The clink of cutlery and the rhythmic staccato of ‘Cool For Cats’ drift up from the kitchen, rousing me from a long, satisfying sleep. In Rosie Cooper’s 1930s three-bedroom semi-detached house on the side of Portsdown Hill the day is up and running.

I push myself to a sitting position, rake back my fringe and watch my tits barge free from my pyjama top in their usual indecorous fashion. I put it on back-to-front before I pad along the landing to the bathroom; I was too tired last night to notice what kind of impression I made on my host, but I don’t think it’ll be improved if she walks upstairs and sees my bare breasts bouncing around simply because I’m too lazy to sew a couple of buttons back on.

After I’ve relieved myself, showered, brushed my teeth and combed my tangled locks into some sort of order I pick out clean underwear from my holdall and proceed to the dressing table for my daily quota of powder and paint. I’m careful not to overdo things — just some foundation, eyeliner and pale pink lipstick to prove I’ve made an effort. Then I pull on my jeans and a plain white T-shirt, slip into my ankle boots, stuff my cigarettes and matches inside my shoulder bag and treat myself to a fairly critical appraisal in the mirror.

Not bad, babe — but you might want to think about doing something with that hair now that the warmer weather’s on its way.

Rosie is grilling slices of streaky bacon and beating eggs when I walk in on her. She’s a slim, good-looking woman in her middle forties, wearing a white short-sleeved cardigan over a pink gingham dress. Her dark hair is flecked with blonde highlights, parted on the left and cropped neatly above her ears, the kind of style you’d expect the assistant manager of a temping agency to have adopted. She greets me with a warm if practised smile.

“No need to ask if you had a good night’s rest,” she says, her voice enriched by a distinct south Hampshire burr. “I hope you’re not one of these people who doesn’t eat breakfast. My mother always says, and I agree with her, that if you take care of the inner girl first thing in the morning she’ll look after the outer girl for the rest of the day. She’s what in times gone by would have been called a ‘wise woman’. We don’t respect the older generation enough in my opinion. They have so much to teach us. But you’re too young to know what I’m talking about. So, there’s fruit juice over on the table. Help yourself to cereal and coffee. Kerrie should be joining us in a few minutes. She usually pops in on Saturdays around half-past nine, a quarter to ten-ish.”

I’d have been happy with ‘good morning’. It would’ve done.

“I’m just going outside for a smoke,” I tell her, trying hard not to lick my lips at the delectable smells coming from the cooker.

“Well, you know my thoughts on that, dear.”

After the lecture I received when I asked if there was an ashtray in my room? I think I do.

I open the back door and find myself on a tidy but underused patio. The lawn and its borders, sloping steeply upwards to end in front of a low wooden fence beyond which stretch the wide chalky acres of the hill, are similarly bereft of imagination. It’s a divorcee’s garden, well kept yet pining for the loving touch of the man who abandoned it.

A few slabs of crazy paving take me through to number 113. The houses in this part of Woodford Road are all built with their main doors at the side; they give onto stairwells that separate the living rooms from kitchens large enough to double as dining areas. Rosie’s red Ford Escort is perched rather precariously at the top of her portion of the shared drive; beside it sits the white van belonging to Kerrie’s boyfriend.

I stroll round to the back, where she’s putting washing out to dry — this having taken precedence over her need to dress in anything more becoming than a robe and a pair of fluffy slippers.

“You’re up early,” she remarks, her mouth pinched and drawn without her top teeth, the creases around it made more prominent by the strong sunshine.

“Rosie’s making breakfast. I thought I’d have a fag first. Want one?”

“Light it for me, would you thweetheart?” she says, placing two pegs between her lips.

“How are you feeling after yesterday’s exertions?” I ask once I’ve passed her the cigarette.

“A lot better for waking up with a gorgeouth man bethide me. Don’t you mith that?”

