Sitting on a stool at the counter, smoking a Rothmans and nursing a tonic water — ice, no lemon — the girl who had momentarily piqued my curiosity looks older at close quarters than she did from the other side of the dining room. If I’d been asked to guess her age before I met Suki I’d have said she was in her late twenties; today, having learned to look for such indicators as the set of her mouth and the laughter lines at the corners of her eyes, I’m inclined to revise that estimate to something like thirty-one or thirty-two.

She’s no Jean Shrimpton, that’s for sure. Although we’re roughly the same height, her figure has meandered a fair few steps further along the all too familiar trail that begins in the lush meadows of curvaceous and well endowed, then winds through the higher pastures of nicely rounded and pleasantly plump only to peter out among the bleak, treeless fells of a spreading waistline and running to fat. Her most arresting feature — ignoring the vast spread of cleavage visible above her low-cut peasant blouse — is her multicoloured hair, a riot of pinks, greens and blues chopped into messy layers from a wayward centre parting, so short on one side it shows off practically the whole of her left ear and a good third of her neck, but long enough on the other to brush her right shoulder, thus giving the impression that during her last visit to the salon she had dashed from the chair before an overeager, barely competent stylist could do any more damage to her precious locks. In contrast her make-up is immaculate yet understated, and the only item of jewellery she’s chosen to display is a delicate silver chain from which hangs a large pendant shaped like a crucifix, but with a loop instead of the top arm.

“It’s called an ankh,” she says, lifting it from her creamy skin. “The ancient Egyptians wore them as fertility symbols. It’s ever so old. Can you see the hieroglyphics? Where my finger is, just there.”

I take the amulet in my right palm, only briefly registering the fact that my hand is so close to her chest I can feel the heat emanating from her body. In my previous incarnation such proximity would have left me embarrassingly tumescent; now it only stirs a vague sense of competition.

“Very pretty,” I remark as I push away the mischievous thought that with a bust like mine I could look every bit as sexy as her if I made the effort.

“Isn’t it? My friend Cathryn brought it back from a dig outside Luxor. Of course she had to give all that up when her mum’s health began to fail. It’s a shame, she had such a promising career ahead of her, but you never know what’s around the next corner, do you? I’m Kerrieanne Latimer, by the way. Kerrie for short, like the county in Ireland but with an ‘ie’ at the end instead of a ‘y’.”

And a ‘K’ at the beginning, not the ‘C’ she wrote down in the register. A woman of mystery indeed — or perhaps the atlas her parents consulted had a misprint.

There’s a slightly coarse feel to the freckled hand she offers me, one that suggests she’s closer to thirty-five than thirty, but her grip is firm and warm.

“Ruth Hansford-Jones,” I reply. “Pleased to meet–“

“I know, sweetheart. You’re the girl who’s much too intelligent to be wasting her time in a place like this just because she blames herself for the break-up of her marriage. That’s what Norah thinks, anyway.”

“I’m sorry...?”

They’ve been talking about me behind my back? What else did they discuss, the reason I haven’t got a boyfriend?

“You’re also fighting shy of getting involved with the opposite sex again,” Kerrie goes on, as if my thoughts have appeared inside a fluffy cloud above my head. “Which in your situation is probably the worst mistake you can make. Norah didn’t tell me that, of course. She didn’t have to. I can see it in your eyes.”

This is turning into a very bad dream. I glance towards the foyer with a silent plea to the practical joker who set the cosmos in motion that one of the regulars might come in and provide me with an excuse to ignore her, but at twenty past seven on a chilly Tuesday evening in the middle of April there’s more chance of Vivienne Westwood striding through the door, slapping a five-figure modelling contract on the bar, telling me she’s booked me on the next Concorde to New York and tossing in a brand new BMW and a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park to clinch the deal.

Looks like I’m on my own, then. Battling back the urge to launch a tirade of four-letter words at her, I trawl the deepest reaches of my memory for a civil yet appropriately contemptuous riposte.

“If you say so,” is what eventually surfaces.

“There’s no need to pull a face like you’ve just swallowed a bluebottle, sweetheart. Your name only came up after I happened to mention that as I hoped to do a spot of amateur sleuthing while I was here, it would be nice if I could hire a trusty sidekick to help me out for a day or two. Norah says a break like that will do you a power of good, so consider yourself roped in.”

She delves into her shoulder bag and pulls out a white foolscap envelope.

“What’s that?” I ask before the homunculus at the controls can issue a directive to my mouth warning it that the question makes me sound like a four year old on her first visit to the seaside.

“Well, since you can’t very well claim to be rushed off your feet I thought that instead of sitting there contemplating your navel you might start by reading this while I phone my boyfriend to tell him I’ve arrived safely and remind him not to allow my children to stay up too late. It may be the school holidays, but they still need all the sleep they can get, and you don’t need me to tell you how manipulative teenage girls can be. Oh, and if you can let me have some small change, as much as you can spare? Be a love and charge it to my room, would you?”

As I make a careful note of the money I’ve given her, I’m tempted to leave the envelope where it is and let Kerrie with an ‘ie’ at the end — as if I’ll ever have to spell it — know in no uncertain terms just what she can do with her amateur sleuthing. The woman’s unbridled effrontery has left me stunned. Who the hell does she think she’s talking to? She must be spectacularly good in bed; I can’t think what else the bloke she’s living with gets out of the arrangement.

But my natural inquisitiveness — to say nothing of a fully justified fear that if Norah found out I’d insulted one of the guests she’d have me scouring out milk-encrusted pots and pans until the cliffs were eroded so far back the hotel fell into the sea - gets the better of me. Soon I’m holding a sheet of watermarked vellum headed by an insignia belonging to Barton & Harris, a firm of New Stranton solicitors.

Dear Ms Latimer

Re: Helen Dorothy Sutton (deceased)

As you may be aware we have recently acted in connection with the administration of the Estate of the late Helen Dorothy Sutton who died on 3rd December 1978. By her Will, dated 20th August 1974, Miss Sutton bequeathed her Residuary Estate equally between your father and Carol Evelyn Vasey. Your father died before Helen Dorothy Sutton, but there was a provision that should he have children living at his death, such children would take his share by substitution.

You are, therefore, equally entitled with your siblings to your father’s share of the residuary estate.

We enclose for your attention a copy of the Estate Realisation and Distribution documents as agreed by Mrs Vasey as the Executor, and our cheque in the sum of  £83,645.67 representing the balance due to you...

I put the letter down unfinished. My eyes are misty, for Helen Sutton was not only my teacher but a near neighbour and a good friend to me before I left Northcroft to become a student. Yet my sadness at the untimely death of a woman who couldn’t have been much older than forty is swiftly replaced by a growing sense of incredulity. The phrase ‘with your siblings’ implies that Kerrie’s father had at least three children; a quick calculation puts the total value of the residuary estate in that event at just over half a million pounds.

My hand goes to my mouth.

Half a million?

How did Helen amass such extraordinary wealth? Did she come into an inheritance of her own? How successful must her investments have been, that they accrued so large a final dividend?

Maybe tagging along as this woman’s Girl Friday might not be so uninteresting after all.

But whether it’s what I’ve come to think of as feminine intuition or some other subconscious process at work, I feel reluctant to come clean regarding Ruth’s relationship with Helen until I know more about the latter’s connection with Kerrie Latimer’s family.

When Kerrie returns from the payphone in the foyer, the armchairs and alcoves are still empty. I decide that I’ve nothing to lose by trying to be more assertive.

“Seems pretty straightforward. What d’you need me for?”

“Ooh, that’ll help!” she grins, climbing back on her stool and lighting up once again.

“What will?”

“The fact that you can string more than two or three words together at a time. I was starting to have my doubts.”

It’s not so much the last straw as the detritus from an entire Nebraskan grain harvest.

“Now listen, I’ve had about as much–“

“That letter arrived on my doormat last Thursday right out of the blue,” she interrupts, taking as little notice of my truncated invective as she does of the canned laughter filtering from the lounge. “I’ve never heard of anyone called Helen Sutton. Nor have my sisters, and what Shannon and Clare can’t tell you about our family history isn’t worth knowing. We can hardly ask mum who she was, can we? What if it’s news to her as well? It’s taken her a long time to get over losing dad, and the last thing she needs right now is to worry herself sick over an affair he may or may not have had in the dim and distant past. So as I’m the one with the most time on my hands, it’s up to me to root around and see what I can unearth.”

Is that supposed to have me champing at the bit? No one would blame me if I was to say I’d come across more intriguing stories watching repeats of Mr & Mrs.

“So why stop here and not somewhere in New Stranton?” I ask, more to prove I’m capable of constructing a complete sentence than out of any real desire to know.

It’s the wrong thing to say. Kerrie’s eyes flash with exasperation.

“You did read the letter all the way through, didn’t you?”

“Most of it...”

“Jesus, Mary an’ bloody Joseph!” she cries, her Home Counties vowels temporarily giving way to an accent that sounds as if it originated in a Lancashire mill town. “I give you one simple task, an’...oh, what’s the use? Look, if you’d bothered to get as far as the second last paragraph you’d know the estate agent hasn’t been able to sell the house yet. There, where it says ‘the property at 6 Redheugh Close’. I had to set off at the crack of dawn so I could reach here in time to ask them if they’d tell me where Mrs Vasey lives, because as I’m sure you know they won’t give out that sort of information over the phone, and get them to tell me which was the nearest hotel to that address.”

“It’s pronounced Red-yuff,” I put in.

“Is it really? You live and learn, don’t you? Well, however you say it we’re going to have to rid ourselves of the place somehow, though goodness knows how much it’ll fetch if what I saw on the way over is anything to go by, so one thing I’d like you to do for me tomorrow — that is if you can stop playing with your fringe for five minutes — is to set up a meeting between the two of us, preferably on neutral territory. That way we should be able to come to an agreement before I go back on Friday rather than have to communicate through our solicitors, with all the extra delays and expense that’s certain to entail.”

Set up a meeting? Do I look like a secretary?

She tears the cover from a beer mat, scribbles down Carol Vasey’s name and an address on Albion Crescent, then announces that unless she eases away the stresses and strains of her seven-hour drive from the south coast in a tub filled to the brim with fragrant, steaming hot suds she’s liable to fall asleep where she’s sitting. I watch her leave, thinking that if I get through to the weekend without ending up either in a padded cell struggling against my restraints or in one of the more conventional kind awaiting trial for murder I’ll congratulate myself on a job well done.

Sod’s Law operating at maximum efficiency, less than ninety seconds after Kerrie’s departure the first of the non-residents, a retired postman named Jack whose lugubrious mutterings concerning the state of the economy are like a Vaughan Williams fantasia to my ears, makes his appearance. Hard on his heels comes Sylvia, helping herself to a pineapple juice and taking the stool nearest the hatch. She waits until the old gentleman is ensconced in his favourite chair with a bottle of Double Maxim and the South Durham Herald before beckoning me over.

“How are you getting on with Nancy Drew?” she enquires, her smile so knowing it could romp the grand final of University Challenge.

“You’ve heard about that, have you? All I’ll say is I’d sooner spend a week with her than a fortnight. I reckon Norah owes me one.”

“Don’t be daft, Ruth. Mam’s right, a change of scene might be just the thing to perk you up a bit.” She lowers her voice, aware that Jack isn’t quite as deaf as he likes people to think. “Well, did she spill the beans, then?”

I hesitate for a moment, unsure of my ground. All I’ve told Sylvia is that I lived in Northcroft until I was twelve; she hasn’t pressed me for details, and I haven’t divulged any. If I confess that I remember Helen Sutton from junior school, I risk breaking that unspoken accord. Would it not be wiser to pretend that the name means nothing to me?

My mind made up, I lean closer.

“Are you ready for this? It’s strong stuff.”

“You can be an annoying little madam sometimes. Come on, out with it.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I put my lips to her ear. “Okay, here’s what it’s all about. A woman who used to live on the Triangle left Ms Latimer’s dad a packet. Now he’s dead too, so it’s passed to her and her sisters. Trouble is, none of them know her from Eve.”

Sylvia’s frown accentuates the thin creases at the sides of her mouth.

“Lived on the Triangle? What was she called?”

“Let me think...Helen something-or-other.”

“Sutton?”

“Yeah, that was it.”

She nods her head.

“Helen Sutton, eh? I might’ve known she had money stashed away.”

I hand over the beer mat.

“This is the other beneficiary. I’ve been given the job of making sure they meet up.”

Sylvia’s jaw plummets so far her chin must be visible to shipping off the coast of New Zealand.

“Carol Vasey...” she gasps. “Now we’re for it. You’d best get yourself over there, tell her what’s going on. Write her a note in case she’s gone out. I don’t know, talk about letting the cat in among the pigeons.”

“Sorry Sylv, you’ve lost me.”

“Carol Vasey!” she hisses, as though that explains everything from the origin of the universe to the continuing popularity of Terry and June.

“I’ve got a degree, you know. Believe it or not, I can read. What about her?”

She couldn’t look much more surprised had Al Capone sauntered in with Little Red Riding Hood on his arm.

“You mean to tell me you don’t...what d’you do all day, go round with cloth stuffed in your lug holes? If I said she was Carol Hodgson till a short while back, would that help?”

Now I’m the one with unhinged mandibles.

“Oh,” I say quietly. “That Carol Vasey.”

Some time before I arrived at the Gladstone respected town councillor Bob Hodgson — Trisha’s dad, but that belongs to a long-vanished world — drowned after he was swept from the Heugh breakwater at high tide during a storm everyone on the headland agrees was one of the worst in living memory. But there the consensus ends. Too many issues, the most pertinent of which was what he was doing down there to begin with, remained unresolved for the coroner’s verdict of death by misadventure to be universally accepted. Weeks later, tongues were still wagging in the pubs and clubs, the hairdressers, the post offices and the corner shops.

The most voluble spoke not only of Bob but also his widow Carol, who had been deputy headmistress at Mill House Primary School in New Stranton when the tragedy occurred, and was to take early retirement soon afterwards. Carol had raised the alarm, then been rushed to hospital suffering from a head injury she received at an unknown point in the proceedings. Although she appeared to make a swift recovery, at the inquest she testified to having no recollection whatsoever of the incident, a claim backed up by the doctor who had treated her. When word subsequently spread that Carol was about to marry the very same doctor, a man nearly twenty years her junior, and with the earth barely settled on her husband’s grave, the rumour machine clicked into top gear. The only reason not put forward to account for Bob Hodgson’s death was that he had fought with time-travelling aliens from a distant galaxy.

“That Carol Vasey,” echoes Sylvia.

“There’s more,” I whisper to her. “When I said ‘a packet’ I meant it. I’ve seen the solicitor’s letter. If my arithmetic’s correct Carol’s now richer to the tune of a cool quarter of a million.”

Elvis Presley might have walked up to the counter, with Glenn Miller and Lord Lucan a few steps behind him.

“A quar...a...a quarter of a...all right, that does it. I’ll look after the bar while you’re gone. Try not to be too long. I’m supposed to be picking Janice up at half-eight. Well, get your skates on!”

“Can’t you just phone her?”

“You think she’ll have kept the same number? Have a bit of common.”

“Why the sudden panic, Sylv? So there’s a bit more gossip and innuendo flying about. She’s got two hundred and fifty thousand excellent excuses for ignoring it. If I was her, this time tomorrow I’d be on a plane to Acapulco.”

“Because Helen Sutton died the same night as Bob Hodgson, that’s why. Heart attack, it said in the Herald. But you hear all sorts in this trade. Like Bob’s wasn’t the only body those kids found on Carr House Sands the next day.”

“Jesus...you think she might have drowned as well? But that would mean–“

“I’ll have a word with your Ms Latimer after breakfast tomorrow, tell her to keep all this under her hat for now. You be careful what you say an’ all, ‘specially to that Egerton and his pal when they get here, ‘cause I’ve a feeling they might be from one of the papers. Take it from me, we can do without a repeat of the bother we had with that lot when they descended on us last time.”

I set off along Marine Parade in an agitated frame of mind. Could Helen and Bob have been lovers? Had Carol resolved to do away with her rival by luring her onto the breakwater, only to lose her husband in the ensuing fracas as well?

...the late Helen Dorothy Sutton, who died on December 3rd...

Whatever happened, it took place just over a week after Ruth stole my body.

And it had the effect of leaving a nice little nest egg to a woman who lives only five miles from where the theft was carried out.

I wanted a diversion. It appears that my wish has been granted.

By five to eleven I’ve ushered the last customers outside, turned off the pumps, washed the glasses and ashtrays, wiped down the tables, counted the takings — never an onerous duty on a Tuesday — and developed an unshakeable conviction that if the device Ruth used on me were ever to be mass-produced then it should become enshrined in law that every male drinker spend one night, because that’s all it would take, working as a barmaid in a small provincial hotel.

After delivering my message to a darkened house with a front garden so overgrown I was afraid to glance at the upstairs windows in case I glimpsed Miss Havisham outlined there in her tattered, yellowing wedding dress, I returned to the Gladstone in time to relieve Sylvia from the ministrations of the skeleton, who proceeded to regale me with the history of his mother’s gallstones and followed this captivating account with an even more thrilling description of the surgical techniques necessary to remove them, his eyes never once moving from my bust. Before I was able to call last orders civilisations had risen and turned back to sand, continents had split apart, and mountain ranges had been worn down to shields.

I carry a glass of Coke and a packet of salted nuts into the lounge, then settle on the sofa to watch the second half of The Old Grey Whistle Test. Crossing one denim-clad thigh over the other, I’m about to light up when headlights flare in the car park.

Egerton and his chum, who I’d completely forgotten about.

I raise my eyes to heaven. It’s been that sort of evening.

Sod it, they can wait. I don’t care if they’ve got my body tied up on the back seat, I’ve earned this cigarette.

The sound of someone repeatedly pressing the buzzer on the reception counter makes me reconsider. If Norah has to come down from the flat to answer it they’ll hear her in Tierra del Fuego.

Sighing like a fifteen year old dragged away from the telephone to tidy her room, I rise from my seat and clump into the foyer. Through the open front door, the imperious silhouette of a Rolls-Royce dominates the forecourt.

Sylvia has these two down as reporters? The job must pay a damn sight more than most people think.

“I say, hope we’re not keeping you from your beauty sleep? Egerton’s the name. J G Egerton.”

No mention of the Robert Wyatt album Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow…

“Yeah, I remember Sylv saying.”

“Dashed bad form arriving at such an ungodly hour, I know. I’m sure you’ll accept there were extenuating circumstances.”

The figure spouting this bullshit is in his middle twenties, tall, lithe and bursting with the self-confidence a privileged upbringing instils as second nature. He’s wearing an expensive double-breasted light brown suit, a blue silk tie and authentic Italian shoes. His dark hair is slicked back and tied in a loose ponytail, concealing none of the engaging, some might say roguish smile he hopes will persuade others he’s ready to deal with them as equals.

What he’s doing slumming it in a dive like Northcroft is anyone’s guess.

“No problem,” I assure him, aware that Sylvia is due back from her soirée within the next few minutes. “I’ve only just closed the bar. Uh, you can still have a drink...provided it’s not on draught.”

“I don’t think we will. Fact is, we’ve both been up since the lark. Left the metropolis for deepest Somerset, called HQ to report ‘mission accomplished’ and received orders to head north without further delay. My fiancée’s all in, poor thing.”

“Your fiancée? Sure you want two singles? I know for a fact there’s a double free till at least Friday.”

“Better not, my dear. I can tell you’re as broad-minded a young fillie as they come, but in our line of work we’ve found that some of the smaller establishments are run by those with a hankering for, shall we say old-fashioned values. Wouldn’t do to upset the apple cart, if you get my meaning.”

Young fillie? One more crack like that and you’ll be a gelding, old bean. I’ll chew them to bits while your lady love looks on.

“What line of work would that be?” I ask him as I go behind the counter to open up the register.

If there’s an answer I don’t hear it. The woman standing in the doorway is a good ten years older than her betrothed, yet she has a numinous, all-pervading presence that renders her age irrelevant. The light green beret pinned to the net covering her short, russet curls, the turquoise suit with the padded shoulders and pencil skirt, the single row of pearls, the seamed stockings and the lustrous black high-heeled shoes wouldn’t shame a Milan catwalk, whilst her make-up might have been applied five minutes ago in a Parisian beauty parlour so exclusive Jacqui Onassis has to pull strings and call in favours just to get on the waiting list for an appointment. But it’s her eyes I find most fascinating of all, for they exude a femininity that’s practically primeval. This is someone for whom any man with bones in his wrists would gladly scale Everest, brave the arid wastes of the Sahara, sail the Pacific single-handed and hack his way from one end of the Amazon jungle to the other if he thought there was the slightest chance that by doing so he’d be given permission to prostrate himself at her feet and spend the rest of his days in silent worship.

