Trick of the Dark

4

My mother disappeared when I was sixteen. It was the best thing that could have happened to me.

When I say that out loud, people look at me out of the corners of their eyes, as if I've transgressed some fundamental taboo. But it's the truth. I'm not hiding some complicated grief reaction.

My mother disappeared when I was sixteen. The guards had walked away from the prison leaving the door unlocked. And I emerged blinking into the sunlight.

Jay Stewart leaned back and read her words, head cocked critically to the side. It did exactly what it needed to do, she thought. Arresting and intriguing. Pick it off the three-for-two table, read that intro and you couldn't not want to carry on. That was the secret of getting the punters to part with their money. Simple to understand, hard to do. But she'd done it once already. She could do it again.

When she'd decided to write her first book, Jay had done what she always did. Research, research, research. That was the key to any successful endeavour. Check out the market. Consider the opposition. Acknowledge the potential pitfalls. Then go for it. Preparation is never procrastination. That was one of her key Powerpoint presentation slides. She'd always been proud to say she'd never plunged headlong into anything.

That was just one of the things that wasn't true any more.

Not that she was about to admit so fundamental a change to anyone except herself. When her literary agent had taken her to lunch the week before so he could reveal that her publisher was dangling a new contract before them, Jay had made a point of appearing as cautious and noncommittal as ever. 'I thought the bottom had dropped out of the misery memoir business with the market crash,' she'd said when Jasper had raised the subject halfway through their finicky starters of scallops with mango salsa and pea shoots. As she waited for Jasper to marshal his reply, Jay stared at the food and wondered when exactly it had ceased to be possible to find simple well-cooked dishes in expensive restaurants.

'And so it has.' Jasper beamed at her as though he were the teacher and Jay the favourite pupil. 'That's why they want something fresh from you. Triumph over adversity, that's what they're interested in. And you, my dear, are well set to be the poster girl for triumph over adversity.'

He had a point. Jay couldn't deny that. 'Hmm,' she said, dissecting a scallop and putting a delicate forkful in her mouth. An excuse not to say more till she had heard more.

'Your story's an inspiration,' Jasper persisted, his lean and wary face uncharacteristically kindly. 'And it's aspirational. The readers can relate to you because you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth.'

Jay swallowed, raised an eyebrow and smiled. 'The only silver spoons around when I was a baby were those cute little coke spoons my mother's friends wore on chains round their necks. Not many of my readers came from that universe either.'

Jasper gave a tight professional smile. 'Probably not, no. But your publisher's market research indicates that readers do feel close to you. They feel they could be you, if things had just been a little bit different.'

No chance. Not in a million quantum universes. 'Tangents,' Jay said, her attention on her plate. 'The facts of my life touch the edges of their lives in enough places for them to feel a shivery sort of connection. I see how that worked with the misery memoir. The readers can snuggle under their duvet, all smug and cosy because they escaped my descent into the procession of hells my mother dragged me through in the first sixteen years of my life.' She drew her breath in sharply, hearing it whistle through her teeth. 'But triumph over adversity? Isn't that a bit like rubbing their noses in it?'

Jasper frowned. 'I'm not sure I see what you mean.' Somehow, he'd managed to clean his plate with predatory efficiency while Jay was still barely a third of the way through her food. It was one of the reasons Jay had chosen Jasper as her agent when she'd first decided to write her misery memoir. She liked the people with appetite to be ranged on her side.

'Unrepentant gave them the chance to feel sorry for me. To be glad that they had escaped what I went through. But an account of how I triumphed at Oxford, set up a successful dotcom company, sold out before the bubble burst then went on to found a niche publishing business while knocking out a bestselling misery memoir… Well, it seems to me that all I'm doing is providing them with reasons to hate me. And that's not a recipe for selling books, Jasper.'

'You'd be surprised,' Jasper said, his voice dry as the Chablis they were drinking. 'People who know about these things tell me the punters love to read about people like them who have made it.'

Jay shook her head. 'What they love reading about is vacuous celebrity. Talentless show-offs who will do anything for their moment in OK magazine. Idiots who think appearing on The X-Factor is the pinnacle of achievement. That's people like them. I am not people like them.'

'You do a good job of pretending.'

'Only up to a point. Then there's the lesbian thing. By ending the book where I did, I managed to keep my adolescent yearnings more or less off-stage. But writing about Oxford and after — it's hard to see how I can avoid it.'

Jasper shrugged. 'The world's moved on, darling. Lesbians are cool now. Think Sandi Toksvig, Sam Ronson, Maggi Hambling, Sarah Waters.'

'You still wouldn't want your daughter to marry one.' She finished her appetiser and placed her cutlery neatly together on the plate. 'At best, they'll think I'm a lucky bastard.'

'They certainly will if they find out the size of the advance,' he said, his eyes narrowing in pleasure. 'Half as much again what we got for Unrepentant. Which is terrific in a flat market.'

A waiter whose designer suit had patently cost more than Jay's outfit whisked their plates away. 'Do you think they only hire staff who fit the suits?' she said absently as she watched him swagger back to the kitchen.

Jasper ignored the question and stuck heroically to his pitch. 'But you're a TV face now too. Ever since they started inviting you as a special guest investor on White Knight, you're on the radar.'

Jay scowled like a disgruntled teenager. 'And that's the last time I let you talk me into going against my better judgement. Bloody White Knight. I can't buy a packet of spaghetti in the supermarket without someone trying to pitch me their brilliant business idea.'

'Stop pretending to be a curmudgeon. You love the attention. '

'I am a curmudgeon.' Jay paused while artfully arranged slices of pink lamb surrounded by neat piles of Puy lentils interspersed with perfectly carved miniature root vegetables, all set on massive porcelain plates, appeared in front of them. 'I meant what I said the other day. I really don't want to do any more White Knight.'

She could see Jasper biting back his frustration. 'Fine,' he said, his smile thin and his voice tight. 'I think you're crazy, but fine. So why don't you do something instead that gives me a legitimate excuse to keep everyone at arm's length? "Sorry, she's writing. She's got a deadline." Plus you know you enjoyed the process of writing Unrepentant. And you also discovered you have a talent for writing memoir.'

Jay couldn't deny that she liked the idea of Jasper telling the world to go away. Bar the door and keep the barbarians out while she gorged on love. She knew enough about the arc of relationships to understand that the rush of emotional and sexual intensity between her and Magda would pass soon enough. You couldn't postpone the first flush till you could create a window in the diary. It came and went on its own timetable. And this had come so instantly, so unexpectedly, so unpredictably it was hard not to fear it might fade just as fast, though it was hard to imagine how it could fade when Magda's beauty made her heart flip every time she cast eyes on her. Having an excuse to hide from the world so she could bind Magda closer to her only had an upside. Never mind that in the long run the book wouldn't make her any friends. She had enough of those.

She sighed. 'Oh, all right, then,' she said, more grumbling than gracious.

Jasper's grin was naked delight. 'You're not going to regret this.'

'For your sake, I hope not. You know how bad things happen to people who cross me.' There was a moment of chill, then Jay smiled. 'Only joking, Jasper,' she said.

His smile was a shaky echo of hers.

5

Before they met, Charlie Flint had expected to despise and dislike Lisa Kent. Even though Charlie had been the one flying under false colours that first time, she'd been convinced she was the one on the moral high ground.

Her passion for her profession meant she was constantly alive to opportunities to extend her knowledge and experience. So when it became clear that there was a new trend in self-help programmes that tiptoed close to cult territory, she wanted to check the phenomenon out for herself. The one she'd chosen from the three or four she'd been aware of had been Lisa Kent's 'I'm Not OK, You're Not OK: Negotiating Vulnerability'. NV to its acolytes; groups always had to establish private language that set out the terms of their ownership.

Charlie had signed up under a false name for a weekend seminar. Her intent had been to use the experience as the basis for an incisive, devastating account of the whole phenomenon both for peer-reviewed academic publication and possibly for a three-page spread in the Guardian's G2 section.

The fifty-odd audience members were pretty much what Charlie had expected — mostly mid-twenties to late thirties, undistinguished by individual style, nearly all bearing the taint of defeat tempered only by an anxious hope that this weekend would somehow transform their lives. What had taken her aback was the grudging realisation that Lisa Kent was neither shaman nor charlatan. What she was peddling was mostly sensible and practical. Mainstream therapeutic stuff. What made the seminar cult-like was Lisa's charisma. When she spoke, she held the room in her hands. They loved her. And Charlie was shocked by the realisation that she wasn't so different from the rest of them. Her training and experience hadn't immunised her to Lisa's charm.

But still, there might yet have been no harm done. What happened in the afternoon coffee break changed that. Charlie had been leaning against a wall, drinking tea and trying to look downtrodden enough to belong when Lisa made her way through the crowd and stopped in front of her. Lisa had peered at her name badge and given a wry smile. 'I'd appreciate a little chat, Ms… Browning,' she'd said, hanging enough scepticism on the name to make sure Charlie understood this shouldn't be taken as flattery.

Charlie followed Lisa into a small room off the main hall. Low modular chairs lined the walls and a water cooler hummed in one corner. There was no clue to its function in the arrangement. Charlie sat down without waiting to be asked, crossing one leg over the other, wondering what was coming. Lisa leaned against the closed door, still with the twisted smile in place. Her eyes, Charlie thought, were hard to avoid. A greenish blue tractor beam that had transfixed a room full of people and now made her feel pinned down. 'This is an amazing experience,' she said, trying to imitate the enthusiasm she'd heard at lunch.

'Dr Charlotte Flint,' Lisa said. 'Charlie to your friends, I believe. First degree in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology from St Scholastika's College, Oxford. Masters in Clinical Psychology and Psychopathology at Sussex. Qualified as a psychiatrist in Manchester, where you are now a senior lecturer in Clinical Psychology and Psychological Profiling. Home Office-accredited to work with the police as a profiler. How am I doing?'

'You missed out my campfire badge from the Guides. How did you spot me?'

Lisa pushed off from the door and got herself some water, turning her back on Charlie. 'I recognised you.' She turned back, shaking her head gently. 'You spoke very eloquently at the Forensic Science Society about the reasons for the choices you made in the Bill Hopton case.'

Bill Hopton. The man who had walked free thanks to Charlie's reluctant conclusion in the witness box that he hadn't murdered Gemma Summerville. The man who had walked free to murder four other women. Just mentioning his name was a gauntlet of sorts. The Hopton case had catapulted Charlie into the public eye. It hadn't done her many favours at the time. And now it appeared to have destroyed her career. But back then, that afternoon in Oxford facing Lisa Kent, it was still a bomb waiting to go off, although it remained the one case everyone connected to law enforcement wanted to talk about with her. Deliberately, Charlie said, 'I didn't know you're a member of the FSS.'

Lisa sipped her drink, studying Charlie over the rim of the white plastic cup, dark eyebrows raised in amused arcs. 'I'm not. But I do have friends who are familiar with my interest in the way people's minds work. I thought it was you this morning, but I made some checks at lunchtime to be certain.'

'It's a free country.'

Lisa laughed. 'Don't be ridiculous. You're here to do a demolition job. You think I'm exploiting gullibility and weakness for profit. Though quite how it ties in with offender profiling, I'm not sure.'

Bang to rights, Charlie thought. 'I did think that. I don't now. As to the professional relevance — manipulation of others is how a lot of serial offenders get away with things for so long.' She got up and moved towards the door. 'It's been an interesting day. But I think it's probably best if I leave.'

'I should be angry with you, Dr Flint. But for some reason I'm not. You really don't have to go.' The words were innocuous enough; the tone was not.

Charlie shook her head. 'I think it's best if I do. I don't want to put you off your stride.'

'You're probably right. Knowing that you know that I know who you are would alter the dynamic in the room.' Lisa dug a card out of the pocket of her loose trousers. 'I seem to have confounded your expectations, which means this has been a waste of your time.' She smiled. 'Let me make it up to you sometime. I really do think we might have some interesting things to share. Here's my card. Let's stay in touch.'

As she walked back to her hotel room, Charlie tried to unravel the nuances in Lisa's voice, but she could never be quite sure that what she thought she'd heard had really been there. Had Lisa been flirting? Was it some kind of professional challenge? Or did she simply enjoy the cat-and-mouse game? Whatever it was, Charlie was snagged on the hook of Lisa's charm.

Puzzling over the exact meaning of Lisa's words had become a familiar experience for Charlie. Since that first encounter the ether had hummed with their electronic interchanges, the professional usually making way for the personal exchanges of two people building a connection.

In Charlie's experience, clinical psychiatrists fell into two groups. The ones who deliberately chose never to question anything about themselves and the ones who subjected every aspect of their lives to the same scrutiny they applied to their patients. Charlie often wished she was not doomed to membership of the 'analyse this' crew. But it went some way to explaining her fascination with Lisa. The more inscrutable the woman's communications, the more Charlie yearned to unpick their meaning. What she was clear about was that they were flirting. Flirting with each other, flirting with ideas, flirting with danger.

