Reggie was staying here now, 'until you find somewhere else,' Dr Hunter said, 'but of course you might prefer to stay here for good. That would be nice wouldn't it?'

They didn't really talk about what had happened. Some things were best left alone. They never talked, for example, about whose blood it was that Dr Hunter and the baby were covered in. Jackson wouldn't let Reggie go inside the house (Don't you dare) so she didn't know exactly who was inside or what had happened to them. Something bad obviously. Something irreversible.

Of course, Reggie read in the Evening News later about how two unidentified men had been found in a burned-out house and how it was all a mystery and it struck her that a person who was going to do anything to protect their baby might be someone the police would want to consider for the murders, but they didn't. And no matter how many times Dr Hunter was questioned by the police about what had happened to her she always told them that she had gone out for a walk and suffered some kind of amnesia, which was crazy, but they didn't have much choice other than to believe her.

'What do you think happened, Reggie?' Chief Inspector Monroe asked her and Reggie said, 'I honestly don't know,' which was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Dr Hunter ~ore the scarf all Christmas Day, she said it was the prettiest scarf she had ever had. They drank champagne and ate roast goose and Christmas pudding and the baby had pink ice-cream and fell asleep on Reggie's knee while they watched The Muppet Christmas Carol and, all in all, it was the best Christmas Reggie had ever had and if Mum had been there it would have been perfect.

Ms MacDonald was buried just before Christmas. Sergeant Wiseman and the Asian policeman came to the funeral, which Reggie thought was beyond the call of duty. She had a regular Christian kind of service because her weird religion didn't really run to funerals. Most of the members (five out of the eight) of her church stood up and said something about rapture and tribulation and so on and Reggie stood up and said, 'Ms MacDonald was always good to me,' and some other stuff that was a bit more complimentary than Ms MacDonald really deserved because a person shouldn't speak ill of the dead unless he was Hitler or the man who killed Dr Hunter's family. No one mentioned that Ms MacDonald had caused the Musselburgh train crash. Death absolved a lot of things, it seemed.

Reggie had organized the funeral with the Co-op because they'd done Mum's funeral as well. She chose the same hymn, too, 'Abide with Me'. She went to see Ms MacDonald lying in her coffin. It was lined with white polyester satin so she kept her preference for synthetics right to the end. The Co-op undertaker said, 'Shall I leave you alone?' and Reggie nodded sadly and said, 'Yes,' and then when he left the room she tucked all the little plastic bags of heroin that she'd found in the Loebs' secret hearts into the coffin with Ms MacDonald. Ms MacDonald was one person that you could guarantee wasn't going to come to harm from drugs. After she took them out of the Loebs she had kept them on the shelf in Dr Hunter's garage behind the paint tins, because, as Dr Hunter said, no one ever looked there.

It hadn't been all the Loebs, but quite a few. She had weighed the plastic bags on Ms MacDonald's ancient scales and it came to almost a kilo, which represented a lot of money. She supposed Billy must have been taking something off the top from what he was dealing and hiding it but she didn't ask him because she hadn't seen him and now Ms MacDonald had gone up in flames along with all the little plastic bags and Ginger and Blondie were never going to get their drugs back. They had known that Billy was keeping the drugs in the Loebs but they had never suspected there was a whole library of them in Ms MacDonald's front room.

Ms MacDonald left a will in which she said her house had to be sold and the proceeds shared between the church and Reggie, so now Reggie had her college fund, just like that.

'What's your brother doing for Christmas?' Dr Hunter asked.

'I don't know. Spending it with his friends.' One truth one lie, you couldn't spend time with your friends if you didn't have any friends. She had no idea where he was. He would turn up again, the bad penny, the rotten apple.

The thing was. How did Dr Hunter know about Billy? Reggie knew for a fact that she had never mentioned her brother to her. One more puzzling thing to add to the pile of puzzling things that surrounded Dr Hunter, enough to fill the junk repository to overflowing.

Mr Hunter wasn't there on Christmas Day. Dr Hunter said he could come on Boxing Day and say 'Happy Christmas' to the baby. He had been charged with burning down one of his arcades and was on bail, staying in a ropy-looking Band B in Polwarth while Dr Hunter 'made up her mind' about whether she wanted him back in her life but you could tell that she'd already made it up. It looked like he was going to be declared a bankrupt so it was lucky that the house was in Dr Hunter's name.

'He did try, I suppose,' Reggie said, surprised to hear herself standing up for Mr Hunter, who'd never done her any favours, after all, but Dr Hunter said, 'But not hard enough.' She said that if Mr Hunter had been in her place, she would have done anything to get him back, 'And I mean anything,' she said, with such a fierce look on her face that Reggie knew that Dr Hunter would walk to the ends of the earth for someone she loved and that she, Little Reggie Chase, orphan of the parish, saviour of Jackson Brodie, help of Dr Hunter, daughter of Jackie, came within that warm circle. And now, for better or worse, the world was all before her. Vivat Regina!

God Bless Us, Every One BILLY SLOPED PAST ALL THE LIT-UP WINDOWS IN THE STREET. A HUGE inflatable plastic Santa was hanging off a balcony on the neighbouring block of flats, pretending to climb up. The Inch was crap at Christmas. Edinburgh was crap at Christmas. Scotland, the Earth, the universe. All crap on Christmas Day. He'd got fags from the Paki shop, at least they were open. He was going to kill his sister, he nearly had killed his sister.

He might have to move town, to somewhere where no one knew him. Start again. Dundee, maybe. 'You're such an enterprising boy,' the old holy cow used to say to him when he came and fixed her lights or unblocked her drains or whatever. Take a book from the shelf, put his stash in it, put it back. Reggie was banned from those books and the old holy cow couldn't see to read any more so he thought it was safe.

At least he had the money that Reggie's precious doctor gave him for the Makarov. He couldn't imagine what she wanted it for. Funny old world.

An old drunk staggered past him and said, 'Merry Christmas, son,' and Billy said, 'Away to fuck, you old cunt,' and they both laughed.

Safely Gathered In WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, AT DAWN. THERE WAS A POEM AND HE WAS relieved to find that he couldn't remember any of it. It was freezing cold. The city was almost deserted in a way that you never saw it normally. This wasn't how he had expected to spend Christmas Day. On his own, on his uppers, in the Great Wen. They had planned to book something last minute to somewhere hot and relatively unChristmassy. 'I don't like Christmas too much,' Tessa said to him. 'Do you?'

'Hadn't really given it too much thought,' Jackson said.

'North Africa,' she had suggested, running her finger down his spine so that he quivered like a cat. 'A flight into Egypt. I can probably educate you. Antiquities and so forth.'

'You probably can,' he said. 'Antiquities and so forth.'

A pair ofyoung guys, still drunk from the excesses of Christmas Eve, passed by and gave him a peculiar look, perhaps because he was contemplating the Thames with an intensity that suggested he was thinking of joining himself with the icy waters. He wasn't. His brother had done that to him, he wouldn't do it to his daughter. The two young guys probably thought he was some poor schmuck with no home to go to, no family bosom to be warmly welcomed into at the festive season. They were right.