But not me. Not any more.

Moving with the poise of a film star and the refinement of a long-reigning monarch, she walks up to the desk. When she speaks, her voice is the sound chocolate might make if it could talk as it was melting.

"Bon soir, mademoiselle. Je m’appelle Yvette de Monnier.”

“Enchanté,” I reply.

“A quelle heure servez-vous le petit déjeuner?”

“De sept heures et demi á  neuf heures. La salle á  manger est lá , á  droit de l’escalier.” I reach behind me for the keys to rooms 4 and 5. “Votre chambres sont au premier étage. Si vous voudrez me suivre...?”

I show her upstairs while Egerton fetches their luggage from the Rolls. Only when both of them are installed in their rooms do I switch back to thinking in English.

In layman’s terms, if she was good at something then so are you.

I knew Ruth spoke fluent French, but not that she was more or less bilingual. How come that didn’t appear in her file?

What else haven’t you told me about her, Suki?

I don’t suppose it matters, not in the great scheme of things.

I close the register and return to the lounge for the last few minutes of my programme. It’s true what they say, life never stops surprising you.

November 4, 1966

A furious argument is raging between the two groups of ten year old boys gathered on Farwell Field beside the ruins of Northcroft’s thirteenth-century Town Wall. The dispute has arisen because they cannot decide where to play their long-awaited football match. If they use the area to the east of the tumbled limestone blocks, the team representing Hart Street school will have home advantage; otherwise it will pass to the squad from Throston.

One or two of the less willing participants, pressed into service like medieval peasants, have begun to move away from the others in case a full-scale brawl breaks out. None dare stray too far. Better a black eye or a split lip than the lasting derision he will have heaped upon him if his friends think he is about to turn tail and run. Snapper Brookbank, tall, skinny and so short-sighted he must wear his glasses even for an event such as this, knows that in a scrap he will be of less use than a sugar umbrella in a monsoon — yet he has had an idea he hopes may prevent it coming to that.

He sidles up to Basher Howell, the Hart Street captain, and tugs at his elbow. Nervously, he gabbles out his suggestion. If Basher’s initial reaction is one of scorn, he is surprisingly quick on the uptake for a thug who spends hours every week sitting cross-legged in the hall for answering back to Miss Cattrick, and within moments his Palaeolithic features are lit by a grin so broad the Magnificent Seven could gallop through it side by side and still leave room for the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

“Tell yer what,” Basher says to his opposite number Paul Addison, “giz a goal start an’ yers can be at ‘ome.”

The Throston cohort exchange doubtful glances. Many of them are bright enough to have worked out that the choice of venue will have little bearing on the outcome. Addo, not the most luminous of candles, agrees to Basher’s proposal without consulting anyone. The blazers and jumpers go down on the Throston side of the wall, and at long last the game can begin.

Snapper volunteers to go in goal from the kick-off. That way he is sure to make a contribution to the Hart Street cause — unlike Piggford, who reacts to the approach of a football as if it were a poisonous snake. Yet although he acquits himself reasonably well behind a defence with no more ability to maintain a tight formation than a brood of decapitated hens, with the score tied at six-apiece and the light fading fast, Snapper yearns to play a more positive role. A few of the girls from his class have stopped by to watch the action on their way to Brownies: Paula Harbron is there, whispering something to Ruth Pattison, who according to Topsy Taylor has had to wear a bra since the end of the third year, and he seems to know about these things; best of all Trisha Hodgson, the one who makes his willy feel all funny whenever she flicks back her long, carrot-coloured hair. Think how impressed she would be if she saw Snapper Brookbank notch the decider!

But time is not on his side. Some of his teammates are already complaining to Basher that their mams will murder them if they stop out after it gets dark. There can only be a minute or two left at the most.

“Next one the winner or what?” cries Addo.

“Aye, better ‘ad be,” Basher shouts back. “Mergie goalies?”

“Yer on!”

This is what Snapper has been praying for. Now any member of the team can nominate himself as ‘keeper should the need for one arise. Full of unused energy, he sprints up the field.

By some fluke, a wild clearance lands the ball at his feet with only one opponent in front of him. He pushes it forward, leaps over a lunging, mistimed tackle and finds himself bearing down on a completely unprotected goal. Even Piggford might have fancied his chances of rolling it in. All he has to do is keep a clear head, and–

“SNAPPER!!!”

Basher has charged after him, determined that no swot from the top class is going to deprive him of the glory that is rightfully his. Snapper can ignore him, of course, but he is only too aware that should the ball strike a divot and bobble wide his next music lesson will be held on a big white cloud and involve learning to play the harp. The price of failure is too high. He will sacrifice his place in the Hart Street hall of fame for the satisfaction of knowing he deserves the real credit for the winning goal.

He turns and sees that Basher is almost level with him. He must make the crucial pass now, before accusations of offside can be levelled. But Trisha is still watching, and he has one more trick up his sleeve.

Scooping the ball up so that his captain can take it on the half-volley, he looks on in horror as it careers off the end of his plimsoll and smashes into Basher’s face, knocking him flying. A Throston player is on hand to boot it away, and no one seems very interested in fetching it back. At the other end of the pitch the ‘goalposts’ are being removed. The match is over, the opportunity to record a famous victory has been squandered.

Trisha and her friends walk away in fits of laughter. Meanwhile, Basher has lifted himself to his feet. There is a livid red mark on his left cheek.

“You useless four-eyed lanky streak of shit.”

The insult is all the more ominous for having been spoken so quietly. Snapper decides this may not be the best time to remind him that without his brainwave Hart Street would have lost six-five. In fact he can think of only one way to escape the beating of his life.

He legs it.

Over Farwell Field, past the tennis courts on Garrison Point and across a Town Moor still churned up after August’s carnival until he reaches the muddy lane that leads past the back of the hospital and the rugby ground, each breath an agonised gasp as the lighthouse looms ever nearer and he can finally turn the corner into the blessed sanctuary of Princess Terrace. Not a moment too soon either, for Basher and the pack of bloodthirsty hounds trailing in his wake are almost upon him.

At his front gate he stops dead, aghast at his own stupidity. He has forgotten that on Fridays they always have their tea at gran’s. He still has to run the length of Tennent Street, through St Hild’s churchyard and down Brougham Street as far as number 41.

But it is too late. He is surrounded.

Hands push, poke and drag him across the road and onto the neglected patch of grass where a tarnished King Neptune, his trident broken off at the haft and his crown used as a nesting place, looks forlornly out to sea. Basher is waiting beside the statue; his fists are clenched, his anger unabated.

“Give ‘im a good knackin’, Bash.”

“Aye, kick ‘is fuckin’ ‘ead in.”

The circle closes, and a tribal chant is taken up.

“Ooh-ah, ooh-ah, ooh-ah…”

Snapper can do nothing to ward off Basher’s ferocious assault except curl up on the ground and shield his glasses with his arm. He begs for mercy. None is forthcoming. He promises to be Basher’s slave for ever and ever. His pleas are snowflakes landing on an exploding volcano.

“What is going on here?”

He knows that voice! It belongs to Mademoiselle Malraux, who takes Miss Sutton’s class for French on Monday afternoons and sometimes on Thursday mornings as well. They’re such good friends they live together on the far side of the Triangle, in the house at the end of Redheugh Close nearest the sea wall.

Now that Basher has stopped hitting him, Snapper looks up in reverence at the young woman who has come to his aid. She’s wearing a smart black jacket, a short black skirt, black leather knee boots and those kinky stockings with holes in them he thinks are called fishing nets. Her sleek raven hair falls loosely about her shoulders, encompassing flawless olive-skinned features and alluring oriental eyes that suddenly ignite to send the spectators fleeing like ants from a burning nest.

Only Basher stands his ground.

“Nowt miss,” he protests, though his face is full of unfinished business. “We was just playin’, honest.”

Mademoiselle Malraux steps over Snapper.

“Close your eyes,” she says to him.

He obeys at once; but he cannot keep them shut, for he has already seen the silver, lozenge-shaped object she is holding…

No, that’s not right.

That was someone else, and in another place entirely.

Wasn’t it?

The alarm goes off, yanking me back into the waking world with all the subtlety of an enraged rhinoceros. I fling out a hand to silence it, but only succeed in knocking my watch to the floor.

“F...fiddlesticks.”

Yawning loudly, I sit up and stretch my arms above my head. The movement loosens the thread holding the last remaining button on my pyjama top; it falls into my lap, allowing my breasts to shove the material aside like two divas pushing their way through a crowd to pose for the paparazzi.

“Fu...fancy that.”

I sweep away the covers, then launch my feet into the air. They land on the carpet in such a fashion as to send my watch hurtling across the room. It smacks into the skirting board beneath the dressing table, accompanied by a portentous tinkling sound.

“Fuck it.”

I have to get down on all fours to retrieve the unfortunate timepiece, dugs drooping like a cow’s udders. It’s an ungainly beginning to my first full day as Kerrie Latimer’s trusty sidekick.

Luckily the watch is still ticking.

Twenty-five to eight. I’d better get a move on.

Before I do anything else I light a cigarette. Of course the head breaks off the match as it flares into life, missing my right nipple by less than an inch.

It’s going to be one of those days, obviously.

Then again, I ought to have learned by now that there are some pleasures a girl really should forgo when her tits are hanging out.

I pull back the shower curtain, my thoughts already skipping ahead to the look I ought to adopt for the coming ordeal. Thanks to Suki Tatsukich’s tenacity — some might have called it bullying, but I don’t believe anyone’s written a set of guidelines for that particular training programme — I’ve grown into the habit of wearing a skirt once or sometimes twice a week, though I draw the line at anything that ends above the knee. There’s a big difference between being at ease with your sex and wanting to flaunt it.

Yet I need to submerge myself fully in my new identity, for who knows where Kerrie Latimer’s investigative zeal will lead us? The chances are we’ll meet Carol Vasey, and if she guesses that I’m the same Ruth who went to school with her daughter I’ll have my work cut out just keeping my cover intact.

Scrubbed and rinsed, I towel my hair dry. Once again the centre parting I try to put in insists on migrating abruptly to the right as it reaches my forehead, so that my fringe falls appealingly — or irritatingly, depending on your perspective — across my left eye. Sylvia’s friend Janice, who runs a hairdressing salon in New Stranton, has offered to take the scissors to my unruly tresses free of charge, but I’d rather wait until Ruth is caught; then I’ll make her watch me have them shaved down to a quarter of an inch all over.

Spiteful, I know. And that’s the most lenient of the punishments my imagination has devised for her.

I’m opening the drawer to pick out fresh underwear when...

What is going on here?

Mademoiselle Malraux, who came to my rescue when I was being beaten up on Neptune’s Triangle because of that stupid football match. God knows why I had to dream about her after all these years.

Maybe I’m conflating her with the posh tart Egerton brought along — Yvonne or Yvette or whatever her name is. And it might also have something to do with finding out I can speak such good French.

Funny thing, the mind.

Especially when it’s been transplanted into someone else’s brain.

To more practical matters...

A close-fitting light green T-shirt to go with my jeans, leaving no one in any doubt that I’ve got just as much up top as Kerrie and I don’t care who knows it. Brown leather calf boots rather than trainers in case the weather forecast is correct for once. A little more mascara than usual. Carmine lip gloss to hint at the femme fatale lurking within me. A dab or two of Charley behind the ears.

I feel like a proper pansy.

But I don’t have to make any beds this morning. Better a painted doll than a skivvy.

The fun begins a minute or two after I’ve arrived in the dining room, when Kerrie breezes through the door and discovers that the table at which she had expected to sit is occupied by a dapper young gentleman in a stylish checked sports jacket and an open-necked shirt, together with a glamorous older woman wearing an eye-catching floral cheongsam and reading Balzac’s Eugénie de Grandet in the original French.

“I think you’ll find that belongs to room 7,” Kerrie says in a tone that suggests she’s not used to protracted arguments and doesn’t anticipate one here.

J G Egerton picks up the piece of folded cardboard wedged between the milk jug and the basket filled with those infuriating individually wrapped pats of butter that are always too big for one slice of toast but never contain quite enough to spread across two.

“Well I never!” he exclaims, flashing her a smile that would have had Lucrezia Borgia simpering.

Kerrie doesn’t even blink.

“So I can have my table back.”

It’s most emphatically not a question.

Egerton leans over to his fiancée, who clearly considers the exchange undeserving of her attention.

“We seem to have committed the most frightful faux pas, poppet,” he tells her. “What say we do the decent thing and move?”

She rests bejewelled, damson-nailed fingers on his sleeve.

“Weren’t we here first, darling?” she murmurs in a faultless BBC accent. “I’m sure we were, you know.”

“I understand, Yvette...but let’s not have another scene, eh?”

With neither woman prepared to abandon the disputed terrain, I fold up my newspaper and sit back to watch the fur fly.

“I thought so,” Kerrie says suddenly, commencing hostilities by snatching Yvette’s book from her hand. “I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I?”

Yvette de Monnier allows her eyes to roam across every square inch of her adversary’s body, taking in the asymmetric multicoloured hair, the tight cheesecloth shirt, the black leather pants and scuffed ankle boots all in one smooth, dismissive movement. She could hardly have demonstrated less respect if she’d been examining a flea-bitten old mare on her way to the glue factory.

“I very much doubt it,” she drawls in a voice oozing with disdain. “I’m not in the habit of frequenting bring-and-buy sales.”

Miaow! This is shaping up to be a real humdinger!

Sadly — though perhaps not from the standpoint of world peace — Sylvia comes in from the kitchen to explain that since Ms Latimer and I will be spending much of the day together it makes sense for us to have breakfast at the same table. She apologises to Kerrie for not giving her prior notice of the altered seating arrangements, adding as a muttered aside that there’d be no need for misunderstandings of this kind if her employee had been up and about at the usual time.

It was bound to be my fault, wasn’t it? If a hurricane tore the roof off she’d find a way to shift the responsibility onto me.

Kerrie flashes her enemy a look of pure malevolence before taking her seat and pouring herself a glass of grapefruit juice. That the liquid doesn’t go flying over her shoulder to ruin Yvette’s cheongsam is a miracle that would have had the thousands in the desert who’d dined handsomely on five loaves and a couple of fishes trudging home telling one another they’d seen more impressive conjuring tricks at children’s birthday parties.

“Anyway sweetheart, how are you this morning?” she asks me. “All set and raring to go?”

“Ready when you are,” I reply, hoping for the sake of my last clean pair of jeans that I sound keener than I feel.

“That’s what I like to hear. We’ll make a good team, you and I. Okay, I’ve been having a think. We should start off at the cemetery, then–“

“She must be going to apply for a job as a gravedigger.”

Yvette de Monnier’s stage whisper has approximately the same effect as a rabbi walking into a crowded synagogue on Yom Kippur clutching a pork pie in one hand and a half-eaten bacon sandwich in the other. The two old ladies have ossified into statues, egg yolk dripping from their forks. Mrs Sourface’s mouth has fallen open wide enough to catch a swarm of locusts, let alone the odd fly. The skeleton impales a mushroom that will never reach his stomach.

With geological slowness Kerrie turns her head.

“That’s a nice dress,” she remarks. “I might get myself something like that when I’m your age.”

All over the developed world sirens wail, television and radio broadcasts are replaced with rolling news bulletins, police leave is cancelled, hospitals are placed on emergency alert, fighter pilots scramble and politicians scurry for their underground bunkers.

Egerton hisses words of restraint into his fiancée’s ear. He’d enjoy as much success having a quiet chat with a lioness whose cubs are on the brink of starvation about the feelings of that lame zebra she’s been shadowing.

“When you’re my age, darling,” Yvette comes back, “you won’t be buying clothes from anywhere that doesn’t specialise in camping equipment.”

The retort crackles and spits through the charged atmosphere. It strikes its target with the force of a ballistic missile. Even Mrs Sourface is tittering to herself. My glee is marred only by the certain knowledge that one person, and one person alone will pay the price for Kerrie Latimer’s humiliation as the day wears on.

Northcroft cemetery is situated about a mile north-west of the hotel at the very edge of the built-up area, on top of a wide railway embankment running alongside the coast. Consolidated in the 1830s from spoil excavated during the construction of the Victoria Dock and the deepening of the medieval harbour, by the middle of the following decade it carried more coal than any other line in England. That trade has gone now, and if the hourly passenger service from Middlesbrough to Newcastle-upon-Tyne by way of New Stranton keeps the main section open, on the spur going down to Northcroft only a few forgotten sleepers poke above the tangle of thorn and scrub growing the length of the dismantled track, each a grim memento of a lost industrial heritage. A cheerless, unlovely place under the brightest of conditions, on a dank Wednesday morning beneath leaden skies it weighs at the soul like a duplicitous lover.

Standing with her back to the gates, Kerrie zips up her windcheater and gazes past her white Volkswagen Beetle at the empty dock basins and silent waterfronts in the distance, the wasteland that separates Northcroft from New Stranton.

“Not quite what I had in mind when I set off yesterday,” she sighs. “I thought it was all cliffs and castles up here?”

“That’s Northumberland,” I correct her, stuffing my hands in the pockets of my cagoule to stop myself looking at my watch for the fourth time in as many minutes. Although I have no great love for my birthplace, I abhor the ignorance so many southerners show towards it. We’re not Geordies, we don’t support Scotland when the Home Internationals are being played, and we never pour brown ale on our corn flakes.

(Actually I did that once when I was a student, but only to wind up this turd from Congleton who was forever harping on about his superior ‘northern’ sense of humour.)

“I wonder why Helen stayed so long? If she had that kind of money, I mean. No offence, sweetheart, but it’s not exactly the English Riviera.”

She’s spot on there. A dense mist has begun rolling in from the sea, concealing the disused wharves, coal staiths, piers and slipways with the urgency of a relief worker disposing of a leprous cadaver. Soon all that can be seen in that direction will be the rough ground fringing the dark ribbon of Cleveland Road as it arcs southward to disappear in a wall of unrelenting gloom.

“Beats me,” I admit with a shrug.

This apparent indifference earns me a disparaging frown, not the first I’ve had to put up with since the contretemps in the dining room. When Sylvia and I gave Kerrie an abridged account of the circumstances surrounding Bob Hodgson’s death we received a frostier reception than the Pope trying to get served in a bar on the Shankill Road. Even the florist on Northgate Street, whose only crime was to express surprise at her southern accent, got a mouthful in return. I just hope that none of the things last night’s dream has made me start to remember about Helen Sutton and her relationship with Mademoiselle Malraux come to light; I shudder to think what Kerrie’s reaction might be if she learns what kind of person her dad may have been messing around with.

We find Helen’s final resting place with the assistance of a chart the grizzled, triangular-faced warden must keep in a subterranean vault if the time he takes to fetch it is any guide. The more recent plots are at the western end of the cemetery, without so much as a tree or a bush to provide a sense of seclusion. All that protects them from the bitter northerly winds that so often sweep unopposed across the broad, grassy hummocks of Hart Warren is the husk of what was once an isolation hospital, located here in a typically macabre instance of Victorian town planning.

I hang back a few feet, allowing Kerrie to pay her respects to a woman she never met by resting a simple spray of roses on the bare earth. Then I notice the headstone, no more than nine or ten inches high. An epitaph has been written on it, and in French.

The game is up. With a mounting sense of foreboding I watch Kerrie take a pair of round-rimmed spectacles from her shoulder bag and put them on to read the words inscribed in the polished white marble.

“You didn’t tell me she was only forty-three, sweetheart?”

“You never asked,” I mumble, a little too loudly.

“Well I’m asking if you can translate that message for me.”

The acid in her voice would eat its way through the casing of a nuclear reactor before you could finish reciting the rhyme about little Johnny drinking H2SO4. I do as I’m told.

“‘Farewell, my love. You died to save the women of the whole world.’”

“How odd. I don’t suppose you know who he is or what he meant by that?”

Bollocks to it. She’s going to find out sooner or later.

“It’s a she. And no, I haven’t the faintest.”