Perhaps you should consider what your correspondent has failed to send you? I always like the answer that's not there… What exactly did Lisa mean by that, Charlie wondered, staring at her computer screen. Was she simply referring to the newspaper cuttings, or was this another instance of oblique suggestiveness? The way Lisa made her feel was like a family of termites burrowing through the solid foundation of her relationship with Maria. Charlie knew she had no business playing this risky game, but every time she resolved to leave it alone, there would be a text or an email demanding her attention and requiring a response. She was as hopeless as some of her patients. Unable to resist what she knew was bad for her. She couldn't even be sure the woman was a lesbian. Flirtation and obliquity might just be her natural mode. So little of their communication had been face to face and so much of it had been a teasing joust. Maybe Charlie was completely off the mark. Really, for all she knew, Lisa could be straight. This whole mess could be nothing more than pitiful wishful thinking. With a despairing moan, Charlie turned back to the contents of the envelope.

Clearly, the clippings were only a selection of what had been published in the media. Could it be that the answer lay in the missing stories? Impatiently, she called up Google News and typed in the name of the victim. In a fraction of a second, the search turned up a list of everything the media had produced about the murder of Philip Carling. There were dozens of them, even allowing for Google's winnowing-out of similar stories.

There were other, more urgent, calls on Charlie's time. Reviving her dying career, for one. But sometimes distraction was irresistible. Charlie called up the first story, determined to work through them methodically. The first revelation came in the second story she accessed, a Daily Telegraph article that referred to Dr Magda Newsam. Shocked, Charlie realised that the widowed bride was no stranger to her. The name Magdalene Carling had meant nothing. But the alternate identity jolted Charlie from academic enthusiasm to dismay. She was appalled that she had somehow failed to register that the woman at the heart of this tragedy was someone she had once known. Suddenly, things began to make sense.

'Poor kid,' she said softly, pity in her voice. The realisation of Magda's place in the murder trial made one thing incontrovertible. Whoever had sent the mysterious package had almost certainly been part of college life all those years ago when Charlie had been an undergraduate, a pupil of Magda's mother Corinna and an occasional babysitter of her children. Was it Corinna Newsam herself, or had someone else sent the photocopies? And still the question remained: why?

Methodical as ever, Charlie continued through the archive material. She had almost come to the end when a photograph downloaded to her screen, appearing one slice at a time from the top down. The woman it revealed had the kind of beauty that made people stare. Even a snatched newspaper shot left no room for doubt on that score. Dark blonde hair and apparently perfect skin, the regular features of a fashion model, a mouth whose fullness hinted at sensuality. 'Wow,' Charlie said, admiring the shapely figure and undeniably good legs that gradually appeared.

The caption revealed that this stunning woman in the foreground of the photograph was Philip Carling's widow Magdalene. 'Look how you turned out, Maggot,' she said, amazed at this trick of the genes. But as she studied the wider picture, Charlie realised she needed no caption to recognise the woman at Magda's elbow. Age had not withered Jay Macallan Stewart's fine-boned beauty, nor custom staled her air of dashing danger.

Although it created more questions than it answered, Charlie felt sure she had solved the basic problem of the source of the cuttings. 'If my daughter was hanging out with Jay Stewart, I'd be doing something about it,' she said. And with a few keystrokes, she was in her email program. Subject: More Questions Than Answers

Date: 23 March 2010 15:35:26 GMT

From: cflint@mancit.ac.uk

To: lisak@arbiter.com

I followed your advice. It was obvious I hadn't been sent all the press coverage, so I Googled news to see if I could figure out what was missing. Lo and behold, I discovered almost instantly that none of the versions I had been sent named the widow appropriately. Her real identity is not , it's . AKA Maggot, or at least it used to be when she was 10 and I was 21 and used to babysit her and her siblings. She's the eldest daughter of Corinna Newsam, the junior philosophy fellow at Schollie's who taught me and regularly used me as a babysitter until my final-year obsession with getting a decent degree and still managing to have some fun put a stop to it. Anyway, we've stayed in Christmas card touch since, though not so close that she mentioned Magda's involvement in this case.

Reading on, I came across a photo of Magda — who has grown into a drop-dead gorgeous beauty in the Princess Diana mould. And standing behind her was somebody else I recognised. She used to be plain Jay Stewart but now the world knows her as Jay Macallan Stewart. Dotcom millionaire and bestselling misery memoir author. Now she's the boss of 24/7, the web-based personalised travel guides. You might have seen her on White Knight, she appears sometimes in the guest investor slot. She was a couple of years behind me at Schollie's, but her notoriety was sufficient to overcome that handicap. Even among the dykes of Brighton, the stories about Jay Stewart galloped along the grapevine.

I remember her as ruthlessly ambitious, one of those working-class heroes who are determined to exploit every opportunity to the hilt and don't care whose faces they trample on in the scramble to the top of the heap. She was elected JCR president the year after I went down. Only after she'd secured the position did she come out, very spectacularly and stylishly, as the lover of a senior commissioning editor on one of the glossy fashion mags. Some of the college fellows wanted to throw her out, but she was always very careful never actually to break the rules.

So, I figure that if I was Corinna Newsam, and Jay Stewart was hanging round my daughter, I'd be looking to dig some dirt that could consign Stewart to the history bin. But she wouldn't want to approach me directly in case my lesbian solidarity was stronger than a very old loyalty to her and Maggot.

Now, having worked it all out, I'm not sure what to do. Do I want to get involved? Do I care? And doesn't lesbian solidarity count for something? All suggestions gratefully received.

Hope your clients didn't drive you to drink.

Love, Charlie

Subject: Re: More Questions Than Answers

Date: 23 March 2010 19:57:32 GMT

From: lisak@arbiter.com

To: cflint@mancit.ac.uk

Hi, Charlie,

If you were a dog, you'd be a Lakeland terrier, all dogged persistence, solidly reliable and wearing a grin that could melt an iceberg. Your discoveries are fascinating. Whatever the subtext here is, you're right, it's clear that it has something to do with Magda Newsam and Jay Stewart, and that the linkage to you is via Schollie's.

Your Corinna seems remarkably unsure of you, considering how well she appears once to have known you. In her shoes, I would have turned up on your doorstep and told you I needed you. You'd never have refused. Would you?

On the other hand, it may simply be that because she does know you, and understands how impossible you would find it to say no to her, she's asking for your help in the only way she can imagine that would allow you the possibility of refusal.

Or is it a test? Along the lines of, if you're not smart enough to work this out, you are no use to me.

Which is it, do you think?

I know you, Charlie. You need answers. You defined your options with that first decision to investigate the clippings; whether you acknowledged it or not, it tugged at your deep-seated affection for your old college. Now, it seems to me that you will not be able to rest until you have confronted Corinna and discovered what she wants from you.

Look on the bright side. Maybe you can wangle a trip to Oxford and we can spend some time together. It would be good to have some face time that isn't at a conference, don't you think?

Clients drove me to a delicious claret. If you were here, I would take the opportunity to wean you off those New World heavyweights you're so wedded to. I promise you'd enjoy the journey.

LKx

No doubt about that, thought Charlie. Lisa had chased thoughts of Magda and Corinna from her head with the suggestion of turning up on her doorstep and demanding her help. That was enough to set Charlie's thoughts flickering over the possibilities, both delicious and dreadful. The thought of Lisa and Maria face to face made her want to bury her face in her hands and weep with the impossibility of it all. She couldn't believe Lisa was unconscious of the effect her words would have; after all, the woman spent her days dealing with the innermost recesses of other people's minds.

'Grow up,' Charlie muttered. She forced herself to stop indulging in adolescent fantasies and to focus on the practical content of the message. Lisa clearly understood her well enough to know she could no more leave the cuttings alone than she could the charged communications between them. Corinna did seem the obvious candidate. There seemed no option other than to call her and settle the matter.

Charlie sighed. Finally she'd managed to find something even more daunting than the General Medical Council. Somehow, she didn't think it was going to be any easier to deal with.

6

'You can't argue with that,' Catherine Newsam said, ushering her sister out of the courtroom and down a narrow side passage towards the room the Crown Prosecution solicitor had arranged for them. 'The judge nailed it. I don't see how anybody could have any doubt that Barker and Sanderson did it.' She neatly interposed her body between her sister and a woman she'd seen on the press benches. 'Fuck off,' Catherine said sweetly over her shoulder as she followed Magda inside the room marked 'Private'. Being the youngest of the Newsam children had granted Catherine licence that sometimes made her siblings wince.

Two weeks since her first retreat there, and still Magda found herself surprised by the lack of comfort. Four not-quite-matching chairs with the tweedy upholstery worn smooth in patches, a table that was too large for the space and a metal bin that hadn't been emptied since they'd first dumped their used coffee cups in it. Someone had tried to lift the room's spirits by taping a couple of Spanish holiday posters to the wall, but the brilliant blue of the sky only made the grubby walls more dispiriting. But none of that mattered to Magda. What she cared about was having a refuge from the stares and whispers. 'You really think so? I don't know, Wheelie. Just because we want it to be that way doesn't mean you're right,' she said, tucking one leg beneath her as she perched on a chair.

Catherine nodded vehemently. She looked like a child's doll with her curly blonde hair, round face, bright blue eyes and pink cheeks. There was no physical resemblance between the sisters. Where Magda was tall, slender and effortlessly graceful, Catherine was average in every respect. What made her memorable was not her looks but her irrepressible bounce, currently pressed into service in defence of her big sister. Others might have resented Magda's beauty, but Catherine was proud of her sister and delighted that, for once, she could offer Magda the support and help that had always been at her own back. 'Trust me, Magda,' she said, adamant in her confidence. 'Especially after the way the prosecuting barrister rubbished the defence. They've had their last taste of freedom for a while.' She still gripped the door handle. 'Do you need something to eat? Or drink? Coffee? Muffins?'

It was amazing how often Catherine's eagerness to please manifested itself in food and drink. 'In spite of your conviction that it's all open and shut, I suspect the jury will be out long enough for you to do a commando coffee raid.'

Catherine checked the pocket of her jeans for change. 'I'll be back,' she said in a passable Terminator impersonation. Magda couldn't help smiling, and Catherine's eyes lit up with gratification as she headed out the door.

For the first time since she'd arrived at court that morning, no other eyes were on Magda. The absence of attention was as tangible as the lifting of a physical weight. Being on show was exhausting. She wondered how Jay coped with being the focus of so much attention. Thanks to her appearances on White Knight, she was often recognised in the most unlikely of situations, stripping her of her privacy. 'I was so naive about it,' she'd once said ruefully to Magda. 'I never appreciated how people assume possession of you simply because you appear on their TV screens.'

Magda wished they were together now; she never minded Jay's admiring scrutiny. But if Jay were here, the attention from the press and the public gallery would be even more oppressive. The attitude of the media would shift dramatically. From being the object of sympathy she'd become the subject of lurid speculation and diary-column gossip. Jay was right. They needed to avoid their relationship becoming public knowledge till the trial had slipped out of people's immediate consciousness. The one time they'd been photographed together, after Philip's memorial service, Jay had managed to put out the potential fire, making sure she was described as an old friend of the family. Having been taught by Corinna had turned out to be useful after all.

'We need to keep our private life private for now. You don't want them thinking of you as the merry widow,' Jay had said. 'Even though we haven't done anything wrong, there are plenty of people who would be only too ready to insinuate the opposite.'

She was right. Nothing they had done had been wrong. Quite the opposite. The more evidence Magda had heard in the courtroom, the more she understood how right Jay had been. If they hadn't done what needed to be done, justice would never have been served. But now Paul and Joanna were going to jail, where they deserved to be. And she was proud of the part she'd played in that process.

Magda clung tightly to that feeling of pride. She didn't have many unmixed feelings about Philip's death. It had been a terrible blow, no denying that. To lose your husband to sudden violent death on your wedding day was never going to be less than shattering. Even if you'd been tamping down your doubts about the marriage for weeks. But if it hadn't happened the way it did, she and Jay might never have found each other again. And that was a notion that filled Magda with horror. She hated herself for the thought, but in her heart she knew that losing Philip to gain Jay was a trade she'd settle for all over again. It shamed and appalled her in equal measure that she could even let such a thought cross her mind. Harbouring ideas like that made her cradle Catholic guilt kick in and left her feeling that her present happiness was not only undeserved but on the brink of being snatched from her.

Catherine shouldered the door open, a cardboard cup of latte in each hand, saving Magda from the darkness of her thoughts. 'That was quick,' Magda said.

Catherine grinned. 'I told you tipping the coffee-stall girl on day one would pay dividends. I don't even have to queue any more.' She passed a coffee over and perched on a chair, tucking one leg under her. 'I bet you're relieved it's nearly over.'

'Yeah.' Magda sighed. 'I'm just hoping that I'll feel some sense of closure.' She shrugged. 'A way to draw a line and move on.'

'Isn't that what Jay's about?' Catherine said. Magda searched for hostility in her tone and, finding none, decided her sister was only curious.

'Jay feels like a parallel universe,' Magda said. 'Not connected to my life with Philip at all.'

'But she is,' Catherine said. 'I mean, that's when you ran into her again. The day of the wedding.'

Her words sent an electric jolt through Magda's chest. 'No,' she said. 'It was after that. Remember? We met at a dinner party.'

