbed back down the stepladder and switched on the Christmas tree lights. 'There,' she said. 'Doesn't that look lovely, Chief Inspector?'

'Call me Louise.'

'Cheers,' Louise said, raising her glass of orange juice and Alison said, 'Cheers.'

'I got a puppy for Christmas,' she told the Needler children. 'When he's a bit bigger I'll bring him round to see you.'

'What are you going to call him?' Cameron asked.

'Jackson,' Louise said.

'That's a funny name for a dog,' Simone said.

'Yeah,' Louise said. 'I know.'

The Rising of the Sun, the Running of the Deer 'MERRY CHRISTMAS,' DR HUNTER SAID, RAISING HER MUG. THEY toasted Christmas morning with coffee and mince pies and brandy butter for breakfast. ('Oh, for heaven's sake, why not?' Dr Hunter said.) The baby had porridge and a boiled egg. Then they opened presents around the tree. The baby had a push-along dog that looked a bit like a Labrador, although he was more interested in the wrapping paper. Sadie, a real dog, was given a handsome collar and a new ball that bounced as high as the ceiling. Dr Hunter made Reggie cry because she gave her a PowerBook, brand new, that no one was going to take away, when all Reggie had given Dr Hunter was a velvet scarf. It was a nice one though, from Jenners, that she'd scraped her remaining money together to buy.

Jackson Brodie had insisted on giving her a cheque for a lot more than the amount he had borrowed from her even though she said, 'No, no, you don't have to do that,' but when she went to the bank to try and pay it into her account, the bank said they would 'have to refer it', which Mr Hussain said meant that it had bounced and that Jackson Brodie had no money, despite what he had said about being rich. Which just went to show that you thought you knew a person and they turned out to be someone else. He still belonged to her but she wasn't sure she wanted him any more.