I’ve gone and done it now. The worms are wriggling out of the can, and the lid has rolled down a drain. Kerrie is still wearing her glasses, but that doesn’t stop her eyes shooting a hail of bullets into mine.

“Go on...” she growls.

“Helen taught me when I was in the fourth year at junior school. She wasn’t from Northcroft originally, but I don’t think she ever said anything about where she’d lived before she moved here. If she did I was off that day. Anyway, I remember she had a friend who used to come in now and again and teach us French. Mademoiselle Malraux, her name was. From the Far East, Vietnam if I remember right. Everyone in the class fell for her, she had the ability to leave you hanging on her every word. Then all of a sudden we had to make do with this other girl, who was hopeless. It turned out that Helen and Mademoiselle Malraux were more than just friends — you can’t keep something like that secret in a close-knit community such as Northcroft — and one or two of the parents had complained to the headmistress. Considering it was 1967 and attitudes weren’t anything like as tolerant as they are today, Helen was lucky not to have been shown the door as well.”

Kerrie steps closer. She’s struggling to keep her temper in check. One wrong move and I’ll be as supine as the corpses beneath my feet.

“Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. I confess to you that my father may have had a clandestine affair with someone, and you only now see fit to tell me she was a lesbian? Any more bombshells you’d like to drop? Take your time.”

But something deep within me has decided that enough is enough.

“You think the world revolves around you and your precious family? Some of us have got more on our minds than dredging up stuff that happened when we were kids. If you’re not happy then go and hire yourself a private detective. It’s not as if you can’t afford one.”

I march up the slope to the low brick wall beyond which the ground falls away steeply through high dunes to a long, narrow beach. After a minute or two Kerrie joins me and asks if I’d like a cigarette. We share a light, our freckled fingers cupped around the flame. For a long time neither of us speaks; instead we look out at the formless horizon and listen to the waves lapping against the shore. Only the far-off sound of a dog barking ruptures the near primordial serenity.

Kerrie is first to break the spell.

“You don’t like me very much, do you? I shouldn’t really be surprised. I admit I can be a bit overbearing at times. That’s one of the words my husband used when he packed his bags last August. He said that being shackled to an overbearing Irish sow like me for fifteen years was longer than he’d have done for armed robbery. I flew at him, I’m ashamed to say. I’d just been told I needed to have several of my top teeth taken out, so it wasn’t the best moment to discover that my marriage was over. Don’t feel sorry for me, by the way. I didn’t love him. Alan was a shoulder to lean on at a bad time in my life, nothing more. I gave him two lovely children, and I let them visit him whenever they want, so he can’t turn round and say he’s done all that badly out of it.”

I don’t know how to respond. It’s hard to believe she would be so open with a girl she met less than twenty-four hours ago.

“You’re Irish?” I manage after an increasingly awkward silence.

“I was born Carmel Assumptor O’Rourke in Ballymahon, County Longford. But I’ve lived in this country since I was seven. We moved around a bit at first, Lancashire and Cheshire mainly but also the Midlands.”

“Yeah, I thought I detected a northern accent when you got annoyed with me last night.”

“That obvious, was it? Of course, you’ve lived in the south, you’ll have picked up on it straight away.”

“So where did Kerrieanne come from?”

“I’m not actually sure. It was after we settled in Reading when I was fourteen, I know that. Alan didn’t like it. He always calls me Mel, just to be contrary. And David, that’s my current boyfriend, insists on shortening Kerrie to Kay.”

“You said you’d been with your husband for fifteen years. You can’t have been very old when you got married.”

“Old enough. I’m thirty-eight, if that’s what you’re angling for.”

“I didn’t–“

“Yes you did. Now it’s your go.”

Only fair, I suppose.

“Twenty-three. Twenty-four in September.”

“Your husband, silly,” she laughs.

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

I wonder what she’d say if I told her I’ve only ever seen photographs of him.

“Have it your own way.” She pats my arm. “Come on, let’s give 6 Redyuff Close the once-over before the heavens open.”

As we make our way back down the path I’m struck by a series of puzzling thoughts. Mademoiselle Malraux left Helen the summer I sat my A levels, and by all accounts the couple parted on less than amicable terms. That fits neatly with the date of the will quoted in the solicitor’s letter; it’s natural that Helen should want to exclude her former lover from any settlement she may previously have made.

Yet it rests uneasily with the message on the headstone.

Adieu, mon amour.

That doesn’t sound like a woman who still felt scorned and rejected. Not forgetting what it must have cost her, even for a memorial that size.

As for the rest of it, how on earth could Helen have saved the world — no, the women of the world — by dying? Had she found she was suffering from a contagious disease that only affected the female half of the population, and done herself in to stop it spreading?

But you hear all sorts in this trade. Like Bob’s wasn’t the only body those kids found on Carr House Sands the next day.

“Sad, isn’t it?”

Kerrie has stopped beside a grave festooned with fresh flowers, the borders swept clean of wind-blown sand and other debris. A few feet away lies an altogether more neglected plot, marked only by a small wooden cross leaning at a precarious angle and an urn from which jut a handful of withered stalks.

“Comes to us all in the end,” I remind her, for want of anything more profound to say.

“I mean that some are remembered and others aren’t.”

“Luck of the draw, I suppose.”

“I believe it’s more to do with the distance we put between ourselves and other people. Isn’t there a saying, ‘every stranger is a friend you haven’t been introduced to yet’? Or something like that.”

She takes my arm, as though we’d known one another for years. For a reason I can’t put my finger on I’m grateful for the contact.

It doesn’t take a mathematician with the perspicacity of a Pascal to postulate that Neptune’s Triangle has four sides. How the misnomer originated is a topic the residents believe is best left for students of local history to ponder; the only thing most of them know — or indeed care about — is that as the bronze deity surveys his watery realm from the middle of an open space less than seventy yards across at its widest point, too small for the council to dignify it with an official title, the name has stuck.

Few of those fortunate enough to own one of the imposing four-storey houses on Princess Terrace or the more modest dwellings on Redheugh Close, which face what is in effect a miniature park from the north and west respectively, would argue that the headland could possibly offer a more pleasant setting. Here at its south-eastern extremity is commanded an unrivalled view of Teeswater Bay, best enjoyed on a bright afternoon when the Cleveland Hills, marching to meet the sea in a sequence of majestic cliffs, are often elucidated in breathtaking detail. The less aesthetically minded may be more appreciative of the man-made hillock known as Battery Point, home to the Heugh lighthouse and the cenotaph honouring amongst others the first casualties to fall on British soil during the Great War, which affords shelter from the fierce gales that lash this exposed section of the Durham coast even in high summer. But for the last three years it has been the exquisite sunken garden at the fully restored statue’s feet that by common agreement has made the Triangle such a desirable place to live.

“This is all very quaint,” smiles Kerrie as she unwittingly parks the Beetle in the very spot Arthur Brookbank’s dilapidated old Wolseley 1500 called home until the death of its owner from a sudden stroke at the tragically early age of forty-eight.

“Isn’t it just,” I murmur, taking care to avoid being overheard this time.

I tend to avoid my old stamping ground if I can. Although it’s beyond dispute that such features as the japanned wrought-iron railings and trim hawthorn hedges have enhanced the environment tremendously, this is no longer the place where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. More than that, I feel both cheated and insulted. If I didn’t know better I could quite easily be persuaded that the council had waited for me to move away before releasing the funds to spruce the area up.

I follow Kerrie along Redheugh Close to the sea wall, which overlooks a foreshore of boulders and rock pools where on a clearer day than this gulls would be wheeling and diving in search of tasty morsels left behind by the retreating tide. To our right stands the house Helen Sutton purchased after she took up her position at Hart Street; like the rest of the terrace its front door opens directly onto the pavement, yet the property is set apart by the double-glazed windows with their genuine hardwood surrounds, a stuccoed exterior of a shade somewhere between mustard and peach, and the neat lines of Flemish tiles adorning the roof. Yet for all the improvements that appear to have been made, it’s not the kind of abode where anyone would expect to find a relatively young woman whose assets would eventually realise more than half a million pounds.

A paved walkway leads us around the side of the house to Albion Crescent. Perhaps thirty feet below, the Heugh breakwater extends into the mist like a causeway to some ghostly otherworld, an impression reinforced by the low, funereal boom of the foghorn. Further on languish the wrack-covered remains of the outdoor swimming baths, destroyed in a storm a quarter of a century ago, and a promenade whose only amenities are an empty children’s paddling pool and a crazy golf course presided over by a hut so decrepit its last coat of paint was probably applied by a man who’d turned up for work wearing a doublet and hose.

We pause at the top of a flight of steps that seem to have been cemented onto the vertical concrete as a last-minute addition. On the opposite side of the road stands the Kirkham public house, a prominent TO LET sign fastened to the wall above the mock-Grecian portico. Whitewash has been brushed over the windows, whilst the picnic tables and benches set out on the patio are speckled with bird droppings.

Another Northcroft success story. My father’s coffin must be corkscrewing its way to the centre of the earth.

“So this is where it all happened?” asks Kerrie, placing far more trust in the railings she’s resting against than I’m prepared to.

“So they say. Apparently Carol ran into the pub — it hadn’t closed down then, of course — at about a quarter to eight with blood pouring from her forehead, screaming for them to call 999 ‘cause her husband had fallen in the sea. Then she passed out.”

“And when she came round she couldn’t remember anything?”

“If you want my opinion she’s lucky to have survived at all. She had to have followed Bob onto the breakwater, or else she couldn’t have seen what went on. When the tide’s in and the wind’s coming straight from the east just going down there’s as good a method of committing suicide as I can think of.”

“Could that be what he did?”

“He phoned his son-in-law earlier in the weekend, said he’d talked the bank into lending him the money to buy his own fishing boat. The guy was over the moon.”

Kerrie shakes her head.

“It doesn’t make sense. He must’ve known how dangerous the conditions were. Why would he risk his life like that? I don’t understand.”

“You’re not the only one.”

I head across the road at an angle, aiming for number 16. In daylight it looks just as forbidding as it did last night. Why the Hodgsons wanted to swap that nice little house I remember them having on Lumley Square for a hulking pile like this defies logic.

I open the gate and walk up the steps to the front door. Once again there’s no reply to my knock. I bend down to squint through the letter box. Sure enough, the note I addressed to Carol Vasey is on the mat where I dropped it.

“I shouldn’t bother, sweetheart,” I hear Kerrie call from the gate. “No one’s lived here for months.”

I turn towards her, puzzled.

“Months? How d’you work that out? Sylv said she only got married about six weeks ago, remember?”

“Think about it. Every morning when she pulled back the curtains, the first thing she’d see was the place where she lost her husband. No wonder she wanted to leave.”

“It’s not up for sale...”

“I don’t know, perhaps she wants to divide it into flats.”

We walk back to Redheugh Close in silence. The feeling that something isn’t quite right is impossible to escape.

Because Helen Sutton died the same night as Bob Hodgson, that’s why.

If only I could wrap my head around the implications of that one simple sentence.

At the corner we’re met by a wiry, beak-nosed woman in her sixties, wiping her hands on the apron she wears over a pinafore dress florid enough to qualify for a Britain In Bloom award.

“It’s Ruth Pattison, isn’ it? I thought it was you when I seen the two o’ yers go past earlier on. I said to meself I know that lass. Then I remembered Doreen Garbutt tellin’ us yer was back in the town workin’ at Norah’s an’ yer’d gone ginger like yer sister did. Yer don’t recognise us, do yer? Elsie Harbron. Yer went to school with our Jim’s youngest, Paula.” She looks at Kerrie. “Who’s this, one o’ yer mates from down south?”

I’m not sure which depresses me more, the fact that my presence in the town appears to be common knowledge or realising that I’m now officially a redhead.

“Her name’s Kerrieanne Latimer. She’s staying at the Gladstone while–“

“I’ll come straight to the point, Mrs Harbron,” interjects Kerrie. “Your neighbour Miss Sutton left a considerable sum of money to my father, who passed on about seven months ago. He was called William O’Rourke, although most people knew him as Billy. Did Helen ever mention him to you?”

Elsie’s expression hardens.

“If ‘e ‘ad owt to do with ‘er, yer better off lettin’ sleepin’ dogs lie, that’s what I reckon. There’s things went on in that ‘ouse...naw, yer’ll not ‘ear about ‘em from me. Not because o’ what they said, mind. They don’t frighten Elsie Harbron, I don’t care ‘ow many blokes in suits they send round.”

Kerrie and I exchange sidelong glances.

“What are you talking about?” she asks Elsie. “Has someone threatened you?”

“They tried. Told ‘us if the bobbies knocked on the door I should just say I never seen or ‘eard nowt that night ‘cause I was in watchin’ the telly with the sound turned up — if I knew what was good for ‘us, they said.”

“Was this the night Helen died?” I put in.

“And poor Bob Hodgson, God rest ‘is soul. He might ‘ave mercy on ‘ers too, I mean when all’s said an’ done she wasn’ such a bad sort.” Elsie gestures towards the statue. “Did yers know she paid for that lot out ‘er own pocket? Got a surveyor in an’ everything. Come all the way from London. Aye, I know it was Bob that badgered the rest o’ them big fat lazy idle beggars down the Borough Hall to give ‘er plannin’ permission, but I’m tellin’ yer, without the dosh Helen stumped up they wouldn’ve planted a single flower. She wanted that kept quiet, o’ course. Said there was enough nosy parkers pryin’ into ‘er doin’s as it was.”

I rein in my frustration. This is going nowhere faster than a play co-written by Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter.

“Could those men have had anything to do with the French girl?” wonders Kerrie.

Elsie furrows her brows, then beckons us closer.

“Wouldn’ surprise me. Nasty piece o’ work, she was. Helen never made a better choice in ‘er life than when she told that ‘un to sling ‘er ‘ook. I remember it like it was the other day. I was doin’ me step when I ‘eard the door open an’ out the pair o’ them came. Went at it like ‘ammer an’ tongs they did, an’ the language they were usin’...then Helen said summat to ‘er, must’ve been in French ‘cause I never understood a word of it, and yer know what, the frog went down like a sack o’ taties. Aye, true as I’m standin’ ‘ere now. I thought for a minute Helen ‘ad stabbed ‘er with a knife. Well, she crawled into that flash car of ‘ers on ‘er ‘ands and knees, then drove off like she was Stirlin’ Moss. That was the last we ever seen of ‘er, an’ good riddance too if y’ask me.”

Elsie refuses to tell us more, and shuffles back to number 5 with the warning that ‘nowt good ever come from rakin’ up the past’.

Kerrie lets out a loud sigh.

“What d’you make of that, sweetheart?”

“I don’t know...but I wouldn’t mind a word or two with Mademoiselle Malraux.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

I turn away, assuming that this part of our inquiry is at an end. Kerrie, however, has other ideas. Less than a minute later we’re in the back street, trying the latch on the tall wooden gate set in the stout Victorian brickwork. As I expected it’s bolted shut, but my companion’s eyes have already picked out the teenage boy kicking a football back and forth against the wall some fifty yards away.

“That’s a stroke of luck,” she says. “Come on, we’ll get him to climb over and let us in.”

“How are we going to do that?”

She unzips her windcheater, then does the same to my cagoule.

“Shouldn’t be too difficult for a couple of busty babes like us.”

Which is how we find ourselves in a yard that has been transformed into a private xeriscape of trellised walls and terracotta tiles edged with dwarf conifers and other assorted shrubs, all dominated by an ornate stone fountain in the shape of a wood nymph I estimate must have added a few hundred to the house’s asking price on its own. Wherever we look, we find evidence that Helen spared no expense in making her home as comfortable as was humanly possible. What was once an outside lavatory now houses a state-of-the-art combination boiler. An extension has been built that could act either as a laundry room or a small conservatory. Visible through the kitchen window are the stainless steel sink and work surfaces that glisten in spite of the ever-worsening light. That the house remains unsold so long after its owner gave up the ghost says more about Northcroft’s economic plight than a wad of government statistics.

Kerrie pushes at the door; to her delight it’s unlocked. Smirking like a naughty schoolgirl sneaking into the staff room to put a spider in her maths teacher’s lunch box, she seizes my wrist and drags me inside.

Although only the fixtures and fittings remain, the glass-panelled interior doors, Artexed ceilings, sumptuous deep-pile carpets, burnished mahogany shelves and brass fin de siá¨cle lampshades all bear eloquent witness to the fact that here was a woman who valued fine craftsmanship over all other considerations. The building has been completely re-wired, and the lack of mildew or condensation suggests the existence of a number of damp courses.

The first clue that not everything is as it should be comes when the door to one of the upstairs rooms declines to move more than an inch at a time. I heave for all I’m worth, but I’m a girl now and my strength isn’t what it was; in the end all I can do is add my weight to Kerrie’s until we finally shift the object on the other side far enough for us to squeeze through.

“Someone didn’t want to be disturbed,” she observes, frowning at the sandbags stuffed into the removal crate blocking the way in.

“It was probably kids,” I suggest.

“You think so? In that case they were a lot tidier than mine. I can’t see any cigarette ends or sweet wrappers lying about.” She steps across to the window and runs a finger along the sill. “Not much dust. That means whoever it was, they were here fairly recently.”

I open the louvered wall closet. At the bottom resides a casket the size of a small picnic hamper. Fashioned from sandalwood or some similar material, the lacquered surface is decorated with swirling arabesque calligraphy inlaid in gold.

“If they were burglars then they missed this,” I remark.

“Sweetheart, it’s absolutely gorgeous!” gushes Kerrie as I drag it into the centre of the floor and my spine makes the discovery that it’s a lot heavier than it looks. “My friend Cathryn simply adores anything like this. When I finally get round to meeting Mrs Vasey I must ask her if I can take this back with me.”

“Why bother? She obviously doesn’t know it’s here, or why would she leave it for any Tom, Dick or Harry to walk away with? I’m no Arthur Negus, but even I can tell it’s worth a penny or two.”

“Hmm...you may be right. We’ll have a look inside, then you can help me carry it down to the car. On second thoughts, it might be safer in my room. You don’t mind, do you sweetheart?”

Of course I don’t. What’s a slipped disc compared to her mate’s soft spot for exotic artefacts? I hope for her sake there hasn’t been a problem with the solicitor’s cheque clearing, because I have no intention of paying the chiropractor’s bill myself.

Kerrie kneels to unfasten the metal clasp holding down the casket’s lid. I sit beside her, the more adventurous part of me hoping we find something more interesting than sacks full of sand.

It isn’t disappointed.

The first item she lifts out I take to be a lump of black cloth, but is in fact a stack of neatly folded jackets and dresses. She picks up one of the latter and holds the material to her cheek.

“Mmm…like velvet, but softer,” she says, passing it across.

I hold the dress in front of me. It’s sleeveless, with a demure lace collar and a diaphanous bodice that has built-in support; the skirt flares out from a narrow waist to a hem that on someone my height would struggle to cover the knees. I have no way of telling where the garment was made, since the label at the top of the zip looks to have been cut or torn off.

There are five others, all identical in design to the first. Kerrie stares at them for a little while, then stands and pulls me to my feet.

“Thirty-eight trumps twenty-three,” she grins, slinking behind me to slide the cagoule from my shoulders.

“You’re joking!” I laugh, but this isn’t a woman accustomed to taking no for an answer.

“It’s your fault for being so young. Come on, you know you’re dying to.”

In fact I’d rather sit through a dozen episodes of Crossroads with my eyelids stapled open, but I can’t be bothered to waste time arguing with her. And at least I have no qualms about stripping off in front of another woman; they disappeared that first Sunday in Belvedere House, when Suki insisted I swap my T-shirt and jeans for a pair of tights and one of Tim’s cricket jumpers so I could get used to moving about with my legs on display.

A few moments later I’m flicking my hair off my shoulders as the material settles and I realise not only that the gauze covering my breasts is so thin it’s practically invisible, the support makes no attempt at all to hide my nipples.

“Doesn’t leave much to the imagination,” I chuckle as Kerrie studies the emblem, shaped like a Chinese pictogram, sewn in gold thread onto the collar. “Talk about showing all points north!”

She shrugs her shoulders.

“They were lesbians. What did you expect, dungarees and hobnail boots?”

I start to redden, and not only because I almost let my cover slip. I’d imagined that living on the south coast for nearly four and a half years had imbued me with a more cosmopolitan attitude than those who stayed behind in Northcroft. My comment gave the lie to that delusion. To Kerrie I’m just another hidebound headlander, with no more sophistication than a jam sandwich.

But my blushes are spared by the rest of the casket’s contents.