Catherine looked puzzled. 'But she was there. At St Scholastika's. On your wedding day. I saw her.'

Magda gave a little laugh that sounded artificial to her. 'Well, she was there, it's true. She was speaking at a conference in college. But she wasn't at the wedding. I never saw her. I never even knew she'd been there till ages afterwards. It didn't come up.'

Catherine frowned. 'Oh. OK. I knew you didn't get together till later but I guess I just sort of assumed that you'd run into her. When I saw her, she was coming out of Magnusson Hall. Since we were using the loos there, and Mummy's office, I thought you must have seen her or something.' She gave Magda a tentative smile. Her big sister might have been protective of her, but when she thought Catherine needed slapping down, Magda had never held back.

But Magda had no intention of making an issue out of this particular conversation. 'Bloody social scientists, always leaping to conclusions,' she teased. It was familiar territory, the hard scientists in the family grousing that the others had it easy, coming up with theories without the inconvenience of having to prove them empirically.

'That's not fair,' Catherine pouted. 'I try to keep an open mind. For example, I could have come up with all sorts of twisted reasons why you didn't tell the exact truth on the witness stand.'

There it was. Out in the open. What Magda had been afraid of for months. The milky coffee turned cloying and sour in her mouth. It's OK, she told herself. This wasn't some hard-faced cop or journalist. This was Catherine, the person who always wanted to think the best of her. Magda frowned, hoping it didn't look as fake as it felt. 'What are you talking about? Of course I told the truth.'

Catherine screwed up her face. She'd never been good at hiding her emotions, and Magda could see the progression of reactions on her face. Finally, she found the right form of words. 'I'm not saying you lied as such. Just that you said something that couldn't have been quite the case.'

Time to go on the attack. 'What on earth are you talking about?' Her forcefulness provoked the response she'd wanted. Catherine was embarrassed and apprehensive. But not so much as to back off completely. 'Well, you said you'd seen Barker and Sanderson leave the main wedding party and disappear round the far side of the Armstrong building.'

'That's right. I said it because that's what I saw. They slipped away towards the punt landing stage. There was no reason for them to go that way. You can only go to the landing stage or back up to the porter's lodge. And he didn't see them.' Magda stared down at the floor. 'That was when they killed him.'

'But you said you'd seen them from the window of Mummy's office. When you went up to get changed into your going-away outfit.'

'That's right. The office overlooks the Magnusson Hall lawn, where the marquee and the dance floor were. You know that.'

Catherine shook her head. 'But you weren't there, Magda. Not when you said you were.'

Magda felt cold, in spite of the stuffy warmth of the room. 'What are you talking about, Wheelie?'

Catherine's mouth twitched uncomfortably. 'I went up after you. I wanted to wish you luck. Give you a hug. Whatever.' One shoulder shrugged. 'Like sisters do. Only you weren't there. The door was unlocked but you weren't there.'

Magda forced a laugh, trying to sound warm and carefree. 'That must have been when I was in the shower. I took a quick shower, Wheelie. I was all sweaty and sticky from the dancing. I didn't want to put clean clothes on in that state. You must have come in then.' She leaned forward and rubbed Catherine's shoulder. 'Silly. Have you been worrying about this?'

'Not worrying, no. Just wondering.' Catherine's expression was still troubled. 'But, Magda… I don't think you can have been in the shower. Because, remember, when I couldn't find you I came back down the middle staircase in Magnusson Hall. And when I got to the ground floor, we met halfway down the corridor. Like you'd just come in the front door. And you were already in your going-away outfit. Remember?'

This was what she had dreaded. A witness who could challenge the version of events she and Jay had fixed on. But it was only Catherine, Magda told herself. Catherine, who had a vested interest in believing in the sister who had always been her hero. Magda shook her head indulgently. 'Well, of course. You don't think I was using the student bathrooms, do you? I had the keys for the Senior Common Room bathrooms on the ground floor of Magnusson Hall. Like I said, I'd just been in the shower.'

Catherine's face cleared in relief. Then it clouded over again. 'So when did you see them? If you were in the ground-floor bathroom, you couldn't have seen them from there.'

Magda gave an exasperated sigh. 'You missed your way, Wheelie. You should have been a lawyer or something. I saw them when I picked up the change of clothes from Mum's office. I stood at the window, looking down at the wedding. All the people I know and love, enjoying themselves. Thinking about the way my life was going to change.' She gave a bitter little laugh. 'Not that I had any bloody idea how it was really going to change.' She turned away from Catherine's gaze and studied the Spanish holiday poster. 'That's when I saw them.'

'Oh. OK.' Catherine smiled, uncertainly. 'I guess that clears it up, then.'

Magda sipped her drink and said nothing. She understood that labouring a lie was the very thing that undermined its credibility. 'Good coffee,' she said. 'Thanks for taking so much care of me over the trial. I appreciate it, Wheelie.'

Catherine shrugged. 'What else would I do? You're my sister.'

'I'm my mother's daughter, but she's not been near me.'

'She's struggling with the Jay thing, Magda. On top of losing Philip… well, it's been like a double whammy for her.'

'Thanks, Catherine.' Magda's tone was sharp. 'I didn't realise me being happy came in the same category as having your son-in-law murdered.'

Stung, Catherine stood up for herself. 'You've got to see it from her point of view. Philip was her dream son-in-law. He dies a horrible, violent death on the very day that all her dreams for you come true. And then you apparently turn into a lesbian without any warning. That's a bit hard for a committed Catholic like Mummy to take. You've got to give her time. You've got to talk to her. Make her realise you understand her point of view, even if you can't agree with it.'

Magda felt her throat constrict with emotion. 'And what about my point of view? When is she ever going to take that into account? How do you think I feel?'

'Like shit, I imagine,' Catherine said softly.

Before Magda could say anything more, the door opened and the familiar bald head of the court usher appeared in the gap. 'Jury's coming back,' he said.

'Already?' Catherine said. She turned to Magda. 'I told you it was open and shut.'

'As long as it's the right open and shut.' Magda followed Catherine and the usher out the door, praying that what she and Jay had done hadn't been in vain.

7

Once upon a time, Charlie had been more than a little in love with Dr Corinna Newsam. There were several very good reasons behind an infatuation that had lasted for most of her first year at St Scholastika's College. Corinna, the college's junior philosophy fellow, was the smartest woman she'd ever met. She was also the least stuffy academic, the most challenging conversationalist and the most demanding teacher Charlie had encountered. She was charmed by Corinna's Canadian accent, in awe of her mind and attracted by her sardonic smile. The husband, four children and adamantine Catholicism were mere details that barely impinged on Charlie's dreamy fantasies. And she never noticed that, like the family, she was entirely under Corinna's thumb.

The fascination didn't survive Charlie's first real love affair. Flesh and blood trumped dreams every time. Besides, by then Charlie had discovered Oxford was full of bright, stimulating women who carried less complicated baggage than Corinna Newsam. Not that she stopped admiring Corinna. She just stopped imagining those moments when the brush of two hands would suddenly explode into something more. Probably just as well, since by then she was an occasional babysitter for the Newsam children. Feverish unrequited lust was a major impediment when it came to occupying the hands and minds of four independent and intelligent children.

Of course, Charlie also eventually worked out that Corinna was a control freak and that she was just another cog in the wheel of the machinery that made Newsam family life run smoothly. When she left Oxford, Charlie knew that, in spite of their mutual assurances, she would be out of sight and out of mind to Corinna. They'd exchanged notes with their Christmas cards for a couple of years, then that had tailed off too. The only time they'd met since Charlie's graduation had been her ten-year gaudy. It had been an awkward encounter, neither really knowing how to bridge the gap between past and present.

And now she was going to have to pluck up the courage to call her. It wouldn't have been such a trial six months before, when Charlie had still been someone with a decent professional reputation, albeit tinged with a degree of notoriety. But now? Charlie stared at the phone and sighed. It was no good trying to pretend that Corinna would know nothing of her disgrace. Oxford colleges were gossip factories, their Senior Common Rooms a buzz of speculation built on slender accumulations of half-truths and rumours. But in this instance, they'd only have had to glance through the neat stacks of daily newspapers on the SCR table to fuel lengthy excursions through the moral maze of Dr Charlie Flint's professional actions.

'Oh, bugger,' Charlie muttered, reaching for the handset. This time of day, Corinna should still be in college. With luck, not teaching but reading. Or lying on the big green velvet chaise longue, thinking. The porter answered on the third ring. No such thing as a professional switchboard operator; the twenty-first century and still the college operated as if they'd barely made it out of the nineteenth.

'St Scholastika's College. How may I help you?' The burr of a local accent that sounded as if it had escaped from a BBC costume drama.

'I'd like to speak to Dr Newsam,' Charlie said, more brusque than she'd intended.

'May I ask who's calling?'

'Dr Charlotte Flint.'

'Dr Flint? How nice to hear you. One moment, I'll see if Dr Newsam's available.'

Bloody Oxford. Never lets you go. Charlie waited, hollow silence in her ear. Nothing as tacky as canned muzak for her alma mater. She'd almost given up when she heard a sharp click followed by a familiar drawl. 'Charlie? Is that really you?'

'Corinna,' she said, taken aback by the warmth she suddenly felt. 'But you're not really surprised, are you?'

'That depends on why you're calling.'

The joust was on. Charlie felt tired at the thought of it. She moved in a different world these days, and she preferred it. 'I'm calling because you sent me a package of newspaper clippings, ' she said. 'About the trial of the two people who allegedly murdered Magda's husband on their wedding day.'

'Why would I do that?' Corinna sounded as if this were no more important than a routine tutorial inquiry about some detail of an essay.

'I think it was a challenge, Corinna. Given what you sent, would I be able to figure out who had sent it? And why? You did it because you're a philosopher. You've grown so accustomed to setting everyone tests and challenges that you've forgotten how to ask a straight question.'

'And what could my motivation for such a challenge possibly be?' Charlie thought she could hear tension in Corinna's voice now, but she couldn't swear to it.

'I'm not sure,' she said. 'But I did track down one photograph that gave me pause. I think if I was a mother and my daughter was running around with Jay Macallan Stewart, I'd be shouting for the cavalry. Now, I know I'm not everybody's idea of the cavalry, but I'm probably all you could think of at short notice.'

There was no humour in Corinna's laugh. 'I thought my memory was still reliable. You always had a gift for investigation and resolution. It's good to see the years have only sharpened it. Well done, Charlie.'

'What's all this about, Corinna? Apart from me being your self-fulfilling prophecy?' She didn't care that she sounded impatient.

'I need your help.'

Charlie sighed. 'It's seventeen years since I graduated, Corinna. You don't know anything about me.'

'I know enough, Charlie. I feel pretty certain you've got a burning desire to redeem yourself right now.'

Charlie closed her eyes and massaged her forehead. 'That's a little presumptuous, don't you think?'

A moment's silence, then Corinna spoke crisply. 'We know you here, Charlie. And there is a strong feeling among the senior members in college that you have been made a scapegoat. That you have in fact acted with honour and honesty. It may have been uncomfortable, but it was right to stand up for Bill Hopton's innocence when he was actually innocent. It's not your fault he went on his killing spree afterwards.'

'Some might disagree with you,' Charlie said, her voice weary. 'Some might say it was his very experiences at the hands of those of us involved in law enforcement that sent him over the edge.'

'Speaking as a philosopher, I find that an untenable proposition, ' Corinna said briskly. 'Now, there's nothing we can do to help you professionally, obviously. Although I'm sure, where influence exists, it's being brought to bear. But what I can do is offer you the chance to be useful. To use your skills for good, if you like.'

Charlie didn't know why, but she felt like laying her head on the desk and weeping. 'I don't have the faintest idea what you're on about, Corinna. And I'm pretty sure I don't want to.'

'Charlie, we can help each other here. But a phone call isn't the way to do this. Come and talk to me. Come to Oxford for the weekend. Bring your partner if you like. I'm sure she'd find plenty to amuse her in the city. You don't have to come and stay with us if you'd find that awkward after all this time. We'll find you a room in college.'

'I don't think so, Corinna.'

'All I'm asking is that you listen to me, Charlie. No obligation. If you won't do it for me, do it for Magda. You and Magda were always buddies. Charlie, I understand the reason you do what you do. It's because you have a desire to protect the vulnerable. Right now, Charlie, my daughter has never been more vulnerable. Can your conscience really afford any more burdens?'

'That's a very poor effort at emotional blackmail, Corinna.'

'You said yourself if you had a daughter who was running around with Jay Macallan Stewart, you'd be shouting for help. That's all I'm doing here.'

'I understand that. But I'm not the person to help with this. I don't know how to break up Magda and Jay Stewart, even if I thought that was an appropriate thing to do.'

'I'm not asking you to separate my daughter from Jay Macallan Stewart,' Corinna said, sounding ruffled for the first time. 'I wouldn't be so crass. I know my Magda well enough to understand that finding out the truth about the kind of person Jay Stewart is will do the job perfectly well. What I'm asking is that you bring your talents to bear on uncovering that truth. At heart, this is about a miscarriage of justice. I thought you still cared about that kind of thing, Charlie.'