“Now and again,” I murmur, pushing away the picture it’s created of the couple making love. In fact I quite like the guy; in the hour and a half between him picking us up from the railway station and me being billeted on Rosie I found David Compton to be amiable, courteous and understanding as well as a knowledgeable, erudite communicator. Anyone less representative of your average self-employed painter and decorator would be hard to imagine.

“Jutht now and again?”

I look back down the hill towards Farlington marshes, which merge seamlessly into the brackish Langstone Harbour. To the west, a line of trees marks the shore of Hayling Island; in the other direction, five or six miles distant, the centre of Portsmouth is a hazy blur.

“It’s lovely here…”

“Thorry. Thore point, I know.”

I turn and force myself to smile.

“Don’t apologise. It’s just that I had to talk to Rosie about him last night. She kept me up till nearly midnight.”

“Ooh, you poor thing!”

She drapes an arm around my shoulder and escorts me into her kitchen. Dave is at the table in his work overalls, sipping coffee and reading the Guardian. He’s several years younger than Kerrie, and has both the appearance and attitude of someone who hasn’t quite given up on the hippy movement.

“Hello Ruth,” he says brightly, warmth pouring from his soft brown eyes.

“Hello there,” I reply with due diffidence.

I may have a libido that shows as much sign of life as a plague pit, but even to me it’s obvious what Kerrie sees in him. When I ignore the somewhat inconvenient fact that he’s a bloke with a dick and a pair of hairy bollocks, I have to admit I’m looking at a pretty exquisite specimen. It takes a concerted effort not to stare too admiringly at that broad, muscular chest, those powerful shoulders, that strong chin with its Kirk Douglas dimple, that silky torrent of dark brown hair…

After two or three minutes of inconsequential chit-chat he gets up to leave. Kerrie sees him to the door, sending him on his way with a clinch that would have animated a mummified Pharaoh. I can’t put my hand on my heart and say I’m not the tiniest bit curious as to what it would feel like to be in her place.

When she returns it’s to lead me straight back to her neighbour’s. Over breakfast the conversation bends towards Rosie’s daughter Nina, whose eldest child’s behaviour is causing his teachers some concern.

“I warned her about spoiling him,” she complains. “Didn’t I warn her, Kay?”

“You did, Ro,” agrees Kerrie as she spoons mushy cereal and warm milk into her mouth.

“I mean he’s come to that age, hasn’t he? She has to make rules and set boundaries, as you and I did for our own children. I’ve told her this till I’m blue in the face. And now she accuses me of interfering. I said I’m only passing on the benefit of my experience. But will she listen?”

“They won’t. Siobhan’th the thame.”

“You understand, of course you do. You’re a grandmother yourself.”

Kerrie nods sagely as she sets aside her bowl. She licks her gum clean, then gets to grips with a plate of scrambled egg while she outlines her plans for the next few days: in addition to tomorrow’s visit to the Isle of Wight, where Cathryn lives with her invalid mother, they include the rearranged meeting with her sisters in Reading before she makes the journey north to collect her car. Rosie’s attitude to the ‘vandalism’ visited on the Beetle outside the Gladstone is as inflexible as it was last night.

“Flogging’s too good for them, that’s what I say. Maggie’ll sort it out, she’s exactly the kind of strong personality this country’s been looking for. I hope you intend to charge the hotel, after all it happened on their property so they’re liable for any damage. I’ll check with Gerald when I see him this evening, but I’m sure I’m right. No reflection on you, dear,” she adds, patting my hand.

“Who’s Gerald?” I whisper to Kerrie when Rosie gets up to make a start on the dishes.

“I’ll tell you later,” she replies with a conspiratorial grin.