Three small phials of black ink. A tube filled with a clear resin. A jar of what seems to be moisturising cream. A dozen or more long strings of heavy black beads. A bag tied with knotted twine that spills out bracelets, necklaces, and rings mounted with sparkling black jewels, as well as scores of loose gemstones of differing sizes, all of them black and all backed with felt, as if they’re meant to be attached to something. Most bizarre of the lot, an implement that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a tattooist’s parlour.

Kerrie pulls the stopper from one of the bottles. To the underside is affixed a delicate cosmetic brush. She sniffs it, her head recoiling.

“This is nail varnish!” she exclaims. “Did Helen ever say she worked as a make-up artist, something along those lines?”

“Not to my knowledge. Why?”

“Because what we’ve got here could easily be a collection of props left over from a third-rate horror film. All that’s missing is a set of fangs.”

I lean forward and pick up the jar containing the thick white gel. On the side I can see a name, Niculescu, and an address, though efforts have been made to scratch out the latter.

“You know something, you might not be that far off the mark. I can’t quite read the name of the town, but I’d hazard a guess it’s in Romania.”

“Really? Why d’you say that?”

Me and my big mouth again. How many more times...?

I have to think fast. Admitting that I remember England’s 1-0 victory over that country in the group stage of the 1970 World Cup, when nearly half the opponents’ surnames ended with the element —escu, simply won’t do.

“I, uh...I once went out with a guy whose father was born in Romania. Before I met Tim, obviously. Stefan, he was called. Stefan, uh...Stefan Stefanescu. It means ‘Stephen, son of Stephen’. Or something like that.” Go on, Rich. Dig away. “I said to him that’s not very original, but apparently it’s fairly widespread in their part of Europe.”

Much to my relief, Kerrie appears happy to accept this rubbish as gospel. Maybe I’m better at telling lies than I give myself credit for.

Or she wasn’t paying that much attention.

Her hand has found what is evidently the casket’s false bottom. She slides it out, revealing a large dog-eared notebook bearing a Woolworth’s trademark. As she opens it, I see her grope inside her bag for her glasses. A moment later her eyes light up behind them.

“Come and look at this, sweetheart!” she cries. “I think we’ve hit the jackpot!”

Glued to the first page is a Xeroxed copy of a newspaper report dated February 23rd 1946. It carries the story of a collision between the Sheffield Victoria to Marylebone express and a goods train at Grendon Underwood junction in Buckinghamshire. Among the eight passengers to lose their lives were Frank Sutton, a civil servant from Loughborough, and his wife Marjorie. Their eleven year old daughter Helen escaped with cuts and bruises.

“She was an orphan, then,” I say, feeling fairly safe in stating the obvious.

“Mmm...and Loughborough’s only about twelve miles from Leicester, which is one of the places we lived after dad brought us across the water in ‘47. I’ll have to check with my sisters, but volunteering to help disadvantaged children is just the sort of thing I’d expect him to have done.”

“Still, for Helen to have remembered his kindness after so many years…”

“It’s not very likely, I know. But at least it’ll give Shannon and Clare something to chew on. Now, I wonder what other goodies she’s left us?”

Overleaf we find a teaching certificate awarded in the summer of 1958 by Loughborough College of Physical Education, and after that another press clipping naming Helen as one of a team of walkers who raised money for charity by finishing the journey from Land’s End to John o’Groats.

Then nothing — until the three photographs right at the end of the book.

The first features four smiling girls in their late teens or very early twenties, dressed in hiking gear and standing against a spectacular backdrop of upland meadows and forested mountains. At the foot of the page, in a neat if slightly immature feminine hand, has been added a caption.

Outside Vatra Bucovinei, 31/7/64

“July 1964...” I mutter. “That can’t have been very long before Helen moved here. What d’you reckon, a last holiday abroad before she started work in the frozen north?”

“Assuming it was Helen who took the picture,” Kerrie cautions me.

“No, not a holiday. She was twenty-nine that year, and those girls are all a lot younger. Some sort of outward bound course, maybe? But it definitely wasn’t in Romania. For a start, it’s almost impossible to get a visa unless you’ve got family there or you’re invited as part of a delegation. And I’m fairly sure they don’t let you wander around the countryside taking snapshots.”

I turn the page, and find four names and addresses. Presumably they belong to the young women in the photograph.

Sarah-Jane Collingwood
Bywell Lodge, Bywell nr Hexham

Susan Dwyer
33 Chalice Lane, Glastonbury

Lynne Macreadie
19 Kilbirnie Road, Dunoon

Sonia Kessell
Aptmnt 304, Machtenslaan 134, Molenbeek, Brussels

“Why d’you think the first one’s been crossed out?” asks Kerrie.

“I’ve no idea. It was fifteen years ago. Anything could’ve happened.”

The next image contains more thick foliage, but this time it’s outdone by the magnificent gilded dome and four tall minarets rearing into the cerulean sky. The date below is given as August 1st.

“’The moschee at Dragoiasa’,” Kerrie reads out. “That must be the local word for a mosque.”

“It’s not just a mosque, though. Can you see all those other buildings peeping from behind the trees?”

“So where on earth were they?”

“Well, it’s got to be within a day’s walk of that other place. As for which country, I honestly couldn’t say. It might be Turkey, I suppose...”

The final photograph has us turning to each other, dumbstruck.

A young woman sits in a high-walled courtyard where fountains play amid columns and recesses embellished with the vibrant abstract patterns characteristic of Islamic architecture at its most splendid.

But this is no follower of the Prophet. Were she to be seen in any public place from Damascus to Djakarta, stoning or an even worse fate would undoubtedly await her.

She is completely bald, with what looks to be a line of black gemstones going back from the top of her forehead along her scalp to the crown and possibly beyond. A dozen or so smaller stones are set in each of her brows. There is an oriental slant to her heavily painted eyes; at their corners are etched a series of tiny black dots forming patterns strikingly similar to the pictogram on my jacket’s lapel. Her lips are black too, matching the lacquer coating the beringed fingers and thumbs interlaced in her lap.

And her dress is indistinguishable from the one I’m still wearing.

I point to the caption.

“I’m guessing Sorina’s her name. But what the hell is a ‘kuzkardesh gara’?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” replies Kerrie, standing up. She lights a cigarette, then opens the window to let out the smoke. “But it seems to me that what we’ve stumbled on is a kit to turn somebody into one.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I laugh. “It’s a costume. It must be.”

“It’s not. I can tell.”

“How?”

“Look at her face, Ruth. That’s a fanatic if ever I saw one.”

She might have a point. Sorina’s lips are curled in the self-satisfied smile of one whose faith is absolute and unwavering. Not only that, but the resolution is good enough for me to see several large freckles on her shaven scalp. No actress would say goodbye to her hair for the sake of a low-budget vampire movie.

Kerrie starts rubbing her chin.

“You know something, I think we’ve been barking up the wrong tree. Pass me that jar, would you?” She scoops out a dollop of the viscous white cream with her finger and holds it to her nose. “Helen didn’t bring this back with her, at least not from that trip. This stuff isn’t fifteen years old. It would have separated out by now, gone all brittle and lost its aroma.”

“What are you getting at?”

She asks me to hand her the notebook. Her eyes narrow as she turns to the page with the four names and addresses.

“I’ve heard of Hexham. It’s not that far from here, is it?”

“Fifty miles, give or take...”

“Then that’s where we’re going next. I think Helen was in charge of those girls. Something happened out there, and she felt responsible. These things were sent to her, maybe not long before she died, as a reminder that the incident hadn’t been forgotten.”

“You’re talking about blackmail?”

“Remember the men who threatened Mrs Harbron?”

“Yes, but–“

“We need to speak with someone who knows the Collingwood family. Wherever Sarah-Jane went that summer, I don’t think she came back.”

As we begin tidying up, I glance once again at the portrait of the kuzkardesh gara. What message had she heard, that it persuaded her to undergo such a radical transformation?

Then I remember the incident that took place outside Hayden Hall five months ago, when I pulled off Suki Tatsukichi’s wig and saw the scars defacing her scalp.

That is a story I shall never tell.

Were you there too, Suki? Did you become one of those women? How recently did you leave them, that your hair had only just begun growing back last November?

Around the time that Helen Sutton received the casket, maybe?

A few weeks before she died?

Farewell, my love. You died to save the women of the whole world.

Suddenly I’m shivering, and not because of the cold air coming through the window.

Long before the hands on the clock have crept round to half-past three I’m thoroughly bored. The only thing on the television is a bowl of wax fruit, I’ve read every newspaper, magazine and brochure in the lounge from cover to cover, and played so many games of noughts and crosses against myself I don’t know if I’m still me or I’ve changed into the person I’m trying to beat. To make matters worse, the rain has arrived as promised and shows no more sign of letting up than a heavyweight boxing champion who had discovered five minutes before climbing into the ring that his latest challenger was not only having an affair with his wife but had also insulted his mother, made lewd advances towards his under-age niece and defrauded his grandparents out of every last penny of their hard-earned savings.

Damn and blast the woman! Just when I was beginning to warm to her, she had to go and pull a trick like that.

“I’m setting you free for an hour or two,” Kerrie informed me after we’d dropped her beloved casket off at the Gladstone — or rather after we’d lugged it up two flights of stairs to her room — and Sylvia sauntered in to announce that she’d managed to get in touch with Carol Vasey, then arranged for the two of us to have lunch with her at the Wooler, a pub in the swankiest part of New Stranton on the edge of West Park. “It’s for the best, sweetheart. If Carol still feels under suspicion, she’ll be much less likely to come out of her shell if I’m with someone she knows lives nearby.”

What does Carol think I’m going to do, hide a microphone down my bra so I can surreptitiously record their conversation, then make a transcript and send it to the Daily Mirror? Stand on an orange box in front of what used to be Ingram’s reading it out through a megaphone?

Who needs all this Agatha Christie bullshit anyway? So Mademoiselle Malraux might have been trying to blackmail Helen. A load of good it did her. And even if we knew for sure that she sent the casket, how can we prove that the memories it triggered caused Helen’s heart to fail?

Old Elsie was right, some things are better left alone.

Like how Suki Tatsukichi could have left a religious cult and shortly afterward joined a secret branch of the MoD, where she was given a higher level of clearance than the Prime Minister.

Or that a photograph of another member of this cult came into the possession of Helen Sutton, who happened to have taught both the girl Suki was chosen to help through her adjustment and the person responsible for stealing her original body.

Or that Suki found her a job in Northcroft, where Helen died only days after the theft occurred…

The stench must have them holding their noses in Tahiti.

I’m hunting among the jigsaw puzzles and board games for a pack of playing cards when I hear the front door slam shut.

“Ruth? Where are you?”

Kerrie Latimer, back from her slap-up meal at last. I wonder what she was stuffing into her face while I had to make do with a cheese and tomato sandwich and a strawberry yoghurt?

That’s weird, there’s no sign of her car...

The stupid cow’s run out of petrol, that’s what she’s done. Well, if she imagines for one nanosecond that I’m about to go traipsing down to Cockburn’s for a gallon in weather like this she’s got another think coming.

But much as I’d like to, I can’t avoid her for the rest of the week.

“In here,” I call.

“Right,” she says, stamping in from the foyer. “Whatever you’re doing, leave it and come with me.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

I grab my cagoule and follow her outside, feeling like I’ve just been caught looking for conkers when I’m supposed to be sitting an important maths test.

Trusty sidekick? A puppy on a lead is what she should have asked for.

Thankfully the Beetle is parked a mere ten yards along Marine Parade, and the engine is running.

“Get in!” she barks.

“Okay, keep your hair on.”

I settle in my seat, pushing my fringe back from my forehead. Kerrie takes a moment or two to refresh her make-up, then turns to me with storm-filled eyes.

“You’ve got some serious explaining to do, my girl,” she launches at me.

“What are you on about? What did Carol tell you?”

“She told me lots of things. But I don’t intend to discuss them here. I want you to take me somewhere we’re in no danger of being disturbed.”

“Fine. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Said without moving a single eyelash.

I instruct her to take the same route as this morning, but to bear left at Cemetery Road under the cavernous Throston railway bridge, as if we were heading for New Stranton. After about a mile I ask her to turn left again. We cross the single-track line that connects Northcroft with its neighbour and enter the devastated dockland, a place for which the word ‘shameful’ might have been specially coined.

Formerly partners in prosperity, the two boroughs now glare at one another over a desperate landscape, petty princelings in a conquered kingdom contesting the succession to a non-existent throne. Office buildings, warehouses, foundries and engineering works stand idle and boarded up. Crumbling brick walls enclose compounds piled high with rotting wood, discarded sheets of corrugated iron, rusting storage tanks and obsolete machinery. Flotsam drifts upon the scummy surfaces of abandoned timber ponds, collecting in fetid corners to mingle with the burgeoning heaps of refuse littering their shores. Mournful rows of condemned wagons wait in weed-choked sidings, denied the kindness of one final shunt to the scrapyard. Above them the sinister outlines of redundant harbour cranes hover like spectral carrion birds.

The road comes to an uncertain end between sand-strewn mounds of rubble and broken glass. Away to our left, sorry ranks of lamp posts no one has thought it worth taking the trouble to remove betray the former presence of a grid of streets going down to a beach now become a graveyard for old washing machines, bicycle frames, mattresses, sofas and car tyres. On the side of a workmen’s shack some local wag has sprayed an apposite salutation:

Kerrie eases the Beetle to a stop next to where she hopes the kerb will be.

“This is that awful place I could see from the cemetery, isn’t it?” she says. “What happened here?”

“The port authority went bankrupt. They relied too much on the coal trade. When that all started going to the Tyne at the end of the ‘60s they didn’t have the money to make the docks suitable for the big container ships you need nowadays for seaborne traffic to be viable. They were given the chance to merge with Teesport, but they turned it down. Too many vested interests, I suppose. Then they lost out on the contracts to build the new oil rigs. The factory owners saw which way the wind was blowing and cut their losses. What makes me laugh is they keep saying they’re going to flatten the place and put up modern, purpose-built units. I mean, we can’t fill the industrial estates we’ve got. If they’d only listened to the–“

I break off, aware that she’s miles away. I think about lighting a cigarette, but I’ve left my bag at the Gladstone so I occupy my mind by wiping some of the condensation from the window. The rain is still falling heavily, giving me little option but to stay where I am and wait for her to let me know what I’ve done wrong.

She opens her mouth, then hesitates, as if by going on she’ll commit us both to a course of action from which there can be no return.

“Come on,” I sigh. “Get it off your chest.”

She turns to me, laying a hand on my sleeve.

“I want you to think very carefully before you answer this question. When did you last see Helen Sutton?”

I feel the blood freeze in my veins. Although the MoD’s file on Ruth made no mention of Helen, neither did it give me any reason to believe that I’d inherited the ability to speak French like a native. With such crucial gaps in my knowledge, I run a serious risk of ending up in a situation I can’t talk my way out of.

Well done, Suki. First-rate job.

“What d’you want to know that for?” I pout in an attempt to stave off the inevitable.

“Just tell me.”

“The day we finished at Hart Street, I guess.”

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be. It was more than ten years ago, don’t forget.”

“It couldn’t have been last October?”

I’ll make it easy for you. Hart Street school. Miss Sutton’s class. She told us to sit together right at the back because you always came top in tests and I was always second.

I knew it.

I fucking knew it.

Ruth came to Northcroft before she took my body. She came here with a specific purpose in mind, failed to achieve it and reckoned she’d have a better chance if she was disguised as Richard Brookbank.

Because Helen would have trusted Richard enough to welcome him into her home.

I wasn’t just a decoy.

Ruth wanted something from Helen — something so important to her she concocted an elaborate scheme to steal the transfer device and manipulate Richard’s movements so she could swap bodies with him.

And the MoD let her, because they needed to find out what it was.

The question is, did it have anything to do with the kuzkardesh gara? If so, how did a humble lab technician learn about them?

You work for us now.

Blindfolded, it seems, and with both hands tied behind my back.

I need time to digest this information more thoroughly — but that’s the one thing Kerrie doesn’t look as though she’s ready to give me.

“October,” I echo tonelessly.

“You were spotted one afternoon driving away from the school.”

“Who by?”

“Carol’s daughter Elaine, who has children there.”

“She was mistaken.”

“No she wasn’t. Elaine spoke to Helen later. She confirmed that it was you.”

Marvellous. How the hell do I get out of this one when I don’t know what else Kerrie was told?

I wait for her to continue, but the ball is in my court and likely to stay there. Maybe if I concede a few inches of ground now it might encourage her to say more, and I’ll have some idea of what I’m up against.

“All right, you win. When things went belly up with Tim and all I got from my parents was ‘we told you so’ I thought I’d make a fresh start. I hadn’t decided where. Northcroft was just one of the avenues I explored. I don’t know why I was under the impression Helen might have been able to help me. I was never one of her favourite pupils.”

Is that the beginning of a smile I can see creeping across her face? It bloody well is, you know.

Take a bow, Rich. You’ve dodged the bullet yet again.

“Yes, Elaine said that she didn’t lend the sympathetic ear you were hoping for. That’s one of the consequences of behaving selfishly as a child, sweetheart. Teachers tend to remember that at the expense of your more positive attributes.” She reaches out to touch my shoulder. “I understand why you didn’t mention this before. Everything to do with your husband is off limits, full stop. That’s your choice, and while I think it’s the wrong one I respect you for sticking to it. But if we’re ever going to solve this riddle we have to work together. Three people lost their lives that night, and after what I’ve seen and heard today I’m beginning to wonder if any of them died from natural causes. I can’t give the matter my full attention if I feel you’re keeping vital information from me. The fact that Helen told you she was considering leaving the profession, for instance.”

“It slipped my mind. I’m sorry if–“

Three people?

But you hear all sorts in this trade. Like Bob’s wasn’t the only body those kids found on Carr House Sands the next day.

It’s that runaway train again. If I keep my mouth shut it might just steam on by.

But the whistle is imploring me to step onto the track, and I’m powerless to resist.

I have to know.

Kerrie’s hand has moved to cover mine. Her face is full of concern.

“Are you unwell, sweetheart? You’ve gone very pale.”

“You said three people died. Helen Sutton. Bob Hodgson.” And now my mouth’s so dry I can scarcely move my tongue. “Who…who was the third?”

“A boy you and Elaine’s sister were at junior school with. Richard something or other, in a car accident. I assumed you knew.”

My head feels as if it’s been smashed against the side of a cliff. The numbness spreads, affecting my arms, my hands, my legs...

Sad, isn’t it...that some are remembered and others aren’t.

Richard Brookbank’s body lies decomposing in the ground. I will be trapped in this bag of flesh, blood and bones until I too have breathed my last.

I will be a woman for the rest of my life.

November 4, 1966

My saviour turns and walks back across the grass, leaving me to my fate. I can’t find the strength to run away, so I resign myself to what must surely follow.

But Basher makes no move to renew his assault. Instead he is sobbing like a little girl whose favourite doll has just been torn to pieces by a vicious bully.

“She didn’t...she didn’t ‘ave to do that to us,” he wails. “I would’ve said I was sorry.”

“Do what to you?” I ask, mystified by this not unwelcome turn of events.

“Yer don’t wanna know. Yer just don’t.” Tears still streaming down his face, he holds out a hand. “Mates, eh?”

I’m too relieved to refuse.

“Yeah, all right.”

“Don’t say owt to anybody, will yer? If they ask yer, tell ‘em I knacked yer again an’ now we’re even.”

Basher races along Tennent Street as though all the devils in hell are in hot pursuit. Of what happened to him that November evening on Neptune’s Triangle he will never breathe a word to a living soul.

The dream fades, nudging me into that nebulous state between sleep and wakefulness.

Basher Howell was a changed lad after that. He stuck in at school, passed his 11-plus and only ever got into fights if he saw someone was being picked on. He used to say life was too short to make enemies just to prove how hard you were. I can recall Miss Cattrick telling the deputy head what a strange thing that was for a kid his age to come out with.

When we went to Westbourne I realised that Mademoiselle Malraux had done me a huge favour, since the Stranton lads had it in for us ‘cod heads’. None of them had a second go at Bash, mind. While we were never what you’d call best friends, I discovered later that hanging about with him saved me from the kind of treatment they dished out to Piggford, dragging him up to Summer Hill and leaving him tied to a tree all day with his trousers around his ankles. Not only did he have that to put up with, he’d get home to find he was in trouble for knocking off.