It doesn't take long for silence on a phone to loom large. After a few empty seconds, Charlie said, 'I don't understand.'

'Paul Barker and Joanna Sanderson did not kill my son-in-law, Charlie. The jury's out today, the evidence is stacked against them. They're going to jail. And it's wrong.'

'Haven't you left it a bit late to try and drag me into this? If it was really about avoiding a miscarriage of justice, surely you should have called me weeks ago.'

Corinna's exasperated sigh was not unfamiliar to Charlie. 'This hasn't exactly been easy for me. I thought it would be thrown out of court. I had no idea how far… Look, Charlie, what matters here is that the two people in the dock are innocent. They didn't kill Philip.'

Charlie couldn't help herself. 'Who did?'

'Some things don't work over the phone. Come and talk to me, Charlie.'

Hook, line and sinker, Charlie thought. Here we go again.

8

I left Northumberland Jennifer Stewart and arrived at Oxford Jay. A small thing, for sure, but the first stage of my transformation. A lot more was needed, that much was soon obvious. Years later, I still have vivid, humiliating memories of my first tutorial with Dr Helena Winter.

Helena Winter was one of the reasons I had chosen St Scholastika's. Hers had been the first book about philosophy that had fired my enthusiasm for the subject. When I'd come to the college for my interviews, I'd thought her the most stylish woman I'd ever seen. Impeccable in a charcoal pin-striped suit, she radiated calm composure. Her face was inscrutable, her hair a perfect chignon the shocking white of a new ream of printer paper. I desperately wanted to impress her.

I had prepared my first essay on the history of philosophy with her in mind and, as instructed, began reading it out. It may be hard to believe now if you've ever heard me on the radio or TV but back then I had a Northumbrian accent you could cut with a knife and spread on stottie cakes. I was barely into my stride when I became aware of Dr Winter's raised hand, like a genteel officer of the traffic police. I faltered to a halt.

'I'm so terribly sorry, Miss… Stewart,' Dr Winter said, not caring whether she sounded condescending or not. 'Your accent is positively splendid, and would be a great asset were you to be studying Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. But unfortunately I haven't understood a word you've said thus far. I wonder, could you possibly return to the beginning and speak a little more slowly?'

I was mortified. But at eighteen, I had no notion that a woman like Helena Winter was capable of being put in her place, never mind how to do it. So I started again, forcing my mouth round the sort of phonemes that would have earned scorn and mockery in my native Wearside. By the end of that first term, I was bilingual. BBC English for Dr Winter, Northumbrian when I was thinking and talking to myself.

The junior philosophy don was a powerful antidote to the formality of Dr Winter. Corinna Newsam was the polar opposite of most of the college's tutors. The list of differences was long and significant. She was Canadian; she was Catholic; she was married so she lived in a proper house, not a set of rooms in college; she had children of her own; she was no more than thirty-five, a mere child by Oxford's donnish standards; and she was informal, insisting we call her Corinna.Those were the tangible differences. But there were intangibles too. She was lively, making the ideas of Ancient Greek philosophers vibrant and relevant. She never patronised, and she wasn't a snob. Probably half of us were half in love with her.

Jay paused and reread the last paragraph. 'No,' she muttered. 'Strike the last sentence.' She had to keep reminding herself there were new brakes on candour. Magda would read this memoir. Most of what Jay didn't want Magda to know overlapped with what she wanted the rest of the world not to know. But there were more things that were off limits now. It was tacky to reveal to your lover that at the time she'd first had a crush on you, you were in love with her mother. So she erased the last sentence and took off her glasses, polishing them on her T-shirt while she figured out a new bridging sentence.

In short, she was the only member of the Senior Common Room who seemed to have friend potential for any of us.What I didn't realise back then was that it wasn't friendship I needed.

What was missing in my life was what had always been missing. I needed a mother. And somehow, Corinna Newsam picked up on that need.

Jay smiled in satisfaction. That would play much better with Magda. It also shone a benevolent light on Corinna, providing Magda with more ammunition against her mother's hostility. She could imagine Magda saying something to Corinna like, 'But she's so nice about you. She talks about how kind you were to her. Why are you being so unkind now?' Every little helped.

Jay checked the time in the bottom corner of her computer screen. Eighteen minutes till the next news bulletin. According to Magda, the jury would be going out sometime today. But it would be tempting fate to expect them to come back with a quick verdict. Jay longed for it to be over so she and Magda could forge ahead with their lives without fear. But she knew from past experience that when you set a chain of circumstance in motion patience was the only ally worth cultivating. It would all be fine. The ball she had started rolling on Magda's wedding day would score a goal soon enough. The next news bulletin was irrelevant. Plenty of time to write more.

At the end of our third seminar, Corinna called me back. 'Are you in a rush?' she asked.

'No.'

She nodded and smiled. 'Fancy a beer?

I'd like to have a chat about your work.'I didn't know whether to be apprehensive or thrilled. I was only four weeks away from a world where adults didn't mix with those they considered children. We walked out of college and down to the nearest pub, hurrying against bitter driving rain that left no breath for small talk. One or two undergraduates glanced at us as we entered, doubtless recognising Corinna as she shook herself dry like a dog. At the bar, she bought two pints of bitter without asking what I wanted, then steered me to a corner table.

'I figured you'd prefer a pint,' she said, following her remark with a swallow that emptied the first inch of the tall glass. I decided it wasn't the time to remind Corinna I was under age or point out that I came from a teetotal Methodist background.

'Thanks,' I said. 'What was it you wanted to talk about?' I had no finesse in those days. I tasted the beer. It was thin and bitter and smelled of wet dog.

'Your essay was excellent. One of the best I've ever seen from an undergraduate. I think you might do well to consider the philosophy of language as a special option.' I tried to speak, but Corinna held her hand up. 'I think you've got interesting insights in that area. You'd probably be one of only two or three in the college doing it, so you'd get a lot more attention from your tutor. Which would be me.' She grinned. 'I like to steal the most talented undergraduates for my specialisms. It makes me look good when the exam results roll around.'

I had been sipping my beer while Corinna spoke and I'd managed to get it down to the same level in the glass as my tutor. 'I've already made a decision about my option,' I told her. I let Corinna wait long enough for the disappointment to show. 'I'm going for the philosophy of language. I've already read most of the set texts anyway.'

It was the right thing to say. It opened the door to unrivalled access to Corinna's intelligence and knowledge. And I was in love with that knowledge. Within a couple of weeks, we'd become regular drinking companions, meeting once or twice a week, usually around nine in the evening after Corinna had gone home from college, fed, bathed and bedded the children and eaten supper with Henry. I found her awesome; the idea of juggling a life like that was beyond my imagination. Corinna was awesome for other reasons too; no matter how much she drank, she was always coherent, always stimulating. Or perhaps it was that I was too drunk to notice anything different. We talked about our backgrounds and gossiped about people in college. Corinna complained about Henry, I complained about whoever happened to be the current man in my life. The men never lasted for more than a couple of weeks and all traces of their names have long since vanished from my memory. But Corinna used to laugh uproariously at my stories and regularly told me never to fall for a man just because he made me smile. I gathered it had been a long time since Henry had done that for her. From what she said, he'd grown more fond of drinking than of her. In the process, his world view had hardened into a hybrid of High Tory and hardline Catholic, where immigrants, lefties and homosexuals vied for top slot on his hate list. I had the distinct sense that if it had not been for her religious convictions Corinna would cheerfully have thrown Henry out of the house and their children's lives.

Jay paused again. It was all very well letting the prose flow, but she would have to edit her indiscretions before Magda got anywhere near the text. That last bit was certainly going to have to go. Henry had been as useless a waste of space then as he was now. But even though Magda knew her mother treated her father with all the disdain due to a feckless drunk, she wouldn't thank Jay for exposing Henry's failings to the rest of the world. She erased everything after 'different' and started typing again.

After the pubs closed, we would return to Corinna's rambling house in North Oxford and retreat to the sprawling basement kitchen. Henry never joined us, and I never thought that odd. If I thought about it at all, I presumed he wasn't interested in college gossip or the intricacies of philosophical speculation. Corinna and I would drink strong black coffee and talk about ideas and language till gone midnight, then I would throw my right leg over the crossbar of my step-cousin Billy's bike and wobble off into the night.

A couple of weeks after that first drink, Corinna asked me to babysit. 'The kids are all fed and ready for bed. All you have to do is read them stories in relays. I've threatened them with a fate worse than death if they play you up. Take no backchat,' she'd said, sweeping past me in a slinky black number and enough musky perfume to stun an ox.

I looked around the kitchen. Maggot, the eldest, eleven years old, so-called because Patrick couldn't manage 'Magda' when he was learning to talk, sprawled on an ancient chaise longue, supposedly reading a Judy Blume novel, but actually watching me like a hawk from under a white-blonde fringe. Patrick and James, nine and eight but looking like identical twins, were building something complicated from a kit, ignoring me and arguing about which piece had to come next. And four-year-old Catherine, the baby, known as Wheelie because she was born on Bonfire Night, was sitting in front of the TV, ignoring her Thomas the Tank Engine video and staring at me with a look somewhere between fascination and terror.

I took a deep breath and bent down, holding out my arms to her. 'Bedtime, Wheelie.'

Catherine scowled and folded her arms across her chest like a caricature of a Geordie matriarch. 'No. Stay here.'

I crouched in front of her. 'It's time for bed, Wheelie. I bet you're tired.'

`No,' she said mutinously, bottom lip thrust outwards.

I tried to pick her up. It was like wrestling a seal under water. 'No!' Catherine screeched, unfolding her arms and landing a punch on my mouth, smashing my lip against my teeth. I could feel the flesh swelling already. Now I began to understand how children get battered.

From behind me, Maggot said, 'Tell her you'll read her a story and she can choose. That usually works.'

I nodded. 'OK, Wheelie. Why don't you come upstairs with me and I'll read you a story? Any story you like?'

Half an hour and five stories later, Catherine's eyes closed. I watched for the best part of a minute, to make sure they weren't going to fly open again, then I crept downstairs. The boys were easier. I did a deal with them; they could watch some documentary about Isambard Kingdom Brunel provided they watched it in bed and promised faithfully to turn off the TV afterwards.

'They won't, you know,' Maggot informed me the minute the deal was struck.

'Maybe not,' I said, not caring. 'I'll check later.'

'They'll fall asleep eventually and you can turn it off before Mum and Dad get home,' Maggot said. 'Otherwise they'll only get stroppy with you.'

'And what's the deal with you?' I said. 'I take it you don't want reading to?'

'Hardly,' Maggot said with the superiority of someone who isn't yet in the tortured grip of adolescence. 'I go to bed at nine. I read till half past. I can be trusted. Until then, you can talk to me.'

I didn't have the first idea what nice middle-class eleven-year-old girls talked about. Where I came from, it was lads and shoplifting. Somehow, I didn't think either was on Magdalene Newsam's agenda. 'Can you play cribbage?' I asked desperately.

'No,' Maggot said curiously. 'What is it?'

So I taught her. There wasn't a cribbage board in the house, but I improvised with the boys' Lego. We talked too, but it was easier over a game of cards than facing each other across the scrubbed pine table and searching for something to fill the silence. There was nothing in that first encounter to predict what has come from it. But this isn't the place for that story. Not yet, dear reader.

By the end of that first term, I was babysitting for the Newsams about once a week. I still went out drinking with Corinna, and dropped in whenever I was at that end of town. For most of that term, I was homesick and lonely, cast adrift by geography and social class. But Corinna made me feel there was somewhere I belonged, somewhere I had value. There wasn't much of that elsewhere in my life in those days.

Jay paused. She knew what she wanted to say. Was there any point in even typing a line that could never survive the most cursory of edits? 'Yes,' she said. She wanted to see what it would look like on the page.

I would have cheerfully killed for Corinna Newsam then.

9

How to get to Oxford without Maria, without Maria ever realising: that had been the plan. That was the challenge for Charlie. If the stereotypes held, it should have been laughably easy; psychiatrist versus dentist, no contest. But Charlie knew Maria too well to rely on that. Maria often saw the bigger picture while Charlie was focused on the detail. Maria had been the first one to warn her of the dangers of the Bill Hopton situation. The first of many. The many she'd chosen to ignore because she'd been so fixated on pure principle over dirty practicality. And look what that had cost her.

She wondered now whether she could have done anything differently. She remembered their conversation the night before she'd delivered the report that had set the ball rolling. Although Charlie was scrupulous about not revealing confidential details to Maria, she'd always talked about the issues raised by her cases. 'Tomorrow I've got to write a report that's going to piss everybody off,' she'd said. 'They've got somebody in the frame for a particularly unpleasant murder. But I don't think he did it. I think he's a psychopath and I think there's every likelihood that one day he will graduate to a full-blown sex killer, but he isn't there yet. Some of my colleagues would say that's reason enough to put up and shut up, but I can't do it.'

Maria had probed her options and the depth of her convictions, then she'd sat at the dinner table looking worried. 'You need to not do this,' she said.

'I can't go against my principles.'

'Isn't there another way? Can't you excuse yourself from the case? Pretend you've got a conflict of interest?'