The Latimer household has come to life by the time we break free from Rosie’s clutches. Kerrie’s twin sons are in the living room watching Saturday morning television; she introduces me to them — they were out with friends when Dave brought us back last night — and leaves us to get acquainted while she ousts her daughters from the bathroom. Padraig, who has slightly darker hair and is plainly the more loquacious of the pair, explains that they’re both in their first year studying Mechanical Engineering at UMIST. Neither he nor his brother seem particularly upset that their mother has arrived home with a busty redhead in tow, which makes it a matter of some urgency to douse their enthusiasm by explaining that I’m married, and down here to explore the possibility of a reconciliation with my estranged husband — a story Kerrie and I hammered out for their benefit during the tedious couple of hours we spent on the slow train from Waterloo.

The girls know this already, and waste little time in coaxing me away from their half-brothers so they can resume the previous evening’s interrogation. Niamh, at fourteen the younger by just under a year, is blessed with pixie charm and a glossy cascade of copper-coloured hair she continually sweeps back from her face. Sinead is thoughtful and a little more reserved, her flawless heart-shaped features all but hidden by thick strawberry blonde tendrils. The questions rain down on me: did I watch Grease, is that Charley I’m wearing, do I prefer disco, rockabilly or powerpop, will I go glam this summer? (To which the answers are no, yes, none of them and possibly.)

Just before half-past ten Rosie sweeps into the room.

“You’re wanted upstairs,” she informs me, rolling her eyes at the stereophonic groan the summons elicits. “Right, you two. You’ve got ten minutes, then I’m off. With or without you. So unless you fancy catching the bus all the way into Pompey I’d suggest you get a move on.”

I follow Sinead and Niamh as far as the landing, where I’m pointed towards Kerrie’s bedroom. The door is ajar; I knock and wait to be invited inside.

She’s at the dressing table, naked apart from her bra, panties and tights. I take the chair she indicates, crossing one thigh over the other as I watch her fish her denture from the tumbler where it spent the night. She shakes off the excess water, uses a spatula to smear adhesive across the back of the plate and slides it into her mouth, making a few final adjustments with her fingers and tongue.

“Mmm...well, that’sh about ash comfy as it’s ever going to be,” she says. “Now I’m used to wearing false teeth I should really get round to having the rest of them whipped out. Both my sisters lost theirs before they were forty, and they say it hasn’t affected their sex lives one little bit. Then again, being all gummy when you’re making love certainly has its selling points.”

It’s a second or two before I figure out what she means. Then I feel my jaws fall open.

“You don’t...”

“You must’ve led a very sheltered life if that shocks you, sweetheart.” She walks over to the wardrobe and picks out a pale green short-sleeved top and a full-length wrap-around patterned skirt. “A bit suburban housewifey, but it’s only to get the groceries in.”

“You were going to tell me about Gerald,” I remind her.

“Oh yes! He’s Rosie’s ex-husband. They still see each other, although it’s me he’s interested in, not her. I think she knows that, she just won’t admit it to herself.”

“What’s he like?”

“Just what you might expect from a former army officer. Well groomed, articulate, respectful of tradition, morally upright. Distinguished rather than what you’d normally consider handsome. He runs a picture-framing business in Hamble. Built it up from practically nothing.”

How did I guess that he would sound just like Richard’s stepdad? Perhaps you aren’t born with that name, you have to earn it by proving yourself to be a proper stick-in-the-mud.

“He’s aware that you’re spoken for?”

She combs out her rainbow hair and steps into a pair of slip-on shoes.

“David’s thirty-one. I shall be thirty-nine before the end of the year. He won’t be with me for ever. That’s Gerry’s way of thinking.”

“What’s yours?”

“For all that he represents everything I’ve always hated, Gerald Cooper is one of the kindest, most dependable men you could meet. Rosie was the one who strayed, not him. That’s something a woman my age has to bear in mind.” She returns to the mirror and dabs at one of the embryonic wrinkles above her upper lip. “Takes longer every day, keeping the ravages of time at arm’s length. Don’t laugh, sweetheart. You’ve got all this to come.”

I glance at the bag resting on the edge of her bed, wondering if Helen Sutton’s notebook is still inside or it’s been locked away somewhere. I decide not to bring the subject up; my encounter with Egerton has given me enough to worry about.