Then, at the start of the Fifth Year, our French teacher introduced us to the new assistant, with her shiny dark hair and lovely oriental eyes. Bash didn’t seem to remember her at all. But that was when he stopped coming to school regularly. Not many weeks were to pass before the morning assembly where we would be told that he had jumped from the top of the Transporter Bridge and drowned in the oily waters of the River Tees…

And at last I understand what may have driven him to that.

There is no safe haven in which I can drop anchor, no refuge from the storm that has broken.

Only the silence and solitude of the tomb.

I think she’s come down with something. Has there been a lot of ‘flu about?

More than usual. We’ve had a bad winter, of course.

Mmm, it was the same in the south.

Kerrie and Sylvia helping me to my room. How long ago was that? Three hours? Four?

What do I care?

Nothing matters any more.

Nothing.

Richard Brookbank is dead. I will be a woman for the rest of my life.

For the rest of my life...

I cover my face with my hands. I want the world to end tonight. Whether America invades Iran and the Soviets respond by pouring tanks across the border, or an asteroid lands smack in the middle of ICI Billingham it’s all the same to me.

As long as I don’t see another morning.

Very slowly, as though every chemical reaction taking place in my muscles has to be initiated separately, I raise my head from the pillow. In what remains of the light I study the now familiar configurations of tiny freckles peppering the skin between my elbows and the sleeves of my T-shirt, then watch the recurrent motion of my breasts as I take in air and expel it.

My freckles.

My breasts.

Not Ruth’s.

Mine.

For as long as I continue to exist.

I’m female, and I always will be.

Why didn’t you tell me, Suki? Did you think it was kinder to let me discover the truth on my own?

Or was it guilt that stilled your tongue?

And what did you say to my mother? What pack of lies did she lose sleep over after she’d consigned her only child’s coffin to the cold and the dark?

Fuck you.

And fuck everyone who was involved with creating that bloody machine.

Serves you right if it brings society crashing down around your ears.

I pound my fist into the pillow again and again.

Why me?

What was my crime?

It isn’t fucking fair!

You can’t go on like this, Rich. You’ve got to pull yourself together. Nobody’s going to turn the clock back. That part of your life has ended. You’re a girl now. You’re Ruth. There’s no escaping that fact. The choice is yours: cope with it or lose your mind.

The despondency ebbs enough for me to sit up, swing my feet to the floor and take a series of very deep breaths. There will be no repeat of the near breakdown I suffered when I first arrived at Tower House. It seems I’m made of sterner stuff these days.

After all, nothing has changed during the last few hours. I’ve been a girl for nearly five months, and if I’m honest with myself becoming male again would take quite a lot of getting used to.

But I always thought this story would have a different ending. Often that was the one thing that stopped me from giving up altogether.

I walk across to the wash basin and rinse my face. The eyes looking back at me from the mirror are clouded but composed. The time for recriminations has not yet come. If I want to preserve my sanity I must first learn to accept my situation, to view being female as a challenge, not a curse.

Easy to promise, so very hard to deliver.

A gentle tapping sounds at the door. Towel in hand, I open it to find Kerrie Latimer on the landing wearing a typically probing expression.

“Oh, you’re up and about!” she says cheerily. “Sylvia’s in a bit of a kerfuffle, I’m afraid. I think she’s worried that she might have an invalid to care for on top of all the other things she has to do because you’re on sabbatical with me. I said I’d check on you before I went to my room.”

“I’m fine. I just needed to lie down for a bit, that’s all.”

She leads me back to the bed, sits beside me and places a motherly palm on my forehead.

“You don’t seem to have a temperature. Tell me the truth, was it the boy I mentioned?”

“No, I uh…I barely remember him.”

She looks anything but convinced.

“Will you be okay for tomorrow? It’ll be a tiring day. I’m meeting Carol at the solicitor’s at three, and I still want to go to Hexham.”

“No problem. In fact I was just wondering if I should put in an hour or two at the bar.”

“Well make sure you take it easy. You won’t be much use to me if you’re running on empty.”

When she’s gone I light a cigarette and sit on the end of the bed to stare at the red glow shining through the ash.

Richard something or other, in a car accident.

One sentence. Eight words. Thirteen syllables.

How little it takes to spell the end of our hopes and dreams.

But at least the person who took them from me is no more. Justice, albeit of a particularly unsatisfying kind, appears to have been meted out.

Are you certain about that? Do you really think she could have been erased from the picture so easily?

Enough!

What’s done is done. I must put the past behind me, once and for all.

I stub out my cigarette, then sit at the dressing table to brush my hair and see to my make-up. Deftly applying mascara to my lashes, I realise that the girl in the mirror isn’t there any more. All that’s looking back at me is my own reflection.

A reflection of the woman I have had no choice but to become.

The only thing that remains to be decided is what kind of woman I’ll turn out to be.

The evening has drawn to a close without incident. Sensing my mood, few of the customers are prepared to engage me in conversation; those that do limit their discourse to the weather and next month’s general election. Can Jim Callaghan and his beleaguered Labour party withstand the Tory propaganda onslaught? Will Margaret Thatcher be elected as the country’s first female Prime Minister?

Believe it or not, there are people who actually care.

After ten o’clock I start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve made up my mind to get drunk once everyone’s gone home — it won’t take much, considering I’ve scarcely touched a drop in five months. The alcohol itself won’t do me any good at all, but the prospect of a reward at the end of the shift has helped me get through the last hour and twenty minutes without biting anyone’s head off.

Then the rugby lads come in, their training finished for another week. Normally I’d return their suggestive banter with interest; tonight I just let it wash over me. I know that some of the younger players are involved in a contest to see who’ll get off with me first, and the best of British to them. Although the loss of my male inhibitions means I can abide a certain amount of familiarity from both sexes, I look on anything more intimate than a friendly arm around the shoulder as an unwelcome invasion of my personal space.

That may have to change soon. It’s odd to think that after so many years of regarding women as trophies to be competed for and displayed like mooses’ heads in a hunting lodge, from now on I’ll be the prize, I’ll be the one the virile young studs are chasing. I don’t need to consult Marjorie Proops to know that the most effective way of removing myself from the game is to target the player I dislike the least and arrange things so that he catches me.

Let the good times roll...

Well before twenty to eleven I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m not going to allow any extra drinking-up time. The regulars know better than to argue the toss if they can see I’m ‘in one’, and when the marginally taller of the Sewell brothers — Peter or Steve, I can never remember which is which — lopes back into the bar it isn’t to ask me out for the third Wednesday in a row but to fetch the box of matches he’d left on the table.

And to round off a perfect day?

Here comes J G Egerton, runaway winner of the Upper Class Twat Of The Year award. Looking more sheepish than an Australian shearing station, he watches his fiancée flounce upstairs, then slinks towards the counter. I finish collecting the empties before I acknowledge his arrival with a cursory nod of the head.

“Busy?” he enquires, his haughty gaze following my every movement.

“Par for the course.”

“Couldn’t turn in without apologising for this morning’s hoo-ha. Suffice it to say ‘twill not happen again.”

“Forget it,” I tell him. “Ancient history.”

“Very decent of you, my dear. Er, I suppose I’m too late for a nightcap?”

He would ask for a fucking drink now, wouldn’t he?

“Not if you’re a resident,” I sigh. “What’ll it be?”

“Scotch. Single malt, I think. With ice, if you have any. You’ll join me, I hope?”

His patrician eyes blaze, burning off my resistance to his easy charm.

But I don’t smile. Not tonight.

Maybe not ever again.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I admit. “It’s been a long one.”

I pour Egerton a Glenmorangie, and myself a vodka and lime. When I hand him the glass, he doesn’t waste the opportunity to let his fingers slide across mine. I’m almost tempted to lead him on for a while, then give the two-timing cunt the knee in the groin he deserves.

“Actually there was another favour I wanted to beg of you, if you’ll indulge me,” he grins. “Enjoying our stay tremendously, top-notch in every way. But the lady would prefer a continental breakfast, in her room if you could manage to swing it.”

The idea certainly has its merits. If Yvette de Monnier and Kerrie Latimer steer clear of one another tomorrow morning the UN Security Council can adjourn its emergency session free from the fear of a conflict that would make all-out nuclear war seem like a playground squabble over a bag of midget gems. On the other hand...

“I don’t know what Norah would say to that,” I tell him, though I have no doubt whatsoever as to her reaction. Force 9 on the Richter Scale, probably.

“Naturally there’s a crisp oncer for the enterprising young lady who sets the ball rolling, so to speak.”

A quid? A whole quid? And all for me?

Makes up for everything, that does.

I want to tell him to shove his money so far up his arse it’ll block his windpipe. But I’ve got this far without insulting anyone, and that’s got to be worth an extra shot once he’s fucked off and left me alone.

“In that case I’ll see what I can do.”

“Splendid! Knew I could rely on you.”

Egerton takes two pound notes from his wallet and places them on the counter, then drains his glass and wishes me pleasant dreams.

I don’t answer. I can’t.

The wallet fell open for less than a second, but that was long enough for me to have caught a glimpse of the membership card it contained.

Royal blue, with a yellow crescent moon and an eight-pointed star.

The official emblem of Portsmouth Football Club.

It’s yet another strand in the Gordian knot that has been tightening ever since Derek Graveney gave me that package.

In Portsmouth.

And if that’s a coincidence they never listen to reggae in Jamaica.

Not that it makes a scrap of difference now.

I put both of Egerton’s notes in the till, then pick up the single vodka I poured myself at his insistence and hold it beneath the optic. I press the bar once, twice and again for luck.

“Rest in peace, Rich,” I say as I lift the drink to my lips.

It doesn’t touch the sides.

Consciousness returns to me slowly, like a kitten whose trust I lost through playing too roughly. It exacts a cruel retribution, each moment of lucidity more uncomfortable than the last. My back feels cold, there’s a nasty taste in my mouth, and an orchestra consisting solely of a percussion section is performing an extended symphony at the back of my skull. There’s only one conclusion I can draw: I’m in for the mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle and second cousin twice removed of hangovers.

I lift my face from the pillow, reaching out an unsteady hand to grip the bedside table as my sluggish brain tries hard to decode the visual signals my watch is sending it. The smell of congealed vomit drifts up from the jeans lying in a heap on the floor with my other clothes; it brings back unsolicited memories of my guts being spewed into the lavatory bowl, which it appears I didn’t quite reach in the nick of time after all.

And of what led to me to that sorry state.

I should have known better, I suppose. Suki Tatsukichi warned me this body couldn’t process alcohol as quickly or efficiently as the one I was used to. Something about me having a lower proportion of water to fat, so it reaches my brain in a more undiluted state. I might have listened a bit more intently if I’d realised I was going to be stuck with the bloody thing.

It’s an eventuality for which you should certainly prepare yourself.

But I didn’t.

The idea was too horrendous to contemplate.

Now I’ve got to face it head-on.

I’m female. No matter what happens to me, that will never change.

I will be a woman for the rest of my life.

Rest in peace, Rich.

Who was I trying to kid? It’s one thing resolving to cast off my former identity when I’ve just sunk four shots of vodka, quite another to keep that promise in the sober light of a new day.

I’m a girl.

That still shocks me to the core.

And now I know I’ll always be female.

How do I accept that and move on?

You could stop being so negative about it. Remember what Suki told you five months ago in Hayden Hall?

You’re about to embark on a unique journey of discovery. If it turns out to be a one-way trip I suspect that what you’ll gain will far outweigh anything you lose.

Maybe that’s true. There has to be more I can get out of being a woman than periods, mood swings and blokes staring at my tits.

Stifling a yawn, I roll over and groan at the cacophony coming from inside my head. The covers have slid down my hips, but since I can’t find the energy to reach out and pull them over me I lie there counting my goosepimples until my bladder calls a halt to this narcissistic indolence. Unfortunately I obey its commands a little too promptly, and as the room gyrates about me I make a solemn vow never to touch anything stronger than shandy if I live to see Screaming Lord Sutch win a seat in the House of Commons.

When I emerge from the shower an unedifying and decidedly wobbly fifteen minutes later, my headache has eased to a dull throbbing I can just about live with. Clean underwear pushes me a little further along the road to feeling human again — though it also points me firmly in the direction of the wardrobe I have no option but to raid now that my jeans are only good for the laundry basket.

I pull the doors open, frowning at the three pairs of slacks hanging on the left of the rail. One way to break with the past would be to make skirts and dresses my preferred form of attire, and I can’t imagine there’ll ever be a more appropriate moment than this to begin the change.

If only I’d harboured a secret desire to be a transvestite…

I open a new packet of tights and allow my procedural memory to take over, sliding the sheer nylon past my ankles, calves, knees, thighs and hips, then smoothing it upwards until it’s clinging to everything below my middle like a second skin. As I sit at the dressing table to comb my hair I reflect that for the vast majority of girls my age — certainly those who work in offices or aspire to join one of the professions — slipping on a pair of tights first thing in the morning is part of their default routine. It’s only a novelty for me because I haven’t yet acknowledged that I should only be wearing leather, denim and the like to prove I’m not afraid to dress down once in a while.

Before I’ve finished applying my make-up I already have a fairly well-defined mental image of the outfit I want to put together. Soon I’m standing in a sleeveless mauve blouse, laying out a light grey cotton jacket on the bed. I ransack the hangers for the pleated skirt I know will match the latter without making it look like a suit, then take a deep breath as I prepare to spend the next several hours showing my legs to all and sundry.

Holding the skirt by the waistband, I step inside it, pull it up, tuck in my blouse and fasten the zip at the side. The hem ends a few inches above the knee, and flares out so much it’ll probably brush both sides of the doorway, but with my legs sheathed in nylon I can move around and almost forget it’s there. Sitting down is when I’ll have to call upon the rules of deportment Suki instilled in me so thoroughly.

Bend the knees together. Smooth the back as you lower your posterior. Right thigh over left, then spread the hem as far as it’ll let you. Hands folded in your lap, or better still holding your bag. Well done. Now let’s go for a drive. You can practise getting in and out of the car.

What she didn’t tell me was why women, and not men, have to go through all this palaver. At what point in history was it decided that we should be the ones saddled with billowing folds of cloth every time we want to take the weight off our feet?

I put on a pair of black silver-buckled shoes, check my bag and attempt to put yesterday’s events behind me as I get ready to immerse myself in the next instalment of life’s great adventure.

As a girl.

Because that’s what I have to be.

Because that’s who I am.

I don’t hang about; time, tide and breakfast at the Gladstone wait for no one.

Norah Russell reads the note she found beneath the magnetic elephant on the side of the fridge-freezer and fixes me with a look that could transform a jeroboam of the finest Champagne into a liquid only a fish and chip shop or a pickle factory might find a use for. There’s more steam coming from her ears than the Flying Scotsman generated at top speed. Were her hairnet to work loose, it would take off with such force as to leave gaping holes not only in the ceiling and the roof but in all likelihood the ozone layer as well.

“A continental breakfasht?” she seethes. “In her room? Where doesh she think she ish, the Shavoy?”

“I’ll see to it,” says Sylvia, who unlike her mother has ventured abroad several times and doesn’t subscribe to the view that if God had intended her to wander around mainland Europe He wouldn’t have put the English Channel in the way. “She’ll be happy with fruit juice, bread rolls, a slice of Dutch cheese, preserves and coffee. What d’you reckon, Ruth?”

“Sounds okay to me.”

She replies with a long, hard stare.

“Are you all right?”

I rub my bare arms, mainly to give my hands something to do now they haven’t got pockets to stuff themselves into.

“Course. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Are you sure?”

“Said so, didn’t I?”

How old am I, twelve and a half?

Although Norah continues to grumble about ‘foreign muck’ as she cracks eggs into a bowl — for reasons possibly associated with an obscure Nostradamus quatrain she always serves them scrambled on Thursdays — I can’t help but wonder if a sequence of events has been set in motion that could one day revolutionise eating habits at the Gladstone. When she sees how little washing up Yvette de Monnier’s breakfast produces she might be tempted to make it a permanent addition to the menu. Does it take such a prodigious leap of the imagination to envisage her turning her hand to something genuinely outlandish such as curry and rice?

I offer to carry the tray upstairs myself. As the instigator of this unprecedented break with tradition it’s the least I can do.

But I make no mention of my suspicions regarding Egerton. Sylvia still thinks he’s a journalist; I don’t want her confronting him until I find out why he’s really here.

There’s no answer when I knock.

“Mademoiselle de Monnier...est-ce que vous áªtes éveillé?” I ask, slipping into French automatically. “J’apporte votre petit déjeuner.”

Not a peep.

I turn the handle, and find the door unlocked. The room is in darkness; she must still be asleep. I decide to leave the tray on the writing desk and make a discreet withdrawal. Averting my eyes from the bed in case Egerton is slumped between his fiancée’s thighs, I tiptoe across the floor.

“JESUS CHRIST!!!”

The severed head on the dressing table sends Yvette’s breakfast cartwheeling through the air. Of course it’s no such thing, just a wig stand with an incredibly lifelike face, but by the time I’ve realised my mistake the milk has literally been spilt.

Crimson, I turn towards the bed. If mortification could kill I’d be dead already.

Mercifully it’s empty. She’s probably in the bathroom grouting her cheeks with Polyfilla.

I open the curtains, admitting the feeble light from another overcast morning. Down in the forecourt, the Rolls is conspicuous by its absence.

They’ve skipped breakfast altogether. Egerton’s backhander was for nothing.

A quick search of Yvette’s belongings reveals little a well-heeled socialite might not take with her when she’s travelling. That’s only to be expected; if she had anything worth concealing she wouldn’t leave it lying around when she knows the rooms are cleaned on a daily basis.

Egerton’s room gives rather more away. A packet of Embassy Regal and a book of matches advertising the dubious pleasures to be had at Knottingley Fork Services on the A1. A well-thumbed copy of Fiesta. A biro filched from a betting shop. Three pairs of British Home Stores Y-fronts still in their polythene bags. A bottle of Hai Karate splash-on deodorant.

Hai Karate? Even Richard Brookbank chose a brand with more class than that.

Single malt, I think. With ice, if you have any.

The clown doesn’t know how to drink whisky either.

The evidence is unambiguous: J G Egerton, who sounds as if he was born not so much with a silver spoon in his mouth as a gold ladel sticking out of his behind, is no more a toff than Norman Stanley Fletcher.

Now what was it he said yesterday in the dining room?

I understand, Yvette...but let’s not have another scene, eh?

It makes sense now. He’s her minder, maybe an unemployed actor she’s paying to keep her out of trouble and at the same time give everyone the impression she can not only pull a bloke ten or fifteen years her junior but also have him salivating with lust whenever she cocks one of her delicately pencilled eyebrows.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t more demeaning ways of earning a crust. He gets to drive a Rolls-Royce, wear some snazzy suits and strut around with a beautiful woman on his arm. More fun than being an extra in one of the Confessions films, I imagine.

None of this tells me why they’re in Northcroft, or what significance I ought to read into Egerton’s affiliation with Fratton Park.

Maybe I’d be better off putting this whole business out of my mind. It’s all come at the wrong time. I need to get away for a while so I can take stock of my life and plan for the future.

I could also do with a few female friends, people who aren’t drifting into middle age. I may have as long as fifty or sixty years in front of me as a woman, and I want to get it right. How do I succeed when my only current role model is Sylvia?

Once Kerrie Latimer’s finished dragging me all over the north-east I might use some of my savings to rent a cottage in the Lakes for a couple of weeks, or maybe hire a car and drive wherever the fancy takes me. I’ve been a prisoner in this place for far too long.

I spend a minute or two making sure Egerton’s things are exactly as they were when I let myself in, then go back to de Monnier’s room and begin clearing up the mess.

You work for us now.

That’s what you think, darling. I resign as of this instant.

Less than two miles west of Throston Bridge, the Durham road ascends through rolling countryside sprinkled with small farms, each field and hedgerow pregnant with the promise of spring despite the consistently dull weather. This has always been my favourite time of the year, a verdant prelude to warm summer days and long, balmy evenings, heralding the season of beaches and beer gardens, of swimsuits and sun-tan lotion, of tennis courts, tent pegs and toffee apples.

The Three Fates alone know what this coming summer has in store for me — and they’re keeping quiet about it.

“Penny for them, sweetheart?”