Charlie sighed. 'I don't see how.'

Maria considered. 'If you come up with this report, they won't use it in court, will they?'

'Of course not. It completely undermines what isn't a very strong case to start with. They might bring someone else in to see if a second opinion will come out differently, but there's no way the prosecution will use me now.'

'In that case, you have to persuade the police and the prosecutor to keep really quiet about your involvement. Let the court sort it out. Keep your nose clean, Charlie. You know what it's like when a prosecution fails. Somebody has to carry the can.'

And if things had played out the way Maria had suggested, things might have been OK. But they hadn't. They'd gone as wrong as they could. Someone had leaked her report to Hopton's defence team and they'd come looking for Charlie. They'd dragged her into the witness box and then it had been all over for the prosecution.

That would have been embarrassing but Charlie's reputation and career would have survived. If they'd listened to her recommendation that Hopton should be held in a secure mental hospital, it might even have been described as a reasonable outcome. But instead, Hopton had gone on to murder four women and nobody was looking past Charlie for someone to blame.

Corinna was right. She was more desperate than she could ever admit for something that would make her feel good about herself. Putting right a miscarriage of justice would do just that. And the chance to spend time with Lisa Kent might even be the icing on the cake.

Now Charlie drained the pasta and returned it to the pan, then tipped in a slug of the spicy salsiccia and tomato sauce she'd cooked earlier. 'Dinner,' she shouted, dishing it up and bringing it to the kitchen table. Maria arrived, still half-absorbed in the newspaper feature section. She found her chair by habit and sat down, the thin line of a frown between her eyebrows.

'Scary,' she said, setting the paper to one side and acknowledging her meal with a satisfied nod.

'What's scary?'

'Scary in a good way,' Maria said, helping herself to the bowl of Parmesan curls Charlie had prepared. 'This stem cell stuff. You know I told you a while back that we're going to be able to grow new teeth for ourselves from these little bundles of cells?'

Charlie, who generally paid attention to Maria because she was a trained listener as well as an instinctive one, nodded. 'I remember. You said the big problem was figuring out how the cells knew what kind of tooth to be.'

'Exactly. Because nobody wants a molar where an incisor should be. Not even if it's their own molar.' Maria gobbled a couple of forkfuls of pasta. 'Mmm, that's good. Well, there's a team of dental researchers who reckon they're close to cracking it.' She rolled her eyes.

'But that's good, isn't it?'

'It's good if you're the person who has a big hole where their teeth should be. It's not so great if you're the dentist who has invested time and money getting to be the best dental implant person north of the Severn-Trent watershed.' Maria reached for the glass of water sitting by her plate and took a swig. 'Here's hoping it takes them longer than they think to unravel the puzzle. Long enough for me to make my money and retire.'

Charlie laughed. 'You're barely forty.'

Maria's hand stopped halfway to her mouth. 'And just how long do you think I want to spend my days staring into the ruins of people's mouths?'

It had never occurred to Charlie that they should discuss retirement. She loved her job. No, strike that. She'd loved the job that used to be hers. When she'd had a functioning career, retirement had been for other people. They'd have had to carry her out kicking and screaming. She'd assumed Maria felt the same. Apparently she'd been wrong. Maybe her accusers were right. Maybe she wasn't much of a psychiatrist. 'I thought you loved your job.' It sounded like a dare.

Maria's eyebrows twitched. 'I love the challenge. I love the difficult cases. But the routine stuff? What's to love? What I always envisaged was giving up general practice in a few years and just doing a few days a month on the really specialist stuff.'

'You never said.'

Maria reached out and smoothed Charlie's hair. 'It never came up. Charlie, I don't know if you've ever noticed, but we hardly ever talk about the future. Or the past. I can't think of another couple who live more in the present than we do.'

'And that's a good thing.' Charlie pushed her food round.

'But that's not how it's been with you lately.' Maria's voice had softened and she laid her fork on the plate. 'Even since the Hopton business, you've been brooding over the past and worrying about the future.'

'That's what you do when the present isn't very rosy.'

Maria sighed. 'I know it's crap, having to get by on whatever crumbs you can pick up to keep you from going mad with frustration and boredom, but this is temporary, Charlie. Everybody says you're going to come out of this with a clean sheet.'

Charlie snorted. 'Professionally, maybe. But as far as the public's concerned…'

'It's not the public that hire you to profile and treat.'

'Maria, I'm no use as an expert witness if I'm so notorious that they can't find a jury that hasn't already made its mind up about me.'

Maria stared at her plate. 'You don't have to go to court. There's other things you do that satisfy you just as much. At least, that's what you always said.'

Charlie said nothing. There was no answer that didn't make her sound shallow and superficial, and that wasn't how it was for her. Giving evidence in court mattered because it was one of the few aspects of her work that had a concrete end product. If she did her job right, the guilty went to jail, the innocent walked free and the ill got treatment. Even if things didn't work out the way she believed was right, there was still a line that was drawn. An enclosure. When you spent your working life dealing with people whose mental processes were off-kilter enough to bring them to your door, anything that could be boxed off was something to be craved. Now she'd experienced the benefits of being an expert witness, she wasn't sure she could continue her work without them.

'There are still plenty of challenges for you,' Maria said, getting up and fetching a bottle of wine. She poured two glasses and put them on the table. Charlie recognised the gesture. Maria was drawing a line under a conversation she didn't want to continue because it wasn't going anywhere. Her next gambit would be a complete change of subject. 'Speaking of challenges,' she said, 'did you get to the bottom of those newspaper clippings? The ones that came in the post.'

Bingo. Charlie smiled. There was a lot to be said for living with somebody whose processes you understood. 'I did,' she said, letting herself be led to where she wanted to go. 'I looked online for other reports of the trial and it didn't take me long to work out that I knew the widow of the victim.'

'What? "Knew" as in personally?'

'As in personally and as in past tense. I used to babysit her when I was a student.'

'How come?' Maria absently picked up her fork and resumed eating.

'Her mother was my philosophy tutor. She had four kids and a useless husband so she used to pick out one or two undergraduates every year to be her default babysitters. I was the lucky one in my second year.'

Maria looked aghast. 'Lucky? Taking care of four kids?'

Charlie lifted one shoulder in a shrug. 'They were pretty easy kids. And I got paid. Not to mention the extra tuition over the late-night glasses of wine. Corinna Newsam was always generous with her time and her booze.' She sipped her wine. 'And now it's payback time.'

'Payback?'

'She wants me to do something for her. Hence the lure of this morning's delivery.'

'She sent you the cuttings? This Corinna Newsam?'

'That's right.'

'But why? Why you? And why all the mystery?'

Charlie grinned. 'She's an Oxford don. It's like a bloody medieval quest. First you have to prove you're worthy of the task. Then you get to find out what the task is. Then you get to ride out against a legion of enemies and come back with the Holy Grail.'

Maria shook her head, bemused. 'I'm just a simple dentist, Charlie. You're going to have to explain that in words of one syllable.'

'You are "just a simple dentist" in the same way that Albert Einstein was a bit good at sums. Corinna sent me a puzzle. If I couldn't solve it or I wasn't interested, then obviously I couldn't be the right person to help. So she gets to eliminate the unsuitable candidate without ever actually having to lose face by asking for help. I solved it and I called her, so I passed the suitability test.'

'You called her?'

Charlie gave the one-shouldered shrug again. 'Well, yes. I mean, how else was I going to find out what's going on?'

'And what is going on?'

Charlie rolled her eyes. 'I wish I knew. But it's Oxford. So it's not as simple as ringing up and getting the full story. If I want that, I have to go and talk to Corinna face to face.'

Maria shook her head, bemused. 'Did they fuck your head up like this the whole time you were studying? No wonder you're so good at dealing with twisted minds. I presume you told her you weren't interested?'

'Not that simple, Maria. Corinna's smart. She knows what's been happening to me. And she baited the hook with the one phrase she knew would suck me in. "Miscarriage of justice," she said.' Charlie paused to take a drink, seeing the dismay on Maria's face. 'It might just be my chance at redemption. I can't say no at this stage. I have to go and find out what Corinna's problem is.'

'Charlie, you never get involved when people contact you directly. "Take it to the police. Or to a lawyer. If they think I'm the right person for the job, they'll come to me." That's what you always say. That's the line. I can't believe you're going to run off to Oxford on what's probably a wild-goose chase just because you used to babysit this woman's kids.'

'But nobody's coming to me any more, are they?' Charlie's anger burst suddenly, a boil whose surface tension couldn't hold any longer. 'I'm suspended from my clinical work, I'm suspended from the Home Office-approved expert witness list, the university's even suspended me from lecturing students. I'm stuck invigilating A-levels and teaching the occasional class at a sixth-form college. A wild-goose chase is better than no chase at all.' She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe evenly.

'Fair enough,' Maria said after a long silence.

'I'm sorry,' Charlie said wearily. 'You didn't deserve that.' She paused momentarily, aiming for the right pitch of nonchalance. 'You could come with me, if you want.'

'To Oxford?'

'You make it sound like the moon.'

'It's another planet, that's for sure. It's your world, not mine. I'm a simple Northern lass, me.'

'You could keep me from getting involved in a wild-goose chase.' Charlie made a mock-piteous face. 'Save me from myself.' The best lies were always the ones closest to the truth, she reminded herself.

'I've got work.' Maria gathered the now empty plates and stacked them together busily.

'I'm not going till the weekend. I've got some more teaching and invigilating this week. Why not come? You've never seen St Scholastika's. You might even like it.'

Maria snorted. 'I'm too old to be seduced by those pretty buildings and glamorous minds. I like nice empty bits of nature to relax in, not cities. It's OK. You go, make a sentimental journey. See what your old teacher thinks you can do for her.'

'Then decline politely and come home?'

'Only if that's what you want.'

Charlie could see the worry in Maria's eyes and felt a quiver of guilt. It didn't matter that Maria was worried about the wrong thing. The dangerous adventure Charlie was embarking on was not the professional end of her visit to Oxford. Whatever Corinna might throw at her, it couldn't be half as risky as putting herself in Lisa Kent's way. But she was in the grip of something beyond her normal control. 'Thanks,' Charlie said, getting up from the table and turning away so Maria couldn't see her face. 'You never know. It might be just what I need.'

10

Her back arching, her muscles in spasm, Magda cried out once, a guttural sound that could as easily have been despair as joy. Her hands clawed at the sheet beneath her. Beyond conscious thought, beyond anything except the powerful surge of orgasm, she was incoherent, half-formed words tumbling from her mouth. Jay put her fingers over Magda's lips. 'I love you,' she murmured.

'Ungh,' Magda groaned. She'd never had sex like this. Wild, dirty, dark and never quite enough. That's how it was with Jay. Intoxicating and exhilarating. An excursion into discovery.

It wasn't as if she'd been dissatisfied with Philip in bed. Once they'd got to know each other, it had always been enjoyable. She'd liked it enough to initiate it more often than not. But with Jay, from the very first time they'd fallen into bed together it had been rapturous. Maybe it was something to do with accepting the true north of her sexuality. Or maybe it was the fact that her girlfriend was undoubtedly gifted. The sex alone would have been enough to keep her in thrall. But here there was so much more than that. Magda groaned again as Jay's fingers brushed her cheek and neck. 'Thank you,' she said.

'Again?' Jay's hand strayed over Magda's breast and down her stomach.

Magda shifted a little. 'No,' she said. 'I don't think I can take any more right now. I just want to enjoy being with you. To celebrate.' She stroked Jay's back, conscious that there were as many differences as similarities between their bodies. Skin colour and texture. Muscle tone and configuration. Body shape and contours. Hair colour and distribution. She'd heard people say homosexuality was a form of narcissism, but she couldn't see it herself. It was hard to imagine how she and Jay could look less like one another.

'You want more champagne?' Jay asked. They'd seen off a bottle when Magda returned from the Old Bailey, their relief making them knock it back like lemonade on a hot summer's day.

'I don't want to move. I want to lie here and savour the moment.' Magda sighed. 'I feel like a weight lifted off me today. It's like I can draw a line under the past and face forward.'

'I understand that.' Jay shifted so she lay on one hip alongside Magda, stomach pressed to hip, arm lying possessive below Magda's breasts. 'Justice has been done. Paul and Joanna are in jail for what they did to Philip. And you did your bit to make sure his death didn't go unavenged. So now you can be proud of yourself as well as feeling relieved.'

Magda ran her fingers through Jay's hair. 'I owe it all to you.'

'Don't be daft. I wasn't the one who had to stand up in the witness box and testify.'

'No, but there wouldn't have been any case to testify in if you hadn't given it a helping hand,' Magda said fondly, kissing Jay's forehead.

'Best if we put that behind us too, I think,' Jay said firmly. 'The less we talk about it, the less likely we are to let something slip.'

Magda was too besotted to be offended by the suggestion that she might not be capable of keeping her mouth shut. 'I'll never forget it, though. What you did, it was risky. And you did it for me. You did it for me when we'd only just got together. Nobody's ever taken a chance like that on me.'