That goes for the photographs as well. You might consider getting them back for us.

And put on the line all the trust Kerrie has shown in me?

No thanks.

But that isn’t what keeps circling the fringes of my consciousness like a ravenous vulture.

“Come on, shake a leg!” Kerrie is saying to me from the doorway. “I’m having Siobhan and Terry over for tea, and until we’ve been shopping all I can offer them is a choice between crispy pancakes and fish fingers.”

She was taken in by the MoD. What they did with her I dread to think.

What of the woman whose body Yvette de Monnier appropriated before she stole mine? Did there come a time when she resigned herself to the loss of her youth, much as I accepted becoming female? Or does she continue to hope that the technology the MoD must still be working on may yet present her with the opportunity to snatch back the years de Monnier took from her?

That against all the odds she might one day resume her life as Ruth Hansford-Jones?

Yvette would like you on her side.

Sorry darling, I’m not in the mood to nail my colours to anyone’s mast but my own.

That doesn’t mean I won’t have a change of heart.

Because I’m not swapping bodies again. She can wait till kingdom come.

*

Dave Compton sits up in his chair, a forkful of chicken curry paused in front of his mouth. He sends an expression of friendly dismay at the sandy-haired young man on the other side of the table.

“Is that what you really think?” he laughs. “Funny, I didn’t have you down as a Tory.”

“I’m not. At least I wasn’t.” Terry Haynes leans back in his chair and pats his stomach. Siobhan’s boyfriend is a beefy figure with a build that suggests he knows his way around a rugby pitch and is equally familiar with the layout of the clubhouse bar. “But you’ve got to agree, Labour isn’t working.”

“Yeah, we’ve all seen the posters,” Eamonn chips in.

“That queue of unemployed stretching from London to Inverness,” grunts Padraig. “If you got them to bunch up a bit it’d probably only reach Berwick.”

“Only?” cries Terry, prompting a loud “sssh!” from Siobhan as she tries to rock her little boy to sleep.

“Where’s Berwick?” Niamh hisses at me.

“Somewhere in Scotland,” answers Sinead.

“It’s on the border, but it’s actually in England,” I correct her.

“That’s the trouble with propaganda,” Padraig continues. “It sounds bad, but you’re given nothing to compare it with. What about the line of people in employment? On the same scale it’d go three-quarters of the way round the globe.”

“Did you sit and work that out?” asks Dave.

“No, it was a mate of ours up in Manchester,” says Eamonn.

“Bob Nobbs,” nods his brother.

Sinead and Niamh start giggling, and I can’t help joining in.

“Is that his real name?” wonders Kerrie, nibbling at a spicy pastry I’ve learned is called a samosa.

“No, it’s Brian. He never goes to the pub, so everyone calls him Boring Old Brian. The initials B, O, B spell–“

“I get it, sweetheart.”

Kerrie takes Liam from Siobhan, who’s a walking contradiction of spiky peroxide blonde hair, Monroe lips, grungy leather jacket and virgin white frock. Every inch her mother’s daughter, in other words.

“That’s right, my darling,” she whispers into his ear. “You stay with grandma while mummy goes for a cigarette.”

“I thought you’d given up?” says Kerrie.

“She did,” sighs Terry. “Then we had my mum and dad over for a few days.”

“Enough said,” grins Dave.

The meal comes to an end with Kerrie announcing that the boys are in charge of the washing up. There isn’t a murmur of dissent. We girls retire to the front room with the baby, and if I can’t bring myself to bill and coo over him like the others, the smile that brightens my face when it’s my turn to hold him and he grabs at my boob is entirely unrehearsed.

Strangely, my recently awakened maternal instincts go straight back to sleep when Siobhan begins changing her son’s nappy.

After a quarter of an hour or so, Kerrie embarks on an inspection of the kitchen. As satisfied as it’s possible for a woman to be when other people have been working in her domain, she ushers me outside for a smoke.