Kerrie Latimer, looking anything but a thirty-eight year old mother of two with her lop-sided multicoloured hairstyle, her black jeans and the translucent grey sand-pattern T-shirt that does precisely nothing to cloak the stunning cleavage her black lace bra only just holds in check — I’m betting the skeleton is still in his room trying to put his eyes back in their sockets — sounds a bit worried that the double act she suggested we perform after we reach Hexham might not be such a spiffing idea after all if one half of it is as good as mute.

“That’s about what they’re worth,” I reply.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

“Sorry...?”

“That it didn’t last.”

She wants to talk about Tim.

Terrific. Welcome to another edition of Make It Up As You Go Along.

“Wasn’t meant to,” I say firmly. “End of story.”

“Did you plan to have children?”

Gordon Bennett! Does she not understand simple English?

“Eventually, I suppose.”

“There’s no time like the present.”

I flick imaginary bits of fluff from the lapel of my jacket, then smooth the front of my skirt.

“Be serious,” I grunt.

“I am being serious. Having a bun in the oven is the best thing that could happen to you. We’re not living in the dark ages. Plenty of single women are starting families these days. How old did you say you were?”

“Twenty-three.”

“I was seventeen when I had my first baby.”

“Seventeen? You were just a kid.”

“I soon grew up, I can tell you.” She pats my forearm. “Don’t leave it too long, that’s all I’m saying. You won’t want little ones grabbing at your apron strings when you’re pushing forty.”

We cross the A19, entering the more open landscape of the East Durham plateau. The only substantial settlement we encounter is a former pit village, the straggling main street lined with empty and shuttered shops. Outside the Co-op, a girl who can’t be much older than twenty is rocking a pram as a toddler pulls at her other hand; the swelling visible beneath her drab brown overcoat suggests it won’t be many weeks before she’s added to her brood.

Seeing her just a few minutes after Kerrie’s intrusive if well-intentioned advice leaves me deep in thought. The only person who can be the mother of my children is me. That means carrying, bearing and raising them. It also involves taking part in the activity necessary to conceive them.

I’d have to be pissed out of my brain first.

Back to the real world...

The audacious magnificence of Durham cathedral, aloof to the hordes milling through the congested city at its feet, certain to outlast them as it has their predecessors for nine hundred years. The impregnable walls of the Norman castle, bulwark against the plundering Scots. The swollen River Wear, flowing between precipitous wooded banks in its deeply incised meander, brown with sediment washed into it by the recent rain.

Some places make your problems feel so ephemeral.

Another half an hour sees us safely through the ferrous haze that pollutes the air east of Consett, across the Derwent and into the unspoiled beauty of Northumberland. The road climbs steady and straight, passing wide pastures bounded by dry stone walls and rising to high ridges clothed with coniferous plantations. The western horizon is blocked by the moors and commons of the North Pennines, the largest truly empty region in England. It has me pining for the days when dad would ask mum to put up a picnic, then hand me the road atlas and tell me to take us on a mystery tour. Fourteen was too soon for all that to be brought to such an abrupt end.

After four or five miles a sharp turn to the right takes us down to the Tyne valley. At the junction with the main Gateshead to Hexham highway, on the edge of a village called Stocksfield, Kerrie spots a signpost indicating that Bywell is only three-quarters of a mile away.

“Our luck’s in, sweetheart!” she smiles. “I’ll pull in somewhere so we can touch up our war paint — and I can get rid of this piece of orange peel that’s lodged itself behind my dental plate.”

My make-up doesn’t need fixing, but I fuss with it anyway because that’s what girls do. When Kerrie begins removing her false teeth I decide to give her some privacy by stepping outside for a cigarette. A young woman carrying a heavy shopping bag leaves the post office; I return the empathetic smile she gives me when the breeze plays havoc with my hem as I’m lighting up. A pimply youth follows her, gets an eyeful and we both deploy our facial muscles in an entirely different way.

I’m back in jeans tomorrow, I don’t care if I have to put them through the wash myself.

Then I see something that pushes that thought right to the back of my mind.

A hundred yards or so to the west, a silver Rolls-Royce has emerged from the side road Kerrie and I will shortly be driving along. The vehicle has disappeared in the direction of Hexham before I can identify the occupants, but I have a good idea who they were.

Left the metropolis for deepest Somerset, called HQ to report ‘mission accomplished’ and received orders to head north without further delay.

Somerset.

And one of the hikers who was in Europe with Sarah-Jane Collingwood came from Glastonbury.

De Monnier knows about that visit. She’s checking each address in turn.

What’s her game? Is she working for Mademoiselle Malraux or trying to expose her? If it’s the latter, how did she find out where those girls lived?

I ought to tell Kerrie. But I can’t, not until I have more to go on. There’s no sense in both of us worrying about what the hell we might be getting ourselves into.

Bywell isn’t so much a village as a collection of farms and cottages strung along a narrow lane beginning a short distance from the northern side of the old stone bridge spanning the Tyne, which encloses the settlement in a broad loop. Behind the buildings to our right stands lush parkland belonging to a large house whose upper storey is visible above the trees a quarter of a mile away; presumably Bywell Lodge is part of the same estate.

Kerrie slides the Beetle to a halt in front of a small yet dignified church surrounded by meadows where cattle graze peacefully in the slowly improving midday light. Opposite the lych gate we can see a steep drive leading up to a white-walled building fronted by a tidy lawn overhung with sycamores.

“The Vicarage,” she reads from the plaque beside the entrance. “Well, it’s as good a place to start as any. Let’s hope the locals are as hospitable as you say they are.”

“Rural Northumberland? They’re famous for it.”

She pats down a stray gingery wisp that’s escaped from the clips she’s used to tie my hair in a loose bun. I’m also wearing her glasses, which feels extremely strange after five months of near perfect eyesight. Fortunately the lenses haven’t been ground to a very strong prescription, so my vision is only slightly blurred.

“You’ll do,” she declares.

“They’ll think I’m here rounding up overdue library books,” I complain, running a hand back from my exposed forehead.

“Don’t be such a misery. You should’ve worn something a bit more daring if you wanted to be the looker.”

Daring? If only she knew…

As we approach the front door, it opens to reveal a slim-built man of about forty wearing a lemon cardigan, a striped shirt, grey flannel trousers and a dog collar. His eyes dart to Kerrie’s bust — St Paul himself couldn’t have done otherwise — but quickly settle on me. They aren’t exactly brimming with Christian charity.

“Good morning, reverend,” I begin, smiling sweetly. “My name’s Ruth Hansford-Jones, and this is my friend Kerrieanne Latimer. We’re looking for Bywell Lodge. We have some–“

“Some questions you’d like to ask Mr Collingwood. I’m sorry, but you people really have a cheek stirring things up again like this. Don’t you think the poor man’s been through enough? Or are you so desperate for a story you hold his grief to be of no account?”

Kerrie and I exchange a look. A subtle arch of her brow indicates that as it’s my integrity that’s been called into question it’s up to me to set the record straight.

“We’re not reporters,” I stress. “What I was going to say before you cut me off in mid-sentence was that we have some bad news for one of the family. We thought it would be better to give it in person than just, you know, drop them a line.”

From her shoulder bag Kerrie takes the notebook she found in the casket’s false bottom. She opens it at the page containing the four names and addresses.

“This is the person we’re trying to trace,” she says, handing it to the vicar. “If you turn back the page you’ll see a photograph of her.”

He does so, shaking his head.

“That’s Sarah-Jane, all right. I recognise her from the portrait John keeps on his mantelpiece. Such a shame.”

“What d’you mean?” asks Kerrie.

But the vicar has found the picture of Sorina. He moves it closer to his eyes, which are widening in disbelief and shock.

“By all the blessed saints...” he gasps.

“Not something you see every day, is it?” I venture. “She’d certainly stand out in a crowd.”

“You don’t understand. This explains so much. What Freda said, it was all true.”

“Sorry reverend, I’m not with you.”

“Can’t you see?” he cries, jabbing a finger at the photograph. “It’s her. It’s Sarah-Jane.”

He passes me the notebook. I can’t tell if he’s right or not because of the spectacles I’m wearing. But Kerrie’s high-pitched ‘oh!’ as she leans so close I can feel the pressure of her boob against mine is all the endorsement I need.

Things seem to have stepped up a gear.

Wedged between Kerrie Latimer’s substantial left thigh and the arm of a chocolate brown sofa, I think back ruefully to the words of a careers consultant the Department of Employment sent me to see during one of my longer periods of enforced idleness.

"In an interview situation, always accept a cup of tea or coffee if you’re offered one. A refusal can cause offence; your host may feel you don’t trust them to make it properly. But under no circumstances should you take a biscuit. They’re accidents waiting to happen."

The crumbs in my lap bear witness to the truth of that last assertion — and Reverend Peter Sawdon’s redoubtable better half doesn’t come across as the type who’d appreciate seeing them casually brushed to the carpet. Going by the expression seared onto her stern features, which match both the puritanical severity of her short, greying curls and the staid lines of her dark brown jacket and skirt, it would be all she needed to order me out of her home forthwith.

“Rachel’s a local girl,” the vicar is telling us. “She didn’t know Sarah-Jane well, but she was here when the, uh...”

“It was a scandal,” his wife says in the clipped tones of a woman who has worked hard to disguise her Tyneside accent. “There’s no other word will do.”

Peter glances at her, as if seeking permission to continue. A nod confirms that he has received it.

“Sarah-Jane decided on a career in the Women’s Royal Naval Service,” he goes on, and if he didn’t have my undivided attention before, he certainly does now. “In the summer of 1964 she was invited to take part in an induction course, which I believe was based at Torpoint in Cornwall. She didn’t return. ‘Missing at sea’, they said. But her body was never found.”

“Freda — that’s Sarah-Jane’s mother — took it really badly,” says Rachel. “If she could have buried her daughter I think she’d have got over it eventually. As it was, she fell to pieces. She went round showing us all letters she claimed Sarah-Jane was still sending her. Apparently she was living in Europe and doing important work there, that was why she couldn’t come home. Of course they were fakes. You only had to look at them.”

“John let me read one when I first took over the parish,” Peter puts in. “It was composed in an extraordinarily old-fashioned style, like something from the Victorian era. No eighteen year old could possibly have written prose that elaborate and long-winded. That told me something about the extent of the grief Freda felt, to have allowed herself to be taken in by such a blatant deception.”

“In the end John called the police, didn’t he?”

“That’s right. They brought in an expert, who compared the handwriting with some of Sarah-Jane’s exercise books she’d kept from school. It was close, almost an exact match. Whoever was doing this had access to a sample they could work from. But the investigation led nowhere. The envelopes bore no postmarks, and the only fingerprints on them were Freda’s.”

“And it didn’t stop there,” Rachel says gravely.

“Unfortunately no,” agrees Peter. “About a year after Sarah-Jane’s disappearance, the circle of victims widened. Her cousin, who was expecting her second child at the time, was targeted. So were most of the girls she’d known at Prudhoe High, and even one or two of the younger teachers. All received the same message: an epiphany of some kind was coming, and they were to embrace it in order to be free of...what was it again?”

“The illusion of selfhood. I got one in the next batch. So did Lady Tynedale over at Bywell Hall. That got the wheels turning, and no mistake.”

“To cut a long and not very uplifting story short, the detective in charge of the case concluded that Freda had written the letters herself. She was cautioned for wasting police time, though she protested her innocence to the last. You can imagine the effect it had on her when the local press got hold of it.”

The vicar goes on to relate how Freda Collingwood spent the next ten years in virtual seclusion, her health deteriorating to the point where she became bedridden.

“She died just a few weeks back,” adds Rachel. “Sixty-three, that’s all she was. I mean, it’s no age nowadays, is it?”

Yet fate hadn’t finished with Freda’s long-suffering husband.

“John told me another letter purporting to be from his daughter arrived at the Lodge a few days after the funeral,” says Peter. “He was angry — we both were. This person had destroyed Freda’s life, and for what? Thankfully there haven’t been any more, and he’s agreed to let the matter rest. But now...”

He gestures towards the notebook, which is lying closed on top of Kerrie’s bag.

“I think we should tell him,” says Rachel. “I don’t care what this cult or whatever it is has done to Sarah-Jane, she’s still his flesh and blood.”

“I’ll second that,” agrees Kerrie.

“It won’t be a particularly pleasant undertaking,” Peter warns us. “John has let himself go a little bit since Freda passed away. He doesn’t make much of an effort to keep the house clean, and he’s not eating properly.”

“There’s no need for you to tag along, sweetheart,” Kerrie whispers into my ear.

“Thanks,” I murmur. “I could do with a cig after that.”

A few minutes later I’m standing beside the Beetle smoking a Winston, with no more idea of what’s going on than a drunk who’s just woken up in the middle of Hampton Court maze after a three-day bender.

How can Sarah-Jane Collingwood have been lost at sea, then turn up on a walking holiday in the middle of Europe? What part did Helen Sutton play in this miraculous resurrection? And why are Egerton and de Monnier so interested in all of this?

Not much dust. That means whoever it was, they were here fairly recently.

Who broke into 6 Redheugh Close? Why did they leave the casket behind? If they were so anxious to keep anyone else from finding it that they jammed a crate full of sandbags against the door, why didn’t they take the extra precaution of locking the one in the kitchen?

Question after question — and not a sniff of an answer to any of them.

“I’m starting to wonder if Peter was right, sendin’ the other two away like that,” says Rachel from the bottom of the path. “People have suffered. I don’t care what’s going on out there, it needs to be brought into the open.”

“Isn’t that Mr Collingwood’s decision?” I suggest.

“I got one of those letters, remember.” She steps closer, though only the cows in the field next to the church can hear us. “I’ve never told Peter, but some of the words…well, they spoke to me. I wanted to go out and repeat them to every woman I saw. I still do. And it’s not just me, either.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“You will when you see them. You’ll understand then all right.”

She goes back to the house, leaving me more puzzled than ever. What she said made no sense at all. Words that make you want to repeat them? What’s that about?

I can’t do this any more. I’m not a trained field operative, just an ordinary girl who needs time to forget that she was ever anything else.

But when I think of John Collingwood, his wife lying in the cemetery and his daughter looking like a cross between Dracula’s daughter and the bride of Fu Manchu, I wonder if I haven’t come out of this affair relatively unscathed.

So far.

New Stranton’s commercial business district will never draw unqualified praise from those who appreciate fine architecture. Its founding fathers having been practical nineteenth-century entrepreneurs whose idea of beauty was a favourable balance sheet, the few buildings to have survived both the attentions of the Luftwaffe and the legalised vandalism of the 1960s show little of the neo-Classical majesty associated with most other Victorian industrial towns. The one structure of any note is a limestone church with a tall, square-sectioned tower surmounted at one corner by a conical appendage that has always put me in mind of a witch’s hat, thus giving it an eccentric, almost disrespectful profile quite out of keeping with its function. Located on an island in the centre of a busy plaza recently co-opted into the traffic management scheme brought into operation after the new shopping precinct was opened next to the junction where the roads from Stockton, Durham and Northcroft converge, it looks east down a wide boulevard — not tree-lined, not in New Stranton — which strives to reach the sea but instead is truncated by the railway line as it curves inland to circumvent the docks. Halfway along this road to nowhere, between the Midland bank and a cellar bar with such an unsavoury reputation I’m risking my own good name simply by not having crossed the road to avoid it, can be found the chambers of Barton & Harris, attorneys at law — and a waiting room so dark and dismal it would have a pools winner whose first novel had just been published to ecstatic reviews staring at the floor and wondering where it had all gone wrong.

“She’s late,” complains Elaine Smailes, shifting in her chair as she fusses with the collar of her verbose sunflower-pattern maternity dress. “I knew this’d ‘appen. Didn’ I say so, mam?”

Carol Vasey looks at her watch. Dressed in an abstemious dark green suit, she’s a handsome, vigorous woman in her early fifties, with a gracious manner and a pleasant smile. If her russet curls are speckled with grey, and her features are starting to take on the weathered appearance of one rapidly moving past her prime, there’s a sparkle to her eyes that might have ensnared many a younger admirer before the good doctor came along — though in his case there’s a better than even chance that more pecuniary factors were at work.

“It’s only just gone ten to,” she says. “We’ve still got plenty of time.”

“I told her a quarter to three, on the dot. I mean, she only ‘as to drive from flippin’ Norton.”

Elaine’s fingers move from her dress to her necklace to her stiff auburn perm, and finally settle for cradling her swelling stomach. This, I gather, will be her fourth child, due at the end of July a few weeks before she turns twenty-eight. A matriarch in the making, and she seems to be revelling in it.

The object of Elaine’s irritation is her sister Trisha, who works as a peripatetic music teacher in the Teesside area. In what promises to be a fairly lengthy series of transactions, she is to be given the deeds to 6 Redheugh Close — Kerrie has brought letters from her siblings relinquishing their share of the property in return for a cash sum to be decided this afternoon — while Elaine and her husband will take possession of the empty house at 16 Albion Crescent. Good luck to them all if they’re thinking of liquidating their assets in the current economic climate.

As for why I’m here, I really can’t say. Kerrie didn’t remind me about the appointment until we’d left Bywell, adding almost as an afterthought that Trisha had telephoned her at the Gladstone yesterday evening to request that I be present. It certainly has me wondering; from what I remember of her, I can’t believe she would take the trouble to do that if all she had in mind was exchanging gossip with an old school chum.

And if she talks about Richard?

You’ll be okay. You’re Ruth now. Richard’s gone, and he isn’t coming back.

Repeat after me...

“Will you wait here for her, sweetheart?”

Kerrie is tapping my wrist. Carol and Elaine are already on their feet, following the receptionist through the heavy oak door at the far end of the room. I nod my head and reach in my pocket for my cigarettes, glad that I can light up without fear of censure now I’m no longer sitting beside an expectant mother.

Left alone, I do my best to organise the jumble of disordered evidence the morning has dumped into my mental ‘in’ tray. It’s a Herculean task; every line of reasoning I pursue leads straight into a cul-de-sac. Maybe I should make up an excuse to quiz Yvette de Monnier, see if she can’t provide some of the missing pieces.

Good thinking. She’ll be thrilled that the hotels’s odd-job girl is taking such a keen interest in her affairs.

“Ruth…?”

My head shoots up at the sound of a voice that until a couple of hours ago I’d lost hope of ever hearing again.

The flowing mane of bright red hair that went with it has been cut into a page boy, yet I’d know those bewitching green eyes, that pert nose and the seductive curl of those delicate lips anywhere. How many nights did I lie awake, imagining I was holding this girl in my arms and whispering sweet words of love as she rested her head on my shoulder? How many hours did I ache for the touch of her warm flesh against mine? How many times did I take a detour past Lumley Square, hoping that once, just once, she might walk through her front door as I was passing the gate and–

Well I’ll be damned...

She hasn’t yet grown out of her trademark jeans and trainers, but there can be no denying that Trisha Hodgson, who time and again stated unequivocally that she would never allow any man to tie her down with a child, would have to be wearing a T-shirt at least two sizes bigger if she was to have any hope of concealing the fact that in a little over three months she’ll be competing with her sister for first use of the delivery room.

“You’re pregnant...” I gasp, my cigarette forgotten.

“Not much slips past you, does it?” she laughs. “We didn’t plan it, but that’s life.”

“Your mum said you weren’t married...“

“God, how far behind the times are you? Next thing you’ll be having a go at me for living in sin, or bringing a bastard child into the world.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s obvious what you meant. I thought after your experience of holy matrimony you’d have known better.” Her frown mutates into the elfish grin that lassoed my heart so many years ago. “Come on, give me a hug.”

My cheek against hers. Feeling the outline of her bra through the back of her T-shirt. Her scent enveloping me. Doesn’t it just sum up my relationship with Dame Fortune that I had to become female before I could get this close to the girl I loved for so long?

“You’ve gone ginger,” she says as we separate and hold each another at arm’s length. “And your tits are still bigger than mine.”

This is excruciating. Despite the fact that I no longer feel any physical attraction for this young woman — or more probably because of it — my emotions are in turmoil.

“If you’re Alice Patricia Hodgson, they’ve started without you,” says the receptionist, coming to my aid before I burst out crying.

“Alice?” I mouth to her.

“I kept that quiet, didn’t I? Actually I’ve been starting to use it more often lately. Must be getting mumsy.” She releases my hands. “Listen, I’m going to do my bit and sneak out of there as quickly as I can. After that I want to talk to you about something. Or rather someone. Anywhere, as long as it’s private.”

Richard. It has to be.

“Uh...the Gladstone?”