'It didn't feel like taking a chance. I knew already you were the one for me. I knew how hard Philip's death was on you, and I had to do whatever I could to take the edge off the pain.' She snuggled even closer. 'Letting them walk free would have been an insult to his memory as well as an outrage to you. So I did what had to be done.'

'If I needed proof that you're the one for me…' Magda leaned back and smiled. 'And now we can stop hiding. We can go out together, do the things that lovers do without worrying that we'll end up in some gossip column.'

Jay chuckled. 'Chances are we'll still appear in some gossip column. But it doesn't matter now. It's not going to be a distraction in terms of the trial. We don't have to worry about some defence counsel insinuating that you had as much of a motive for wanting Philip dead as Joanna and Paul.'

'I always said that was silly. I mean, if I'd known I wanted to be with you, I'd never have married Philip, would I?'

'You might have wanted to be respectable,' Jay said. 'I know part of the reason you married him was because it was what everyone expected you to do.'

'And I was always the one who did what was expected of me.' Magda smiled, an unfamiliar feeling of mischief bubbling inside her. 'At least, until now.'

'Thank goodness. Of course, you might have wanted Philip's money. Just as decent a motive.' The lightness in Jay's tone was replaced by a more sombre note. 'Don't forget, it's still possible that somebody saw the two of us together on your wedding day. A meaningless encounter, they'd think. Unless they read some hack's innuendo and decided we were the evil plotters, not Joanna and Paul.'

'With an imagination like that, you should be a crime writer.' Magda reached over and tickled Jay's ribs. 'Nobody who knows either of us could imagine something so ridiculous. So, where are you going to take me for our first public outing?'

Jay pretended to think. 'I could get tickets for Arsenal at the Emirates on Saturday?' Magda pinched the skin over Jay's hip. 'Ow! I was only joking.'

'I know. But some jokes are beyond the pale. Come on, you're the publisher of the coolest travel guides on the planet. You must have thought of something.'

Jay leaned back on the pillows. 'I thought we might go to Barcelona for the weekend. A lovely boutique hotel just off the Ramblas, dinner somewhere glorious… What do you say?'

'This weekend?'

'That's what I had in mind. Is that a problem?'

'I'm working on Sunday,' she said. 'And I thought I'd go up to Oxford on Saturday to see my parents. I need to tell them about us.'

'I thought your mother already knew? You said she kept digging away at you about me when you were home last month.'

'She knows because she's guessed. I've not actually told her. Not in so many words. And Dad is completely oblivious. He's going to be a nightmare.' Magda drew away slightly, tipping her head back to stare at the ceiling. 'I can already hear the Catholic fundamentalist rant. Honestly, he makes His Holiness Benny One Six look liberal.'

'Would it help if I came with you?' Jay reached up to stroke Magda's hair.

Magda gave a fake laugh. 'Not in any sense of the word "help" that I'm familiar with. Have you forgotten that my mother barred you from the house all those years ago when she discovered you were gay? No, I've just got to grit my teeth and get through it. Hopefully, the fallout won't be too horrendous. And Wheelie's coming up with me, so I will have someone in my corner.'

'Poor Maggot,' Jay said. 'Maybe I should sit outside in the car in case you get cast out like a Victorian fallen woman.'

'It's not beyond the bounds of possibility.' Magda propped herself up on her elbows. 'Enough of this. We're supposed to be celebrating. Is there any food in the house or do we need to order takeaway? I'm starving.'

'All that loving. It makes a woman hungry. How does pizza sound?'

Magda grinned. 'Perfect. We can eat it in bed. Then we don't have far to go afterwards.'

'That's right. We need to make the most of the next few days if you're going to abandon me for Oxford.'

Magda raised one eyebrow. 'Maybe you should sit outside in the car after all.'

11

Saturday

Charlie hadn't planned to revisit St Scholastika's, but to get to the Newsams' house from the guest house she'd booked herself into meant passing the college gates. And she couldn't resist her old haunts. Some people, she knew, never quite cut the umbilical cord with their Oxford colleges, continually returning for whatever excuse they could come up with — a lecture, a guest dinner, a gaudy — but she had never been one of them. She'd mostly loved her time at Schollie's, but she'd been ready for the less cosseted world outside. The only time she'd been back had been for her ten-year gaudy, an event that had depressed her beyond words.

Returning to Schollie's then had been strange. Almost schizophrenic. Charlie had felt like her real-time self-a successful professional whose opinions were sought and respected by her peers, a woman who had made the transition from infatuations to love, someone at home in her own skin — and, simultaneously, like that awkward creature on the cusp of adolescence and adulthood, hiding uncertainty behind arrogance, desperately trying to figure out the shape of her future. Encountering people who knew only what she had been rather than what she had become had been a disorienting experience. She'd felt like a shape-shifter by the end of the evening, glad to escape to the Spartan college room with its grimly single bed. It had not been an experience that filled her with a desire to repeat it.

So wandering round her old stamping grounds hadn't been on Charlie's agenda. For most of the three-hour drive from Manchester to Oxford, she'd alternated between a fantasy that involved Lisa Kent and not much sleep, and castigating herself for even allowing the thought to cross her mind. What she couldn't deny was that she'd put herself in temptation's way.

As soon as she'd manoeuvred herself into a trip to Oxford without Maria, Charlie had texted Lisa. Am in Oxford Friday/ Saturday, possibly Sunday. Get together? Lisa had simply texted back, Will email l8r, leaving Charlie in a ferment of impatience. The email, when it arrived, was a disappointment. But Charlie had to acknowledge that in her present frame of mind, almost any response would have been. According to Lisa, most of her weekend was regrettably spoken for: training sessions with those chosen to spread the Negotiating Vulnerability gospel to the people, meetings with conference organisers and a couple of one-to-one sessions with individual therapy clients. Charlie wondered if booking one of those sessions was the only way she'd ever get some face time with Lisa.

Then, hot on the heels of the disappointing message came a second. Charlie wondered if it was game-playing, but she didn't much care. At least she was playing with an equal. Now, Lisa was offering to meet her for a late drink on Friday evening. I should be free by nine thirty, ten at the very latest. Why don't we meet at the Gardener's Arms? Near where you're staying, right?

And so Charlie had arrived at the pub just after eight, setting up base camp with a view of the door in a bar that felt like a living room. She'd ordered a Thai curry from the vegetarian menu and made it last. She was on her third glass of wine by nine thirty, fighting the desire to knock it back and calm the clench of nervous anticipation that had her in its grip. Lisa would soon be sitting opposite her, the air crackling with the tension between them. Irresistible, that's what it would be, Charlie told herself. The guest-house bed would remain empty; they'd go back to Lisa's house in Iffley village. What would happen beyond the sleepless night and the dazed morning, Charlie had no idea. But it would cut through her life like a knife blade. The two parts would fall apart like a split fruit.

The hubbub of a Friday-evening pub seemed to rise round Charlie as time trickled past. The voices echoed in her ears, the laughter felt like an assault. Quarter to ten and no Lisa. She checked her phone every minute, but nothing appeared on the message screen. By ten, Charlie had started to feel sick. Her hands were clammy, her skin flushed and sweaty. She had to fight the urge to push through the crowd and into the fresh air. When the phone finally vibrated with a message at ten past ten, Charlie's whole body jerked.

So, so, sorry, everything running l8. Nothing 2 b done. Talk 2moro. Lx She read the words and felt the bile rising. She barely made it to the narrow street outside, vomiting her drink and dinner in the gutter between two tightly parked cars. Shaking and sweating, she leaned against the wall and swore at herself. Why had she let herself be sucked into this emotional game? With Lisa, everything was ambiguity. Was her message genuine? Had she got cold feet over embarking on an affair with a married woman? Was she playing the game for the hell of it? Or was it all on the level and Charlie just torturing herself out of guilt?

Back at the guest house, Charlie had lain awake, self-pity and self-disgust taking turns to beat her up. Then remorse had kicked in, making sleep impossible. Somewhere around one, she'd given up and gone online, reading everything she could find about the murder of Philip Carling. At least she would be prepared for her meeting with Corinna. Just like a tutorial. Old habits died hard.

By three, she was yawning. Before she signed off, she did a quick search on Jay Macallan Stewart, to remind herself of the headline public information. Wikipedia gave her a reasonable overview. After Oxford, Jay had used the economics element of her degree to take up a research post with a social policy think-tank. Within two years, she'd figured out where the world was heading and left to set up her own dotcom business buying up excess airline seats and self-catering holiday accommodation at rock-bottom prices and selling the resulting tailored packages on at a profit. Doitnow.com had been one of the runaway successes of the first online boom and Jay had had the wit to sell the business before the bubble burst. She'd spent a couple of years travelling, mostly under the radar, sending despatches home to various newspapers and magazines.

Her next venture had taken advantage of the second wave of internet business. With the explosion in short-break travel, what the world needed was a series of travel guides, constantly updated, available online and tweaked for the consumer's personal interests. And so the 24/7 brand was born. Available by subscription only, Jay's company boasted that there wasn't a major city in the world to which they couldn't produce a personally designed guide. Charlie herself was a subscriber, cheerfully handing over her PS4.99 a month so she was never at a loss when travelling.

All of this had built Jay a reputation in the business world. Economics editors knew who Jay Macallan Stewart was. But what broke her out into the wider public consciousness had been a shameless leap on to the bandwagon of misery memoirs. Jay's upbringing had not followed the usual pattern. Her mother had been a hippie and a junkie. For the first nine years of her life, Jay had run as wild as it was possible to run. Then her mother had undergone a dramatic conversion to one of the more restrictive versions of Christianity and married one of the most repressive men in the North East of England. It had been, to quote Jay herself, 'like running headlong into a brick wall'. Factor into the equation Jay's gradual realisation that her burgeoning sexuality would make her even more of an outcast, and it was a recipe for precisely the kind of misery that sold in the millions. Charlie had no idea how truthful Unrepentant had been, but nobody had come out of the woodwork to contradict it, so nothing had interfered with the momentum that took it to the top of the bestseller lists.

And that was where the online story ended. There was nothing about Jay's personal life beyond the fact of her homosexuality. She was somebody whose name people knew without her actually falling into the dubious category of a celebrity. Charlie had to admit Jay had handled it impeccably. Somehow, she'd managed to airbrush the awkwardnesses out of history.

For there were awkwardnesses. Even Charlie knew that. She'd fallen asleep with an image of Jay Macallan Stewart in the front of her mind. Not Jay as she was now, but Jay as she had been when Charlie had first clapped eyes on her. Tall, rangy inside a baggy fisherman's sweater, hair a mane of chaotic dark curls, all wreathed in the blue smoke of a French cigarette. She'd made Charlie, two years her senior, feel gauche and adolescent. Even then, even though she had no valid reason for her instinct, she'd understood there was something dangerous about Jay Stewart.

Charlie had slept more soundly than she'd expected or deserved, and woke feeling groggy with barely enough time to shower and make it to breakfast. That left her with more than an hour to kill before she was due to meet Corinna. A wander through the gardens and the river meadow of Schollie's on a bright spring morning would at least have the advantage of dragging her down memory lane rather than through the tortured back alleys of what Lisa Kent was doing to her head. More importantly, it would give her a clear picture of the scene of Philip Carling's murder. She didn't imagine the college grounds would have changed much since she'd been an undergraduate. Oxford prided itself on its adherence to tradition, after all. But there would be differences, even if they were only subtle ones. If — and at this point it was a very big if — she was going to take a look at Corinna's supposed miscarriage of justice, she needed to treat it exactly as she would any other case and leave aside any preconceptions. And although she was a detective of the interior state, it never hurt to have a first-hand image of the scene of the crime.

Back when Charlie had been an undergraduate, Schollie's had still been a women's college, one of the last singlesex establishments. Along with St Hilda's, they'd resisted the pull towards admitting men, staunch in the belief that a collegiate university like Oxford should be able to offer a full range of choice to its students. They'd finally, ironically, been forced to give up their stand by the brutal economics of gender equality legislation. So now Schollie's was, like every other college in the university, open to both men and women. Unlike the former men's colleges, its buildings lacked beauty or distinction and, although the grounds were extensive and attractive, the college held no particular attraction for tourists. So there was no admission fee, no scrutiny of ID to establish whether a visitor was entitled to enter. Anybody, it seemed, could wander at will round the gardens and river meadow of St Scholastika's College.

Term had just ended so suitcases and blue IKEA bags were being hauled to cars while parents hovered and undergraduates tried to look cheerful about going home. Some who were paying to stay on for an extra week's residence lounged on benches, smug and still liberated from the old lives that lay in waiting to reclaim them. Charlie slipped through the porter's lodge and across the parking area outside Magnusson Hall to the part of the garden where the wedding reception had taken place. It was about the size of a football pitch, perfectly manicured lawn surrounded by a gravel path then herbaceous borders that looked bedraggled and unpromising in March. But back in July, when Magda and Philip had married, Charlie knew they would have been a luxuriant riot of flowers and greenery of every shade. In the middle of the lawn was a pair of cedars of Lebanon, taller and broader than Charlie remembered. On the far side of the grass was a bench where Charlie had often spent summer mornings reading or just staring, trying to get her head round her next tutorial as the fat brown river flowed sluggishly past.