“It’s all a bit different from yesterday,” she remarks as we light up.

“You can say that again,” I concur, brushing a particularly obstinate flake of pastry from the front of my jeans. “I don’t know if I’m all that keen on being chased around London by thieves.”

I make no further reference to the circumstances that brought me here. There’ll be plenty of time for that when we meet Kerrie’s friend tomorrow. Until then I’m happy to wallow in cosy domesticity.

“David and I will be going out for a drink later on. Just as far as the Sundial — the pub I pointed out when we were at the shops, remember? It’s nice in there, and they have live music most Saturdays. Eamonn and Padraig are heading down at about eight. They say you’re more than welcome to join them.”

“Sinead and Niamh have plans as well, am I right? It’s okay, message received and understood.”

“You can’t blame me for wanting to spend some time alone with him.”

“God no!” I laugh. “You fell on your feet with that one! He’s just the sort of guy I’d…”

I’d what exactly?

It’s all very well to admire a man’s physique or daydream about sliding my fingers across his firm, taut skin, but there’s a person inside — and that person will want to paw me, breathe erotic suggestions into my ear and climb all over me whenever the mood takes him. Although I might come to enjoy such attention, the suitor I can imagine wining and dining me, sending me chocolates and flowers, saying I look nice in my new dress, whirling me around the dance floor, or even pulling me down on top of him, unzipping and unhooking me before I know what’s going on, is a generic figure with no more personality than a mannequin in a shop window. Give him a face or a voice, and even if he’s as attractive as Dave Compton the fantasy evaporates at once.

“So there’s life after Tim?” smiles Kerrie, nudging me in the side.

“There will be. I’ll have to meet him first. But let’s not talk about my non-existent love life. Come on, tell me: how did you two get together?”

“Through Rosie. Indirectly, anyway. When Gerry moved out she decided to have the house re-decorated from top to bottom. Well, as you know we’re in and out of one another’s kitchens all the time...”

“Hmm...then he was the hunky workman and you were the sexy neighbour who popped in to offer him a mug of tea? And maybe more besides?”

“It wasn’t like that at all,” she protests. “What d’you take me for? It was coffee.”

She goes on to tell me that the relationship only really got going in the run-up to Christmas, when Dave’s landlady decided to sell the house he’d been renting from her to a property company rather than fork out the  £1300 it would have taken to pay for the repairs a local government inspector had instructed her to carry out. Although the new owners were obliged by law to find him temporary accommodation, when Kerrie saw the conditions her new boyfriend would have to put up with she immediately invited him to move in with her.

“It won’t last for ever, I know that,” she admits. “He dotes on my children nearly as much as I do, but one day he’ll want his own. And I’m not the woman to give him them.”

I have the best part of an hour before I need to get ready, so I pass it in front of the television exchanging frivolous observations on a variety of topics with whoever happens to be in the room. The utter mundanity of the occasion helps me sink all the more deeply into my new persona. I dole out snippets of my invented past, each sounding less fraudulent than the one before.

If you tell a lie often enough...

But sometimes the truth can be an encumbrance.

What good has it done me to learn what really happened that night in Northcroft? How can it possibly have an impact on my future? What do I have to gain by listening to any more talk of conspiracies and cover-ups? Wouldn’t it be better to make myself believe — really believe — that the authorities acted properly, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional?

The coroner’s verdict at the inquest into Bob Hodgson’s death was indeed the correct one. Helen Sutton died of natural causes. Richard Brookbank was killed in a car accident. Bob’s was the only body washed up on Carr House Sands.

And Ruth Hansford-Jones has no interest whatsoever in any of those events.

That’s the way it has to be.

That’s the way it is.

*

Closing the bedroom door behind me, I proceed to the dressing table to remove my make-up and review a surprisingly enjoyable end to an extremely relaxing day.