“If we’re on our own, fine.”

“What’s this all about?” I fail to stop myself asking.

The receptionist is holding the door open. Trisha smiles at her, then leans forward to place her lips by my ear.

“The woman in that room,” she hisses. “She’s not my mother.”

At the end of my Chemistry ‘mock’ O level examination — the last ninety minutes of which I had spent creating a mathematical formula to estimate the number of tiles in the assembly hall floor, such was the swiftness with which I had committed my woefully inadequate knowledge of that subject to paper — I sought out one of the invigilating teachers and asked him if he didn’t find walking up and down between rows of desks for three hours intolerably boring.

“Boring?” he chortled. “Of course it’s boring. But in this profession boring is good. Boring means going home and not wanting to kick the living daylights out of the dog. I go down on my knees every night and beg the Almighty for another boring day. There’s an old Chinese saying, Brookbank: may you live in interesting times. It was intended as a curse.”

Seven years later, I think I’m beginning to understand the point he was trying to get across.

Trisha Hodgson is standing in the corner of my room, flicking through my record collection. She hasn’t said anything to support the allegation she made earlier, but I know she’ll bring the subject up before many more minutes have gone by.

When she does...

She’s not my mother.

‘Interesting times’ indeed.

I take off my jacket and hang it on the back of the door. When I turn round, I see Trisha holding her middle. Her face is radiant.

“It’s kicking,” she smiles. “Come on, quickly!”

Unsure of the etiquette in these situations, I walk towards her and tentatively extend my hand. She places it on her bulge; for a second nothing happens, then a sudden movement inside her makes me jump.

“Wow!” is all I can say.

“You’ve never done this before, have you?”

I shake my head, and as our eyes meet there forms between us a bond that can only have been engendered by dint of us sharing the potential for motherhood. It seems to soak into the very fibre of my being, assuring me that the thought of carrying new life within my body isn’t so unreasonable after all.

The moment passes, but I can sense that something has changed.

Something important.

Trisha’s glow fades. I sit on the edge of the bed and gesture for her to join me.

Within seconds the dam is blown wide apart.

“I know what I said at the solicitor’s sounds stupid, but hear me out, okay? That is not our mam. Oh, it’s her body, all right. She’s still got the same pattern of moles on her neck and the same little scar on her index finger. But I don’t recognise the person who’s in there. And before you go on about her amnesia, she told me herself it’s only her memory of the night dad died that’s been lost. Other than that she’s supposed to be suffering from no lasting effects at all.”

My mouth feels as if every last molecule of moisture within it has evaporated. If Ruth was in Northcroft when Bob Hodgson drowned, she could easily have swapped with Carol Vasey before setting up the car crash that put an end to Richard Brookbank’s body.

Christ, I shook hands with the woman less than an hour ago.

But why take Carol’s place and lose thirty years of her life? For a share of Helen Sutton’s fortune?

That cat won’t catch any mice. If all she wanted was filthy lucre why didn’t she simply exchange bodies with Helen? Then she could have got her hands on the lot — and at once, not four and a half months later.

“Have you said anything to Elaine?” I ask in as relaxed a voice as I can put on.

“Of course not. She’d think I was away with the pixies.”

“And yet you’re willing to confide in me.”

“You’re not likely to go running to mam — or worse, that pillock she married. Besides, once I’ve finished I can walk out of here and never have to face you again. You will keep this to yourself, won’t you?”

“Course I will.”

“All right,” she sighs. “I found out I was pregnant at the end of November. Mam didn’t think I should have it, said I should put my career first. Adamant about it, she was. Then came the accident, if that’s what you want to call it.”

“Are you saying it wasn’t?”

“I’ll get on to that. First I have to tell you what happened after mam was discharged from hospital. To begin with she seemed right as rain. She got through the funeral okay, sorted out dad’s affairs, arranged to take early retirement…she even talked about getting away from it all once the inquest was over and done with. I said to Elaine, don’t you think she’s a bit too cheerful, all things considered? She just said we should be grateful mam’s taken it so well instead of sitting there all miserable and depressed day after day.

“A week or so before Christmas I decided I was definitely going to have this baby. I’m not against abortion on principle, I mean I’m not religious or anything, but I felt what with dad dying, and poor Miss Sutton and Snapper Brookbank as well — God, you used to sit next to him when we were in her class, remember? — it just felt wrong to end what would eventually become another life. You do understand, don’t you?”

I give her arm a gentle squeeze.

“Yeah...yeah, sure...”

“Well, I picked my moment and then I told her. Ruth, she went completely off it. She was horrified I’d even contemplate a termination. I said it was your idea mam, but she wouldn’t have it. She said I must’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick cause she’d never say that, not to anyone. And when I said thanks for all the sleepless nights she looked at me as if I was a stain on the carpet. It’s been downhill ever since. I’m like a stranger to her.”

Trisha rambles on in similar vein for several minutes. She’s come to the point of tears, and although it would be well within the bounds of acceptable behaviour to put my arm around her shoulder or hold her hand I can’t bring myself to initiate that level of intimacy. Pangs of shame and regret slice through me as I realise that I want her to leave. She represents the past, and I must look to the future.

But she isn’t going to let me off the hook that easily.

“The only other person I’ve talked to about this is Paul — Elaine’s husband. He was really fond of dad. They used to do all sorts together — went fishing, played golf, looked after dad’s allotment. Paul didn’t believe the story they printed in the papers. He said there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance that dad would’ve gone down to the breakwater by himself on a night like that — unless he’d seen that mam was already there, and he thought she was in trouble.

“So he kept his ear to the ground, and one of the things he heard was that a couple of the teenagers who found dad’s body on the beach sneaked back through the police cordon just before it got dark and saw them zipping two more bodies into black bags. They said one was a woman, half-naked and as bald as a billiard ball. I realise it sounds like they were making it up to get attention, but bald? Who’d expect anyone to believe that?”

I can hardly breathe.

I’m guessing Sorina’s her name. But what the hell is a ‘kuzkardesh gara’?

I don’t know...but it seems to me that what we’ve stumbled on is a kit to turn somebody into one.

“Do you think it was…?”

“Miss Sutton? Yeah, I do. Maybe she had cancer, and the treatment had made all her hair fall out. That might be why she was going to pack in teaching. But we can’t check these girls’ stories because both their families have moved, and nobody knows where. You might also have noticed that the Kirkham, where mam was supposed to have gone for help, has shut down. Apparently the landlord’s been given a pub in Scarborough, a stone’s throw from Peasholm Park. He’ll be raking it in this summer, no doubt. Oh, and the sister in charge of the ward mam was admitted to has disappeared as well. Left her job for no reason at all. It’s like the lot of them have either been silenced or paid off.”

Heart attack, it said in the Herald. But you hear all sorts in this trade. Like Bob’s wasn’t the only body those kids found on Carr House Sands the next day.

It’s all starting to come together.

Helen must have used the equipment in the casket to try and turn herself into a copy of the kuzkardesh gara in the photograph. Perhaps it was the only way she could think of to exorcise the guilt she felt after what had happened to Sarah-Jane Collingwood. But whatever was going through her mind, someone in authority didn’t want her transformation to become public knowledge. Instead they put out the cause of her death as heart failure.

And if the third body belonged to Richard Brookbank…

By slow increments a sequence takes shape in my mind. Helen welcoming Richard with open arms, only to learn that he wasn’t the person she remembered. The two of them on the breakwater, Helen having fled there in blind panic. Bob Hodgson braving the elements in an attempt to persuade them to come back. Carol following him down the steps.

One person survived.

That person now claims to have no memory of those events.

And her own daughter doesn’t recognise her.

Ruth used the transfer device on Carol Hodgson, who then drowned in Richard Brookbank’s body. It’s the only explanation that fits.

But that can’t be the end of the story. Sylvia said that the inquest into Bob’s death was carried by several national newspapers. His widow even agreed to be interviewed by one of them. Is it likely that Ruth would court such publicity, even if she believed that by swapping with Carol her trail had gone cold? She definitely wouldn’t have drawn yet more attention to herself by getting married so soon.

Besides, the woman at Barton & Harris wasn’t her. I’m convinced of it.

So who the hell is she?

I glance down to see that my fingers are resting on the back of Trisha’s hand. I let them stay there; it’s scant comfort, but it’s all I can give her.

Then I remember the message carved on the headstone.

Farewell, my love. You died to save the women of the whole world.

Mademoiselle Malraux knew damn well that Helen didn’t die of a heart attack. But what else does she know? What was she doing on the night when her former lover drowned?

Just as important, where is she now?

I have to give Trisha all sorts of promises and assurances before she’ll go. I intend to keep none of them; if she’s as hell-bent on discovering the truth as Kerrie Latimer, I won’t have a life to call my own.

Which doesn’t stop me continuing to wonder, as I watch her red Mini Minor turn the corner into Gladstone Street, what Ruth wanted from Helen Sutton and why she was so anxious to gain her trust.

Because the answers to those questions are the keys to this whole mystery.

An hour before the evening meal is to be served — it’s Thursday so it must be mince and dumplings — I unlock the door on the first-floor landing marked PRIVATE, enter Norah and Sylvia’s flat and run myself a bath. Lowering my body into the soapy water until it’s at the level of my chin, I stretch my arms along the sides of the tub, lean back and let the trials and tribulations of the last twenty-four hours ooze from the pores of my skin.

Richard something or other, in a car accident.

Go away. You can’t hurt me any more.

My right hand moves to the sparse down at the base of my abdomen. From there it travels unobstructed to the silky smoothness between the tops of my thighs. I don’t know why, but the idea of my feminine curves being sullied by the ugly appendages that used to dangle so awkwardly from my crotch suddenly seems ridiculous.

Something has changed.

I lean back, raise my right knee and let my eyelids droop…

Thunder and lightning. Waves as tall as houses. The screams of terrified children. Tearful couples saying farewell to one another. Grown men fighting over life jackets as the order to abandon ship is relayed across the crackling tannoy. A muscular arm pushing me roughly aside, its owner fully aware of the bulging maternity dress beneath my coat. A priest offering the last rites to those the rafts and dinghies have no room for. The horrific emptiness in the eyes of a young crew member who knows he will shortly die. The frantic struggles of the drowning as they go under for the final time. Adrift...

The water has grown tepid. I sit up, splashing my face in an effort to disperse the remnants of my dream, so reluctant are the sounds and images to disappear.

Jesus, there’s some strange stuff going on in my head. Then again, after everything I’ve heard today that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

I climb from the tub, my hand drawn as if by unseen lines of force to my middle.

You’ve never done this before, have you?

What is it like, knowing you’re carrying within your womb an organism that will one day develop into a completely new member of the human race? How will I ever summon up the courage to find out?

Yet I can’t believe I’ll let the opportunity slip through my fingers…

Just what have you awakened in me, Trisha?

I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. However loudly I might rail against the notion, my genetic make-up is geared towards producing offspring. As the adjustment process reaches its conclusion and my mind becomes fully attuned to the body it now inhabits I can expect the urge to propagate my DNA to manifest itself more and more often, and in a variety of ways.

Damn those pesky double helixes.

At least I’m in no great rush. I’ve got years before my biological clock starts ticking down.

And when I consider the psychological obstacles I’ll have to overcome before I can start knitting my first pair of booties I reckon I’ll need them.

I return to my Fortress of Solitude, carrying the driest of the three pairs of jeans I found in the airing cupboard. Kerrie is standing by the door, frowning.

“Oh, there you are,” she says.

“Here I am. I assume everything’s done and dusted?”

She takes me by the elbow.

“Come and talk to me.”

To hear is to obey. Pulling the belt of my dressing gown tightly around me, I follow her down to her room.

“What’s up?” I ask once she’s shut the door behind me.

“After we’d finished at the solicitor’s I showed Carol the notebook.” She lights a cigarette and hands me the packet. “I didn’t tell her where it came from or how I got hold of it. You know what she did? She stared at me as if I’d just pulled out a pornographic magazine. Then she was off, and her daughter with her. Not a word from either of them. They knew what it was. They’d been through that house. So why did they leave the casket there?”

I close my eyes out of sheer vexation. Is this ever going to end?

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I murmur.

“No, I don’t suppose you would. You’re not the one who has to decide what to tell your family tomorrow.”

I ignore the reprimand. I’m not willing to betray Trisha’s confidence just to demonstrate my loyalty to someone I only met the day before yesterday. In any case, regurgitating what she told me would only muddy the waters further.

Kerrie sits on the chair beside the window and looks out at the clouds threatening yet more rain before dusk.

“Three weeks ago I lost my job,” she confesses. “I worked in a record shop in Fareham that closed when the owner sold up. This money couldn’t have come at a better time. But I won’t feel comfortable using it until I know why Helen left it to my dad. I’ve been here for forty-eight hours now, and I feel as if I’m hardly any further forward than when I started.”

“I appreciate that, but I don’t see what else I can do…”

She turns her face from me. I don’t react, other than to pick up my clothes and begin walking towards the door. But before I can get there, she leans over to open the casket.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s not your fault.” She pulls out one of the black dresses and offers it to me. “A parting gift. It’ll be a nice treat for your next boyfriend. You’ll have to dye it, of course.”

I run the material through my fingers. It really does feel gorgeous.

“Dark green?” I suggest.

“With your hair, yes. Wear it with the jacket, obviously. Black shoes. And stockings, not tights. Siobhan — that’s my eldest — has just gone blonde, so I’ll do hers a deep red. Now Cathryn has darker skin, there’s a touch of the Mediterranean in her ancestry, I’m sure…”

She takes Helen Sutton’s notebook from her bag and begins to stow it back beneath the casket’s false bottom. Then her eye is caught by the jar containing the thick white cream.

They said one was a woman, half-naked and as bald as a billiard ball.

“Be careful with that,” I blurt out as she picks it up by the lid.

“Care to tell me why?” she wonders, adopting the quizzical expression I’m beginning to know all too well.

Not again! How can I land myself in so much bother with only one mouth?

“I, uh…I believe it might be a depilatory. Something Trisha said. It’s a long story.”

“That’s okay. We’ve still got a quarter of an hour until dinner.” She unscrews the top and dips her finger in the preparation. “So you think this removes unwanted hair, do you? Let’s see if you’re right.”

Her other hand has untied my dressing gown before I can utter a word in remonstration. The manner in which she puts my supposition to the test, a procedure she insists I reciprocate in full, is an experience I’ll be slow to forget.

But compared to the inquisition I undergo after I reveal the full details of my conversation with Trisha it’s a slice of Battenberg.

An ear-splitting shriek, closely followed by the sound of breaking glass and a succession of thumps and clangs, all interspersed with cries of pain and language that would have raised eyebrows on a building site, ushers in Friday morning under the most unsolicited of circumstances. I sit bolt upright in bed, suddenly aware of how vulnerable I am as a girl alone in her room. Much as I hate to admit it, Suki Tatsukichi’s self-defence lessons may not have been such a waste of time after all.

I daren’t turn on the light, so I pick up my watch from the bedside table, carry it across to the window and pull back the curtains so I can more easily see the hands.

Ten to four. It’ll be pitch black out there for another hour and a half at least.

Voices drift up from the forecourt, carrying loudly in the cold, still air.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est passé?”

“Bitch shoved me through the fuckin’ window, didn’t she? Bleedin’ lot came down. Lucky it’s not smashed to bits.”

“Merde! Allons, vite!”

They’re going. Thank goodness for that.

I open the chest of drawers, discarding my buttonless pyjama top for the first T-shirt I come to. As I push back my hair I can hear an engine roar into life. I don’t need Jim Rockford standing next to me to know that the car screeching along Marine Parade loud enough to wake three-quarters of County Durham is a Rolls-Royce.

When I reach the second floor, Sylvia is already hammering on the door to room 7 like a slain Viking warrior demanding entry to Valhalla.

“Well, don’t just stand there!” she yells at me. “Go and phone the bobbies!”

Before I can comply Kerrie Latimer answers Sylvia’s summons, tying a blue oriental robe around her midriff. Devoid of make-up and with most of her top teeth missing, she looks her age and more.

“Egerton,” is all she says.

“Excuse me!” cries Sylvia, pushing past her to inspect the damage.

Kerrie beckons me over.

“He took the cathket,” she lisps softly. “But I’d hidden the notebook under my pillow.”

“Good for you,” I whisper back. “But what are we going to tell Sylv? She wants me to call the police.”

“Leave that to me.”

My hand moves to her shoulder.

“Are you sure you’re all right? He didn’t try to–“

“No, nothing like that.” She smiles and ruffles my hair, glancing at the two old ladies who’ve just appeared on the landing in their dressing gowns and curlers. “You’d better go and put the retht of your clotheth on, thweetheart. I think you’re going to have a buthy morning.”

Wearing a chunky white sweater and an old, musty pair of jeans that all but fell to their knees and pleaded for the rough-and-tumble of the washing machine, my messy locks tied back in a loose ponytail, I head down to the foyer for my second big surprise of the day. On the reception counter, propped up against the register, is a plain brown envelope addressed to Mrs N Russell. It contains five brand new twenty-pound notes, as well as a short message in an exquisite hand I assume belongs to Yvette de Monnier.

I apologise profusely for our unconventional departure and trust that this will suffice to cover our respective bills. Please do not attempt to contact us at the addresses we gave as they are fictitious.
Rooms 4 and 5.

I have to stop myself from laughing out loud. Thieves who pay their hotel bills and add a whopping great tip into the bargain? What’s next, talking seagulls? Secret portals to magic kingdoms?

Leaving the envelope for Sylvia to deal with, I go through the dining room to the kitchen and take a torch from the store cupboard at the back. As I shine it on the detritus from Egerton’s defenestration and estimate how long I’ll need to clear it up I’m reminded that my spell as Kerrie’s sidekick is over. Normal service will now be resumed.

Normal?

Well, I can always hope.

It goes without saying that once Kerrie has checked out I’ll have to expunge from my thoughts the issues our investigations raised. I can’t function in a world riddled with deceit and disinformation. If I’m forced to weave myself a cocoon in order to mature into the contented, self-possessed young woman I know I have the capacity to be, then that’s what I’ll do.

You work for us now. You always will.

Just think, there was a time when I actually believed that.

The pungent aroma of petrol assaults my nostrils. I point the torch in the direction it’s strongest; the beam falls upon Kerrie’s Volkswagen Beetle and the large puddle spreading from beneath it. Wires trail like spaghetti from the open bonnet.

Shit.

Now there’ll be merry hell to pay.

I crush a shard of broken glass with the ball of my foot, then tramp back indoors to give her the good news.

Tommy Cockburn could not only tut for his country, he’d be an automatic choice for the squad selected to represent the local cluster of galaxies. Rubbing his chin, he picks at the disembowelled Beetle’s entrails for several minutes before turning to its increasingly impatient owner.

“They knew what they were doin’ all right. Are yer sure it was kids?”

“Got eyes, haven’ I?” snaps Kerrie, her Lancashire accent coming to the fore. “Just tell us, can you fix blessed thing or not?”

Cockburn wrenches his eyes away from her black leather pants and low-cut cream top long enough to indulge in a few moments of humming and hawing. He seems to be nothing if not versatile.

“Bit o’ weldin’ll sort out the tank. Ignition’s the main problem, otherwise it’s not too bad. Should be ready by Monday afternoon. Better say Tuesday to be on the safe side.”

“What good’s that to me? I’m supposed to meet me sisters in London this afternoon.”

“Is there no way you could do it any quicker?” I interject.

“Sorry, lasses. Electrics isn’ summat yer can rush. It’s not like wirin’ a three-point plug.”

“What about hiring us a car?” enquires Kerrie. “Can you organise that before clocks go back again?”

“There’s Neasham’s over at Stranton...”

“I’m givin’ you an hour.”

She opens the front passenger door and unfastens the hinge to the glove compartment. All I can see within is a packet of boiled sweets.

“They’ve taken me bloody insurance documents!” she fumes. “Right, that’s it! Do what you like. I’ve had it up to ‘ere wi’ this place.”

She storms towards the main entrance, bushes withering in her wake. Cockburn turns to me as if I’m the fount of all wisdom.

“Just take it in,” I tell him. “I’ll get you her address and phone number.”

By a quarter to ten I’ve begun to slot back into my routine: changing sheets and pillowcases, cleaning and disinfecting bathrooms, dusting, vacuuming and all the other mindless tasks at which I’ve become so proficient during the last fifteen weeks. I’m in the middle of turning over the mattress on the skeleton’s bed when Kerrie appears at the door.