Charlie crossed the grass, trying to conjure up the summer wedding that had ended so violently. There would have been a marquee, perhaps two. Tables on the grass. A band, a dance floor. People everywhere, shifting patterns of conversation, dancing. Hard to keep track of anyone's movements. Even the bride and groom.

The other thing about weddings in college was that there was no effective security. Just as anyone could walk in and out of college, so it was with private functions. Especially open-air events. There was no effective way to make them secure, not when there were other people on the site who had legitimate access to the buildings around the lawn. The side door of Magnusson Hall would have been open so guests could have access to the toilets. So anyone inside Magnusson could have walked straight out and joined the party as if they had a right to be there. Other buildings flanked the garden — the Chapter House, a small building that contained only seminar and tutorial rooms, and Riverside Lodge, another residential building. Charlie wondered whether the Chapter House was locked up on a Saturday. In her day, it would have been.

She came to her old bench and turned round to look up at Magnusson Hall. The Victorian building had once been an insane asylum, a source of much sardonic wit among students. In spite of that, it was decently proportioned, its yellow and red brick decoratively arranged. According to the court reports that Charlie had read, Magda had been in her mother's room when she'd seen Paul Barker and Joanna Sanderson slip away from the party. They'd disappeared round the bottom end of Riverside Lodge, between the building and the river, a route that led only to the landing stage where Philip's body had later been found. 'Unless the fire door from Riverside was open,' Charlie said softly.

She walked over to the corner of Riverside and stared back at Magnusson, trying to remember which room was Corinna's. It had a bay window, she recalled. On the second floor. There were only two possibilities, and both had a line of sight to where she stood. So, nothing wrong with what Magda said she'd seen, from a feasibility point of view.

Charlie turned away and walked the narrow flagged path between Riverside and the water. Tall iron railings topped the knee-high wall to keep the students from falling into the river. On her left, the gable end of Riverside rose, a sheer grey brick cliff punctuated by the square windows that had been fashionable in the 1970s when the building had been built. Halfway along was the fire door, a double square of glass with a deep band of black metal across the middle. In Charlie's day, the building had always been so stuffy in summer that the door was propped open more often than not. She wondered whether that was still the case. Everyone was more security-conscious these days. But if the people Charlie taught were anything to go by, students still liked to think of themselves as indestructible. They'd weigh the danger against the unbearable mugginess in the building and open the door. She'd put money on it.

At the end of the building, the path opened out on to a gently sloping concrete slipway. Beyond that was the sturdy wooden jetty where the punts were chained up. It was here that Philip Carling had been found. Smacked on both sides of the head with a heavy wooden paddle that shattered his skull, then bundled into the water and stuffed head first under a punt to drown. It wasn't a dignified way to go, but it was probably pretty quick. Any sound swallowed by the noise from the wedding party. Whoever did it would be wet, but if they'd had the presence of mind to stash a change of clothes nearby in Riverside or even further down the river bank in the college boathouse, they'd soon cover their tracks. Witnesses said that when Barker and Sanderson had returned to the wedding celebration, she'd been wearing a different dress and he'd changed his shirt. Their defence had been that they'd slipped away to have sex; that they'd been so desperate to get at each other that her dress had ripped and his shirt had been stained with lipstick and mascara, so they'd changed. It was one of those explanations that, although reasonable, was always going to sound contrived, especially since they were the only apparent suspects.

Of course, that was an argument that weakened if you knew about Magda and Jay. If Charlie was going to have anything to do with this business, there were a lot of questions she wanted the answers to. Like, when had Jay and Magda got together? Like, where had Jay been that Saturday night? And if you had a nasty suspicious mind, how long was Magda away from the wedding herself? Charlie gave a little hiss of a laugh. Oh, Corinna would love that question.

Charlie slowly turned and looked up the slope towards the Meadow Building. She'd lived there for three years, first in a tiny cubicle of a room sandwiched between a stairwell and a pantry, then in a big airy room on the top floor that she'd managed to swing because of her role as treasurer to the student body. She'd grown up in that building. She'd learned as much about herself as she had about her academic subjects. She'd fallen in love, had her heart broken then fallen in love all over again. Just like you were supposed to. She'd made friends and she'd changed her future.

Now that future she'd created for herself was sliding out of her grasp. Professionally, personally, she was on the skids. And here she was, back where it had all started. It would never have occurred to her to look for salvation here. But maybe Corinna was right. Maybe this was her chance to reclaim her life.

12

Jay stood at the window and watched Magda drive away. Allowing her to face so difficult a confrontation alone was hard for Jay. But there was nothing to be gained by getting into a fight about it. If Corinna and Henry chose to make Magda miserable over her choice of partner, that would be a ruck worth getting into. One Jay would relish. Still, in one sense, it didn't matter; Jay knew Magda was hers, regardless of what her parents might say or do. For now, it made her look better to step back and let Magda attempt to fight her own battle. And it freed the day for her to write. There hadn't been much time for that since the trial verdict. Jay made herself a coffee and settled down at the keyboard.

I only went home for a fortnight that first holiday. I didn't belong there any more. People I knew from school had lives that excluded me. Most of them had gone off to university with a gaggle of friends. Others were working, earning a wage that set them apart. The house where I'd spent half a dozen years before Oxford wasn't home either. My mother's disappearing act had removed any possibility of that. Mary Hopkinson next door took pleasure in revealing that nobody had heard a word from her since that chill winter night when she'd disappeared with a suitcase containing her best clothes, toiletries, and a framed photograph of me aged six. Any older and she'd have had to admit to her real age, I thought.

My stepfather's house wasn't a place where anyone would choose to be. He'd stripped it of anything that reminded him of my mother and now it was as icon-free as the chapel where I'd been forced to spend all my adolescent Sundays. Going back only reminded me of how liberating it had been to leave in the first place. I spent most of my time out of the house, even if that meant making a coffee in the local burger bar last three hours and a dozen chapters. On the second of January, I fled back to Oxford and slept for three nights in the Newsams' attic room before I could move back into college.

For the rest of my first year, Corinna was my rock and the children my occasional saviours. Of course I'd made friends among my fellow undergraduates by then. I'd even been elected as a representative on the JCR committee. But I could talk to Corinna more openly and more honestly than I could to any of my student peers. I felt as if I had nothing to prove with her. It didn't hurt my academic work either. I swear there was astonishment in Helena Winter's voice when she conveyed my first-year exam results to me. I savoured it as I had savoured few things.

The memory of the moment still made Jay smile. She'd had plenty of glory since then, but that early triumph still had the power to move her. It was strange how powerful these recollections were. She wondered whether they would have been so strong without Magda's reappearance in her life.

There was no escaping the fact that Corinna had been the centre of Jay's emotional life that year. She'd worshipped her, dreamed of her, fantasised about her and been pathetically grateful to be allowed so close to the object of her desires. But she'd always had to be careful, to guard against word or gesture that might lead Corinna to suspect there was anything 'unnatural' about her feelings. As far as Corinna and anyone else was concerned, Jay took great pains to foster the belief that she was merely an undergraduate Corinna had taken under her wing, not least because she was good with the children.

None of which she'd be sharing with Magda. Jay sighed and stood up. She needed to root herself in the past now, not allow thoughts of Magda to drag her back to the present. She walked through to the kitchen and took a packet of Gitanes and a battered brass Zippo from the drawer in the big pine table.

Out on the terrace, Jay lit one of the pungent French cigarettes and let the smoke fill her mouth. She hadn't smoked properly for years, but she'd discovered when she'd been writing Unrepentant that the taste and smell of the strong tobacco were the best trigger for catapulting her back into her past. She sometimes thought their choice of cigarette was the only thing she'd had in common with her mother. She let the smoke drift from her open mouth, watching the blue swirl dissipate in the chilly morning air. Even after all these years of abstinence, the cigarette felt completely natural between her fingers. She let it burn down, holding it near enough her face for the smoke to perform its magic. Now she could recall the urgency of those emotions, the rawness of experience that she wanted to translate to the page.

After the summer, things changed. Not between the Newsams and me, but between me and the rest of the world.The reason? My new next-door neighbour in college. A first year reading modern languages. Louise Proctor.

I was staggering down the corridor with a heavy cardboard carton when Louise emerged from her room. As we jockeyed to pass in the narrow corridor, our eyes met, and I felt for the first time the jolt and spark of instant attraction.

It was a moment of pure terror.

Somehow, I manoeuvred past Louise and stumbled into my own room. I virtually flung the box on the floor and collapsed on the bed, blood pounding in my ears. My senses were on overload. I could feel the weave of the bedspread beneath my fingers. I could see the coarse grains of dried plaster in the chips on the wall where drawing pins had gouged holes. I could smell dust and the cigarette butts in my ashtray and the bowl of orange-and-lemon potpourri that Corinna and her girls had brought round that morning as a 'welcome back' present after the Newsams' two-week package tour to Greece. And I could hear a voice in the room next to mine calling, 'Louise?'

I stumbled over to the window and pushed it open. At the next window, a middle-aged woman with wavy greying hair in a long bob leaned out, waving to the girl I had nearly collided with moments before. Louise looked up and saw us both at around the same moment her mother saw me. 'Hello!' Mrs Proctor greeted me cheerfully. 'Trying to get my daughter moved in!' Then she turned to look down again. `Louise, bring up the grey suitcase next, darling.'

Louise nodded and opened the boot of a red Volkswagen Golf. Her gleaming dark head disappeared momentarily, then she reappeared with the suitcase. I suddenly realised I must look a complete idiot and retreated inside. I crossed the room and closed my door. Then I sat down on the bed again, trying to work out what on earth was happening to me. I didn't like the obvious answer, so I tried to carry on as if nothing had happened.

Louise's reaction made that easier. Whatever had hit me, Louise acted as if she hadn't shared it, in spite of my conviction that the moment of pure electricity had been mutual. After that first encounter, Louise seemed to steer clear of me. If we passed unavoidably between our rooms and the bathrooms or stairs, she scowled and her eyes dropped.

It took a force of nature to change everything.

Back in those days the idea of students having en suite bathrooms was laughable. Each floor had its communal bathrooms, with separate shower and bath enclosures. Unknown to each other, Louise and I were taking baths in adjoining cubicles. Outside, a prodigious thunderstorm raged, the rumbles and claps so loud that the windows rattled in their frames. Jagged forks of lightning skittered across the skies like fear shooting down the tree of the central nervous system.Then one thunderclap pealed louder than the rest; a crack, a scream of wood struggling against itself and suddenly chunks of plaster were cascading from the ceiling.

I yelled something incoherent and jumped out of the bath. Instantly, I was covered in plaster dust that stuck to my wet body. Grabbing my dressing gown, I wrenched the cubicle door open just as the other door also flew back. Louise's long black hair hung in strings round her frightened face, everything streaked with the same dirt that was clinging to me. We both stood gaping at the door leading from the bathrooms to the corridor. There was a roof beam crossing it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Since the door opened inwards, we were trapped. I looked up. Through the mess that had been the roof and the ceiling, I could see the heavy bough of the massive copper beech that was no longer shading the lawn outside.

'Oh shit,' I said.

'That's a word,' Louise replied drily.

'Actually, it's two, but this probably isn't the time to be pedantic,' I said, desperate not to be outdone in the cool stakes.

It took the emergency services most of the night to get the door cleared. Once we'd established that the groans and creaks of stressed timbers weren't life-threatening, Louise and I huddled together against the outer wall and started to talk properly for the first time. By dawn, we knew there was something unprecedented between us. Neither would acknowledge what it was, but we knew it was there.

Once we were freed, we were hustled off by the college nurse in spite of our protestations that neither was suffering from anything more than a few cuts and bruises. After we'd been liberated and had given our soundbites to the media, we retreated to a greasy spoon up the Banbury Road. Over bacon, eggs, sausages and fried bread, I finally said, 'I've never felt like this before.'

'I'm scared,' Louise said. 'I don't know what we're supposed to do.'

I shrugged. 'What comes naturally?'

'Yes, but what exactly is that?'

'I don't know. Play it by ear?' I seemed to be incapable of getting beyond cliche but either Louise didn't notice or she didn't care.

Louise dipped sausage in her egg yolk. 'I thought I was so sophisticated when I came up to Oxford.' She looked up at me, her eyes appealing. 'But I don't know anything about anything really.'

'We'll work something out,' I promised. I was only six weeks older than Louise, but I was an academic year ahead of her. Somehow, that made me responsible for whatever came next. It was the most frightening prospect of my life. Suddenly, I had lost my appetite.

I watched Louise finish her breakfast, then we walked back to college arm in arm. It was a slightly daring gesture, but everyone knew about our adventure by then, so it wasn't hard to place an innocent construction on the action. Back in my room, we stood facing each other. Then, inch by tentative inch, our faces moved closer until our lips touched.

What I remember most was feeling like there had been an explosion of light inside my head. Looking into Louise's eyes, I saw my wonder mirrored. Right then, I felt invincible.

Unfortunately, as I was to learn the hard way, that was never a feeling that lasted for long.