To most people, the three hours I spent in the Sundial with Padraig, Eamonn and their friends — Kerrie and Dave didn’t show up until half-past ten — would have seemed wholly unremarkable. To me, experiencing a night out from a female point of view for the first time since Christmas, every moment was heavy with significance.

It went all the more smoothly for me being aware of the ground rules as taught to me by this body’s former owner. I didn’t drink alcohol for the first three rounds, and limited my intake to two halves of lager and lime after that. I was careful not to say too much, and took great pains to avoid being seen paying undue attention to any one member of the group. When one of the girls — I think her name was Lorraine — whispered to me that she was off to visit the Ladies, I recognised it as an invitation to join her, one it would have been impolite to ignore. And I sized up the competition as if I really did see them as rivals.

The overtly sexual looks I drew from a large proportion of the male customers proved harder to deal with. I had to remind myself that when I’m in full make-up I attract stares, and lots of them. The tousled gingery blonde hair, the prominence of my bust, the swimmer’s shoulders, the way I fill out my jeans, none of those features will ever belong to a wallflower. The trick, of course, is to cultivate an air of feigned indifference. You’re telling these men that their interest in you has been noted, but that’s all.

The evening also provided ample confirmation — in truth, little was needed — that any attraction I once felt for the female form has disappeared. Whatever the future holds for me, it is not a romantic relationship with another woman. The idea of moving between Olivia Newton John’s outspread thighs is as unappealing as the thought of John Travolta thrusting away between mine. In fact if I was forced to choose one or the other I’d open my legs for John every time. Less work for me, and he’d be the one paying for the champagne.

I use a swab to clean my skin, making sure I rub it into all the little folds and indentations around my eyes and mouth. Although Sylvia has assured me I’ve the type of skin that won’t age prematurely, I’d rather instil my routine with good practice now than have to take it up when the first intimations of mortality appear in the looking glass.

I’m reaching back to unhook my bra when I hear a rustling noise outside. I turn off the light, then kneel on the bed to peer through the curtains. The room is at the rear of the house, giving me a clear view of Rosie’s garden once my vision has adjusted to the darkness.

There’s a shadow on Kerrie’s side of the fence, not far from the shed at the top of her lawn.

And that’s a torch!

Egerton.

He must have obtained Kerrie’s address from the hotel register.

But I thought he wanted me to do his dirty work for him? And shouldn’t he have more sense than to go creeping around in people’s gardens less than an hour after the pubs have shut?

I can’t disturb Rosie. She’d insist on being told everything. As for Kerrie, the way she was all over her boyfriend after two or three rum and Cokes I’d be astonished if she isn’t being humped within an inch of her life at this very moment.

I retrieve my T-shirt and jeans from my holdall and pull them on. Shoes in hand, I steal downstairs. I remember that the back door key is in the kitchen, on a ring suspended from a hook between the fridge and the washing machine. It’s stiff, but it turns in the lock with a barely audible click.

Now for the hard part.

I sit on the step to slide my feet into my shoes. Lifting myself up, I inch my way along the crazy paving towards Kerrie’s patio and crane my neck to see around the end of the fence. The prowler is now inside the shed, shining his torch every which way as he conducts his illicit search.

I make a dash for the corner to the right of the door, pressing my back against the wall as if I’m playing some nocturnal game of hide-and-seek. Very slowly, I slither around to a position where I can look through the grimy, cobweb-covered window.

The beam illuminates Helen Sutton’s notebook, which is open at the photograph of the mosque. A hand turns the page, and I can hear a muffled snigger as the portrait of a bizarrely transformed Sarah-Jane Collingwood is revealed.

To my amazement, the intruder doesn’t stuff the notebook into his jacket but places it behind the paint pot on the shelf where Kerrie had evidently concealed it.

And that’s not the only thing lifting my hand to my mouth before I dart back into the shadows.

Locking the door after him, Dave Compton switches off his torch and marches purposefully across the grass to the house.

Now what am I supposed to make of that?

More to the point, what can I do about it?