“Sylvia says there’s a train at eleven o’clock. It connects with the five to twelve from Darlington. We should be in Kings Cross by half-past three.”

I do a double take worthy of James Finlayson.

“We?”

“You’re coming with me, I hope.”

“What?”

“I’ll need someone to back up my story.”

“You want me to go all the way to London with you?”

“Cosham. I’m not involving my sisters in this until I know what’s going on.”

“But I can’t just throw everything down and leave…”

“It’s all right, I’ve cleared it with Norah. I managed to persuade her that the hotel won’t go to rack and ruin if I keep you on for a few more days. I’ll bring you back when I return for the car and the rest of my things.”

I lean the mattress on the headboard, then walk round the end of the bed so I’m close enough to speak to her without the risk of being overheard.

“You said you’d kept the notebook, right?”

“Yes, I want to show it to Cathryn. With her academic background she should be able to shed some light on the cult Helen ran up against.”

“You realise that if Egerton and de Monnier know about it, they’ll have discovered it’s missing by now.”

“I’m not scared of them, sweetheart. Egerton was obviously under instructions not to lay a finger on me. How else could I have fought him away so easily? As for her, if she comes near me again I’ll rip her nipples off.”

I wouldn’t put it past her, either.

Norah having given the matter her seal of approval, I have little choice but to accede to Kerrie’s demands. Shaking my head, I go off in search of Sylvia; I find her in the room Egerton occupied, going through each drawer in turn.

“Have you heard the latest?” I grumble. “Now she wants to cart me off to the other end of the country!”

“You’d better get packing, then. And take something apart from jeans, unless you want that woman’s family to think she’s brought a scarecrow to stop with them. I don’t know, you’ve got a whole wardrobe full of stuff you’ve hardly touched since you started here. Would the world come to an end if you dolled yourself up a bit more often?”

She’s right, of course. Now’s the ideal time to step out in a posh frock and stiletto heels.

Fortunately I can lay my hands on three pairs of clean, dry jeans. But I still need to choose enough other clothes for four different outfits; I’m only taking an overnight bag, so everything will have to be light and easily folded. Shoes, underwear, toiletries…and tampons, I mustn’t forget those. Although my next period isn’t due until Wednesday or Thursday, I’ve learned that where the menstrual cycle is concerned there are no rules set in tablets of stone.

But before I sit at the dressing table to let down my hair and see to my make-up, I lift out the envelope Ruth left for me at Belvedere House and clear a space for it at the bottom of the bag.

Just in case.

Nowhere articulates the gangrenous decay that has reduced Northcroft-on-Heugh from a thriving industrial port to a somnolent backwater with more eloquence than the railway station on Commercial Street, between the town centre and the disused Victoria Dock. Although the impressive nineteenth-century façade remains intact, the forecourt and the wide steps leading up to the main entrance are closed to public access, concealed behind an ugly concrete wall daubed from end to end with meaningless graffiti. The concourse and all but the western end of one platform are at the mercy of the elements following the removal of the great arched canopy, a heartless act of desecration that changed the local skyline for ever; cordoned off by wooden boards, they spend the little time they have left before the return of the demolition crews playing host to every kind of debris it’s possible to imagine. It’s a far cry from the bustling place I remember from my childhood, when people would flock to the buffet for one of Florrie Wilkie’s legendary cooked breakfasts, each mouthful a greasy delight, relax cradling a pint of strong, frothy ale in the adjoining bar, or stock up with crisps, fizzy drinks and puzzle magazines from the kiosk in the booking hall. Today the sole facility available to them comes in the unprepossessing shape of a weather-stained prefabricated hut that acts as a combined ticket office, waiting room and newspaper stall. The only information on display is a badly typed list of departures stapled to the glass partition above the serving hatch. It is not a lengthy document.

Creeping along at a pace a corpulent toddler could outrun, the two-car diesel unit negotiates the dilapidated harbour bridge, labours around the sharp curve that takes the railway onto Northcroft headland and finally shudders to a halt with a screech of brakes and a loud, drawn-out gasp of released exhaust, as though the twenty-four mile run from the main line at Darlington has driven the engine to the utmost limits of its endurance. Having been awake for seven hours, and with a demanding journey ahead of us, it’s a safe bet that Kerrie and I will soon know exactly how it feels.

The dozen or so passengers alighting from the train are raising collars, buttoning overcoats and fastening headsquares against the unseasonably cold breeze coming off the sea. I hoist the strap of my holdall onto my right shoulder, using my other hand to shield my face as the heaving sky jettisons the first drops of squally rain to sting my cheeks and spear my eyes. At least I can look forward to some better weather on the south coast.

I lead the way to the front carriage and what was once the First Class compartment behind the driver’s cab, where the seats are softer and more springy. A young man in army fatigues lifts our luggage onto the rack; Kerrie thanks him, her eyes making it clear that while she appreciates his gallantry, we have things we wish to discuss in private. I settle back, frowning at the circular NO SMOKING sign on the window, and remove the leather jacket I’m wearing over my T-shirt just as the sun peeps out from the angry clouds to highlight the hundreds of freckles covering my arms. A glance at my reflection shows it glinting off the studs I wear at weekends to prevent the holes in my earlobes from closing up — and by doing so confirms that my hair has come off second best to the wind.

“So what’s the order of play, then?” I ask, taking a brush from my bag.

“Well, you’ll be staying with my next-door neighbour Rosie. My two sons are home from university, so it’s either that or the garden shed.”

“You’ve got boys as well? That means you’ve had what, five children?”

“Don’t look at me as though I’m single-handedly responsible for the population explosion,” she grins. “Padraig and Eamonn are twins. They’ll be twenty in October. Sinead and Niamh were born within eleven months of one another, September ’63 and August ’64, so they’re actually in the same year group at school — which can make life interesting, to put it mildly. My eldest, Siobhan, lives with her boyfriend in North End. They had a little boy just before Christmas. His name’s Liam, and I absolutely adore him.”

Only the carriage ceiling prevents my eyebrows from puncturing the tropopause.

“So you’re a…”

“A grandmother, yes. It’s all right, you can say the word in front of me.”

A grandmother.

With pink, blue and green hair cropped short on one side and falling to her shoulder on the other.

And a cleavage that would attract attention on a desert island.

Joe Brown was right. Fings certainly ain’t wot they used to be.

“What’s Rosie like?” I ask, watching the thin-faced, bespectacled guard make his routine inspection in readiness for the return trip.

“A few years older than me. Divorced. A career woman, I think that’s the best way to describe her.”

“And Cathryn?”

“You’ll meet her on Sunday when we go across to the Isle of Wight. Until then I’m saying nothing.”

A buzzer sounds twice; the diesel rumbles away from the platform, and the familiar landmarks I grew up with — St Hild’s, the old pier, the large tidal pond at the back of the harbour known as the Slake — slowly disappear from view.

With them go the last traces of the person I was when I returned here.

Not dead, but held in that transparent yet securely locked container we call the past.

After limping through the flat, monotonous arable land south of Peterborough for nearly half an hour, the InterCity 125 finally begins to pick up speed again. It cruises steadily enough past Huntingdon, St Neots, Sandy and Biggleswade — towns well inside London’s commuter belt, as shown by the dozens of cars parked at each station — but slows to a crawl on the approach to Hitchin. With more than thirty miles still to go, our prospects of arriving in the capital before the weekend rush gets into full swing are fading fast.

“Trust British Rail to mess everything up,” I sigh, laying my copy of Vogue on the table next to the empty paper cups and plastic cartons left over from our improvised lunch. “At this rate it’ll be dark before we get there.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Kerrie. “I was going to suggest we take our time crossing London. We’ll go for something to eat, recharge our batteries. Better safe than sorry.”

“I thought you weren’t expecting trouble…”

“I’m not. But if anything does happen, I’d rather we were both feeling refreshed.”

Only at this point do I remember that I’m not as clued up regarding the layout of central London as a girl who’s supposed to have spent her teenage years in SE9 ought to be.

“How well d’you know your way around?” I ask.

“Alan and I lived in Pimlico for four years, so you needn’t worry about getting lost.”

That’s me told.

The countryside is gliding by more quickly. Soon we’re passing the junction with the suburban line from Royston, then flashing through the sprawling dormitory towns — Stevenage, Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield, Potters Bar — and finally emerging from the long series of tunnels that bring us into the metropolis itself. For a short time I’m a seven year old boy again, breathless with excitement at the thought of experiencing the sights and sounds of one of the world’s most famous cities. The first Underground sign. The first bright red Routemaster bus. Alexandra Palace. Arsenal’s football ground. Finsbury Park, the last station before Kings Cross. That special moment when people start rising from their seats and reaching for their suitcases…

Maybe I haven’t changed that much after all.

We wait for the carriage to empty before stepping onto the platform, then pause for a few more seconds to allow our ears to adjust to the clamour of man and machine echoing beneath the massive vaulted roof. Kerrie shifts her bag onto her left shoulder so I can slip my arm through hers and thus minimise the chances of us becoming separated when we join the throng milling in front of the ticket barrier. It also prompts me to remember that I’m not down here on holiday.

Escalators. Ticket machines. Buskers. Colour-coded direction signs. Posters advertising books, films, plays and musicals you’d be familiar with if only you lived here. The blast of warm air signalling the arrival of the Underground train. Everywhere you look, that distinctive map.

Ten minutes in London and you’re fully assimilated. You want to stay. You’d move here if you could afford to.

Of course it’s an illusion. Of course there’s loneliness and deprivation. Of course there’s violence and crime.

But it’s not hard to understand why those who already have roots in this city very rarely want to set them down anywhere else.

We take the Piccadilly line, jammed into a carriage populated by mute, unsmiling automatons. The lurching, unsteady motion tempts me to cling all the more tightly to Kerrie’s arm. Instead I relax my grip, aware of the tension hardening the set of her mouth.

At Leicester Square she decides we should make the rest of the journey to Waterloo on foot.

“There’s not much point in catching anything going out of London before seven — unless you don’t mind standing for an hour and twenty minutes. Anyway, I’d like to powder my nose and grab another cup of coffee. If I have to deal with that pair I want to be wide awake.”

The staircase disgorges us into dazzling sunshine and the worst excesses of unrestrained commercialism. Barrow boys hawk key rings, mugs, plates, T-shirts, silly hats and other assorted junk splashed with red, white and blue, or crudely processed prints of Tower Bridge, Beefeaters and the Houses of Parliament. Restaurants whose frontages promise exclusivity but in truth are no more than jumped-up eating houses compete just as avidly for the undiscerning tourist’s wallet. Hoardings pour glamour and glitz down upon a multitude infused with vim and vibrancy. Here you’re encouraged to feel you can remain one step ahead of the rest of the country simply by breathing in.

Kerrie guides me along the polyglot Charing Cross Road to St Martin’s Place, where I’m granted my first glimpse of Trafalgar Square in getting on for two years. But she has no desire to take in the sights, ducking left along a narrow side street and into a cafe with a fancy Italian name and a price list that would render Norah unable to speak for months. Once the young waitress who’s trying a bit too hard to be Audrey Hepburn has brought over our coffee and biscuits, we sit and chat about nothing in particular until my companion’s face unexpectedly turns serious.

“How are you off for cash, sweetheart?” she asks me.

“Okay, I suppose.”

“I want you to go out and flag down a taxi. Tell the driver to take you to Victoria, but when you get there act all scatterbrained and say you meant Waterloo instead. I’ll–“

“We’re being followed, aren’t we?”

“I’m not sure. If we are there’s only one of him, and he can’t be in two places at the same time. I’ll ride round on the Underground for a while, then meet you outside a pub on Waterloo Road called The Hole In The Wall.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Better you don’t know. You’ll be less likely to give yourself away.”

It’s comforting to realise she’s got so much faith in me.

“All right,” I sigh, patting her hand. “The Hole In The Wall it is. But you’re buying the drinks.”

Walking back to St Martin’s Place, I risk a quick look behind me to see if anyone’s behaving suspiciously. The coast seems clear, so I shorten my stride and do my best to stay calm. I may be alone in a strange city, but I’m no teenage ingénue.

He’s waiting at the corner. I search for a shop doorway or an alley I can dash into, but it’s too late. He’s seen me.

And he doesn’t appear very pleased about it.

J G Egerton, dressed in a light brown jacket, an open-necked shirt and jeans, steps forward.

“Trust you to stick your oar in,” he says. “Here, let me carry your bag while we find somewhere we can talk.”

“You must be joking. Now piss off or I’ll scream blue murder.”

“You could do that. But then I wouldn’t be able to tell you what really happened on the breakwater the night Bob Hodgson died — or why Ruth Hansford-Jones had to take your body.”

From Waterloo Bridge I look out across the broad sweep of the Thames as it curves east towards St Paul’s and the City. Behind me stands the opulent finery of the Palace of Westminster.

All that power.

Or so I used to believe…

Egerton is standing beside me, flicking cigarette ash over the parapet. He has said little since he confronted me, whilst I’ve managed to control my eagerness to pummel his ears with the questions I so fervently wish to be answered.

“You’ve adapted well,” he remarks at length. “Better than I would’ve done.”

“Do I get a gold star for that?”

“I’d have thought helping to save the world was its own reward.”

“I think we know how that turned out for Helen Sutton, what her reward was.”

He takes another drag, then lets the butt fall into the restless water.

“Helen was infected with something. A sort of virus that takes over the mind. But you can’t study it under a microscope. If you think of the brain as a computer, this — for want of a better word I’ll call it a disease — is a new program that replaces the original one. Memes, they’re called, self-replicating units of information that jump from person to person. Most of them are pretty harmless, like the current craze for ‘50s fashions. Not the one Helen caught, though.”

“Sounds like pseudo-scientific bullshit to me.”

“Plenty of the world’s leading academics would disagree with you.”

“Get to the point. Who’s Yvette de Monnier? And how did you both find out about Ruth stealing my body?”

“Yvette was once very close to Helen. They were lovers, in fact.”

I turn and stare at him.

“It sounds like you’re talking about Mademoiselle Malraux…”

“Yes, Solange Malraux was the name she went by when she was living in Northcroft.”

“But Yvette doesn’t look anything like–“

“Appearances can be deceptive. You of all people should know that.”

I feel my mouth open and close. My eyes are as wide as those of a city child watching a new-born foal struggle to its feet.

Yvette de Monnier and Mademoiselle Malraux are one and the same. And the only way she could have disguised herself so effectively was if she’d used the transfer device.

Somehow I absorb this latest revelation without crumpling in a heap.

“So go on then,” I grunt. “Who is she?”

“Yvette is, or should I say was, a government agent, one of the very few with a sufficiently high clearance to gain entry to the facility where the mind transfer technology was being developed. She thought — and here I have to confess that I’m a bit out of my depth — that it could be used to cure Helen’s condition. There was one problem: Yvette knew that Helen would flatly refuse to speak to her if she was wearing her original body. Her solution was to pose as one of Helen’s former pupils, and it just so happened that Ruth Pattison had the qualifications necessary for her to be recruited onto the team.”

And there we have it.

The one piece of the puzzle that’s eluded me.

“But it didn’t work, did it?” I scoff. “She swapped with Ruth and found that Helen still wouldn’t listen to her. Richard Brookbank, on the other hand…”

“That’s about the size of it.”

I light up, pouring all my concentration into keeping my hands steady.

“What happened to Ruth?”

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

The cigarette falls to the pavement. I close my eyes, fighting to hold back the wetness that threatens to pour down my cheeks.

It’s one surprise too many. I’ve dealt with an array of disagreeable emotions since I became female, but guilt hasn’t been amongst them.

You don’t sound very Japanese.

You don’t sound very male.

Suki Tatsukichi.

Who I briefly mistook for Mademoiselle Malraux.

No wonder she was so abrupt with me. Fifteen years of her life — the best years — gone in a few moments.

And to spend weeks with a living reminder of everything she’d lost…

What can possibly excuse such a crime, Yvette? How do you sleep?

“And it all went hopelessly tits up,” I sniff. “Three people died that night. You ought to be in jail for manslaughter, not cavorting around in a fucking Rolls-Royce.”

“I had nothing to do with the incident. Yvette only hired me a month ago.”

“Rubbish. You’ve been working for her in the full knowledge that she caused those deaths. That makes you an accessory after the fact.”

He takes another cigarette from the silver case in his left pocket.

“’Death by misadventure’. That was the verdict the coroner gave at the end of Bob Hodgson’s inquest, and it was the right one. Helen ran down to the breakwater to escape from Yvette. Carol Hodgson saw what she thought was a murder in progress and tried to save her friend. Bob went after his wife, as you’d expect him to. There was a scuffle. Yvette managed to exchange bodies with Carol before the wave hit. They would both have drowned if she hadn’t. Later, in hospital, she swapped with one of the nursing staff. That’s the body she currently inhabits.”

Oh, and the sister in charge of the ward mam was admitted to has disappeared as well. Left her job for no reason at all.

“The sweetener being the quarter of a million Carol was due to inherit from Helen’s will, I suppose. But tell me this: where does Kerrie Latimer’s father fit in?”

“That’s one of the things we’ve been trying to find out.”

“And the casket?”

“We don’t want her to have it. That goes for the photographs as well. You might consider getting them back for us.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yvette would like you on her side.”

“After what she did to me? All those swaps must have unhinged her.”

“Think about it. What are you going to do once Kerrie decides she doesn’t need you to hold her hand any more? Spend your time slaving away in the Gladstone while you wait for the government to phone you up? They’ve left you to vegetate in that dump. And don’t kid on that you’re happy there, because you’re not.”

“Better than teaming up with a renegade. Sooner or later she’ll make a mistake, then you’ll both be behind bars.”

“Don’t underestimate her. She has friends in the highest of high places.”

“I’m sure she has. I bet she’s in Buck House sipping Darjeeling with Liz and Phil as we speak.”

I start to walk away, but Egerton grasps my wrist.

“The casket was sent to Helen as a trigger,” he says in a low voice. “It was an instruction to turn herself into a kuzkardesh gara and begin spreading the infection around. If Yvette hadn’t intervened when she did–“

Unbidden, an image of New Stranton shopping precinct crystallises in my mind. The women are all cloaked and hooded; the men gaze at them with hollow, unfocused expressions.

“Who are those women?” I demand to know. “Where are they from? What do they want?”

Egerton slowly relaxes his grip.

“The name translates literally as ‘black sister’. But that doesn’t do the bond between them justice at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Their minds are all programmed to work in exactly the same way. A single appearance, a single set of opinions, a single purpose. They’re a totalitarian regime, a religious cult and a zombie plague all rolled into one.”

“But that’s ridiculous.”

“And swapping bodies isn’t? Look, I’ll be blunt with you. If this menace gains control then that’s it. Full stop. Period. Punkt. Bye-bye progress, bye-bye creativity, bye-bye all the things that make us human. For ever.”

He sounds sincere enough, but I no longer care. I have a duty, both to myself and Suki Tatsukichi, to become the woman Ruth Hansford-Jones should have been.

Nothing can stand in the way of that.

I pick up my bag and hoist the strap onto my shoulder. Egerton begins to speak; I shake my head, making it clear that the conversation is at an end.

But as I adjust my pace to that of the commuters crossing the bridge, one sentence in particular keeps coming back to me.

Memes, they’re called, self- replicating units of information that jump from person to person.

As benign as a top ten record, as murderous as National Socialism — or as insidious as an idea planted by a small group of heretic Muslim women, one that can suddenly awaken after nearly fifteen years of slumber.

Adieu, mon amour. Tu es mort pour sauver les femmes du monde entier.

Is that what Yvette de Monnier believes? Does she really think that women the world over are susceptible to this threat?

Maybe she has good reason to.

…then Helen said summat to ‘er, must’ve been in French ‘cause I never understood a word of it, and yer know what, the frog went down like a sack o’ taties.

You were out there with Helen and the others, weren’t you, Yvette? You were infected with the rest of them. And when you and your lover split up, she said something that triggered the virus laying dormant in your mind.

You became a kuzkardesh gara, a black sister. The woman calling herself Suki Tatsukichi has the scars to prove it.

So how did you escape from this cult? Who deprogrammed you? And why aren’t you working with the MoD to develop this cure you claim to have found?

I’ve never told Peter, but some of the words…well, they spoke to me. I wanted to go out and repeat them to every woman I saw. I still do. And it’s not just me, either.

Because I’ve a feeling we might need it.