13

Charlie found it hard to believe how little Corinna had changed. She was still wearing the familiar heavy oval spectacle frames that might have been fashionable for fifteen minutes in 1963 in her native Canada, but hadn't had a single moment of glory since. Even now, her hair was pure 1960s: side parting, backcombed, flicked under her rather heavy jaw, the whole monstrous confection held in place with a layer of hair lacquer hard as shellac. It remained the same uniform dark tan of Cherry Blossom shoe polish. Charlie couldn't help wondering about the portraits in the attic. She smiled an uncertain greeting.

'Charlie. You came.' The same warm Transatlantic voice. Corinna reached out and put a hand on Charlie's arm.

'I said I would.' Charlie let herself be drawn into the hall. Unlike Corinna, it was not as she remembered it. The scuffs and grazes of four young children had gone, painted over and erased. An Afghan runner on sanded and polished boards replaced the worn chocolate brown carpet. And there were proper pictures on the walls, not the garish splodges of kids' artwork. 'Wow,' she said. 'This has changed.'

Corinna's laugh was the familiar cracked cackle. 'That's what happens when your kids grow up and your husband grows old. There's no obstacle to having the place the way you always wanted it.' She led the way down the stairs to the basement kitchen. 'This hasn't changed much, though.'

She was right. The kitchen still had the air of a room through which a mild tornado had passed. Clothes, books, sports equipment, magazines, newspapers and CDs were strewn haphazardly over the sofas and armchairs that lined half the room. The dark red range still had one cream door, because the Newsams were accustomed to taking what was going, especially if it meant saving money. Radio 4 muttered in the background.

'Only the book titles are different,' Corinna said. She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and waved at it. 'Coffee, yes?' She glanced up at the clock. 'We've not got as long as I hoped. Magda and Wheelie are coming for lunch. We can catch up on the small talk then.'

Small talk; my life to Corinna. 'Won't that be a bit awkward? Given why I'm here? Though of course, I'm still not entirely sure why I am here.'

Corinna gave her an odd look as she spooned coffee into a cafetiere. 'Well, I wasn't exactly expecting you to interrogate Magda over the chicken-and-ham pie. I'd given you credit for a little more subtlety than that.' Then, more briskly, 'Besides, they're used to former students dropping in. The place has always had open-house leanings.' She brought the pot to the table along with a pair of mugs. 'So, how much do you know about what's been happening to Magda?'

'I know she married Philip Carling last July. They'd known each other three or four years, depending on which newspaper you read. The wedding and the reception were held at Schollie's and late in the evening Philip Carling was found dead in the river by the punt station. He'd been beaten unconscious and stuffed under a punt. How am I doing?' Charlie was deliberately brutal, trying to provoke a reaction.

What she got was pretty much what she expected. 'Holy moly, Charlie. I see you never mastered the euphemism.'

'I prefer not to leave room for ambiguity. A few weeks later, Philip's business partners were arrested for his murder. They'd been using privileged information to make a killing on the stock market. Philip had found out and was planning to blow the whistle when he got back from his honeymoon. So they killed him. Magda found the key evidence that clinched the case against them. And this week they were both found guilty of his murder. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you sent me a package of newspaper clippings.'

Corinna stirred her coffee mechanically. 'You haven't lost the gift for precis.'

'But why am I here, Corinna? What in God's name is all this about? Why do you care about the convicted killers of your son-in-law?'

She stirred some more, then sighed. 'This is going to sound crazy. I thought about going to the police, but I knew they wouldn't take me seriously, not when they had such a good case against Paul and Joanna. This is why I wanted to talk to you and not some stranger in a private investigator's office. You know I'm not a crazy woman.'

Charlie gave a sad, wry smile. 'You don't have to be crazy to have the occasional crazy fixation, Corinna. It happens all the time.'

'Trust me, Charlie. This is not a crazy fixation. I am convinced that Paul Barker and Joanna Sanderson did not kill Philip.'

Corinna clearly expected this to be a bombshell to Charlie, but she'd already worked out that she was going to hear something like that. 'The police got it wrong? The jury got it wrong?'

Corinna finally put her spoon down. 'It wouldn't be the first time.'

That was a well-aimed barb, and it stung. 'It happens less often than you think.'

'It nearly happened to Bill Hopton.' Corinna's voice was as level as her stare. 'I bet you wish it had.'

Charlie took a deep breath through her nose and counted to ten. She'd forgotten quite how challenging Corinna could be. 'No. I don't. I know it's not a popular position, but I still believe the legal system is worthless if we don't put truth at the heart of it.'

To her surprise, Corinna grinned. 'That's the Charlie I remember. That's why I wanted you on board.'

Charlie shook her head. 'A discredited expert waiting to be struck off? Nobody in their right mind would want me in their corner these days.'

Corinna flapped a hand impatiently. 'That'll sort itself out. You'll see. In the meantime, you're the person to get to the heart of this.'

'To the heart of what? Why are you so sure this is a miscarriage of justice?'

'Because I know who really killed Philip.'

Charlie knew this was the point where she should, like an investigative journalist in a massage parlour, make her excuses and leave. Knowing as she spoke that she was going to regret it, she said, 'Who?'

'The person who murdered my son-in-law was Jay Macallan Stewart.'

14

Sometimes it seemed to Jay that the past was more immediate than the present. She could lose herself in making love with Magda, but when they lay together afterwards, Jay often found her thoughts drifting away from the moment, sifting through memory before settling on one particular episode. It wasn't just because she was delving into her past to make sure her memoir leapt off the page. It had always been like this. It was as if she was constantly re-examining the past in an attempt to cast it in a shape she found acceptable. Jay wanted to look back down the vista of the years and see an unbroken, consistent upward path. Sometimes that took more effort than others.

By the time Louise and I were discovering just what it was that lesbians did in bed, I was already committed to running for President of the Junior Common Room — the quaint term for the undergraduate student body of an Oxford college. It has always been one of those jobs that looks more impressive on a CV than it ever is in reality. But for me it was the next step in the reconstruction of insignificant Jennifer Stewart. Another measure of the distance I had travelled.

All it really involved at Schollie's in my day was making sure the other committee members did whatever they had been elected to do; meeting weekly with the college principal to thrash out any contentious issues and to drink the dry sherry I'd had to train myself to love; running college meetings and, depending on how Stalinist the holder of the office felt, altering the political and practical direction of life for the college's undergraduates. If, for example, one were so minded, one could persuade the JCR members to donate all their funds to the Society for Distressed Gentlewomen. Or some radical Marxist Central American guerrilla army. Depending on your point of view, it was either power without responsibility or responsibility without power.

My main rival for the presidency emerged as Jess Edwards, a geographer with a sharp line in rhetoric, a rowing blue and a disturbing degree of admiration for the historic achievements of Margaret Thatcher. The issues that divided us were practical as well as ideological. For example: I proposed a fund-raising programme aimed at the provision of a proper college launderette with state-of-the-art machines; Jess wanted to spend more on rowing coaches to improve the college's growing reputation on the river.The arguments between us had been hard fought, but soon after Louise and I became lovers, I realised my edge had blunted. Love had knocked the ginger out of me. Where before I would have cornered Jess and metaphorically ripped her limb from limb, now I was making more conciliatory noises than the most wishy-washy bleeding-heart liberal.

Jay leaned back in her chair, remembering her frustration when she'd realised it was all slipping away because she'd lost the relish for the fight. She'd never seen herself as someone for whom love would be enough. Her mother's fecklessness in the early part of her childhood, combined with the savage restrictiveness that had followed, had made sure of that. But with Louise, emotion had overwhelmed her, and the feeling of being at the heart of someone else's world was curiously intoxicating.

The problem was that she couldn't put her ambitions on hold. This was the fourth term of her three years at Schollie's. Soon her time would hit the halfway mark. It wasn't long to make an impression, to create a foundation for a life that was light years away from the grim and narrow prospects of her adolescence. For people like her, there was no second bite of the cherry. This was her chance and she had to make the most of it. Somehow, she had to find a way to turn it round.

Like a carnivore scenting blood, Jess fell on the weakness without mercy. Four days before the election, I was working in my usual spot in the college library when a shadow fell over my notes. 'A word,' Jess said quietly.

I followed her out into the garden and took the opportunity to light a pungent Gitane. The fact that I knew Jess loathed my cigarettes was merely an added pleasure. 'You've got as long as it takes me to smoke this,' I said bluntly.'

I won't need that long. I want you to withdraw your candidacy. '

I shook my head in disbelief. 'When you get back to planet earth, give me a call,' I said sarcastically.

'I'm making the suggestion for your sake. I don't want you to humiliate yourself. The JCR members won't vote a lesbian in as JCR President,' Jess retorted, smugness smeared across her face like dogshit on a shoe.

I had a moment of panic. We'd been so careful. Our embraces had all been inside the safety of our own rooms. I didn't think we'd ever done anything publicly that could be thrown in our faces; we'd never even been to a gay bar. Jess had to be bluffing, I decided. She couldn't know. Nobody could know. 'I'm sure you're right,' I said mildly. 'But why should you think that would bother me?'

'I spent ten years at boarding school, Jay. Give me some credit. I know you didn't have my advantages, but surely you're not so naive as to think you and Louise could make kissy faces at each other over breakfast ever since the roof fell in on you without half the JCR noticing?'

I could feel my ears turning scarlet. Right then, I wasn't sure if I was angrier about our love being reduced to a schoolgirl crush or being reminded I was socially not up to snuff. Either way, it didn't matter. With that one speech, Jess had managed to undo all the softening I'd undergone at the hands of love. 'You're full of shit, Jess,' I snarled.

'I don't think so. As I say, I can't be the only one who's noticed. And unless you withdraw your candidacy, I suspect more people will know by polling day.'

'Are you trying to blackmail me?'

'Good lord, no,' Jess protested. 'But on my way out, I couldn't help noticing the election poster in the kitchen on your floor of the Sackville Building had been defaced. We wouldn't want that sort of thing to happen all over college, would we?'

There had been several times since I'd left the North East when I'd felt the urge to demonstrate my street fighting skills. Never more than at that moment. Somehow, I stopped myself, letting my hands relax out of their reflexive fists. Instead, I pushed past Jess and, leaving my books and notes behind for collection later, I made straight for the Sackville Building.

It was even worse than I'd imagined. The poster that this morning had read, 'Put a Stewart back on the throne' now had 'DYKE' pasted over my name. And added to the list of bullet-point promises I'd made were, 'Lesbian erotica section to be established in college library' and 'Coming-out workshops with professional counsellors'.

I ripped the sheet from the wall, tearing it to pieces. I dumped the remains in the sink and with a shaking hand spun the wheel of my Zippo and reduced its vileness to ashes. I leaned against the sink panting, my eyes smarting with more than the smoke. The knowledge that not many people would have seen it between first thing and now was no balm. I couldn't believe what Jess Edwards had done to me. I'd thought I was the ruthless one.

But I knew with stony certainty that, if I didn't back down, there would be a smear campaign the length and breadth of the college by next morning. And my chances of becoming JCR President would have vanished in the kind of humiliation that people would talk about for years afterwards. Whenever my name came up in conversation where there was anyone from my Oxford vintage, it would be, `Oh, wasn't she the lesbian who thought she could be JCR President?'

And there was Louise to consider. Her ambitions were different from mine; she had no desire for power or notoriety. She'd been having difficulty enough adjusting to the idea of being gay without being humiliated by our fellow undergraduates. And make no mistake about it, I thought bitterly, humiliated we would be. Not much reality lay behind the romantic notions of the solidarity and supportiveness of a community of educated women. At St Scholastika's they were every bit as petty, envious and self-seeking as anywhere else. Thanks to Corinna's indiscreet gossip, I knew of two fellows of the college who had not spoken to each other for the best part of twenty years because of an irreconcilable disagreement over the true cradle of classical civilisation. No, my peers would barely tolerate Louise and certainly would never forgive me for thrusting the personal so very firmly into the public arena, even though I had had nothing to do with its dissemination.

For once in my life, I really didn't know what to do. I couldn't even turn to Corinna. I hadn't told her about Louise; some instinct had made me hold back. I knew the Catholic Church's line on homosexuality only too well, since it was the principal stumbling block between Louise and me. I simply couldn't trust Corinna to let her personal affections supersede her religious views. Wisely, as things turned out.

Jay cocked her head, considering what she'd just written about Corinna. She didn't think there was anything there that would upset Magda. After all, Corinna's subsequent behaviour spoke for itself, and Jay wasn't going to sugar-coat it when she got to that part of the story. However things turned out now, it was still valid. If Corinna welcomed her as a daughter-in-law now, it would play as a Damascene conversion; if not, Jay could take the moral high ground and stand tall under the weight of Corinna's continued disapproval. It might force Magda to a difficult choice, but Jay was convinced she would choose lover over mother at this point. And once that choice was made, there was no going back. Just as there had been no going back all those years ago.

I was sitting at my desk, staring out across the meadows when Jess reappeared. She knocked and stuck her head round my door. 'I see you removed the poster.'

'Wouldn't you?'

'Let me know what you decide,' she said, as casually as if she were asking me how I liked my coffee. 'I'll see you at breakfast.'

But she didn't. By breakfast time, Jess Edwards was dead.