‘If they’re difficult enough,’ returned the pert gamine.

  ‘How about this? “The iceman buyeth not his round.” Five letters beginning with a C. I just can’t get it.’

  Rebecca wrinkled her nose.

  ‘The reference to O’Neill is clear enough. Too clear, in fact. Probably a red herring. Oh drat, I shall have to think about it,’ she concluded world-wearily, getting up from the table.

  ‘Don’t forget your French essay,’ Alison called after her.

  ‘J’essaierai!’

  ‘Isn’t she amazing?’ I said with feigned warmth.

  Alison smiled deprecatingly.

  ‘They all are at that age. It’s easy to be amazing. What’s difficult is to settle down to being ordinary. I fancy Rebecca may find that quite a struggle.’

  She rose to make coffee.

  ‘So what was it you wanted to ask me?’

  I laughed lightly.

  ‘It’s a bit of a bore, I’m afraid. The thing is, the police have been in touch. It’s quite incredible. Apparently there was some irregularity in the way the case against Clive Phillips was prepared, and as a result he’s being set free. It’s a total travesty of justice, of course. No one has the slightest doubt about his guilt, but because the correct procedures weren’t observed they have to let him go.’

  ‘How appalling!’

  ‘What’s even worse is that the Crown Prosecution Service is considering reopening the case. The police very decently warned me about this in advance, and asked if there was anyone who could vouch for the fact that I was in Oxford on the day Karen disappeared.’

  ‘To give you an alibi, you mean?’

  I laughed.

  ‘Well I suppose that’s the legal term, but it’s just a formality really. I mean no one’s accusing me of anything, least of all the police. But they’ve got to go through the motions, you see, even though they know perfectly well that Phillips was responsible for Karen’s death.’

  Alison brought two miniature Deruta cups brimming with espresso coffee.

  ‘That’s jolly thoughtful of them,’ she said. ‘But how frightful to think that that man is going to go free. Aren’t you scandalized?’

  I sighed deeply and shrugged.

  ‘He’s not going free. He’s just being released into another prison, the prison of his own conscience. For the rest of his life, he’s going to have to live with the knowledge of what he did.’

  Alison nodded.

  ‘How very true.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, the main thing is to avoid the whole unsavoury business being dredged up yet again. I just want to forgive and forget. That’s why it’s so vital to do what the police suggest and find someone who will verify that I was here.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Of course. Have you spoken to any of the people you saw that day?’

  ‘That’s why it’s a bore,’ I sighed. ‘You see, when you cancelled our lunch date, I was so depressed I just couldn’t face doing anything else. I’d really been looking forward to seeing you. In the end I sat at home all day and read, did some cleaning, listened to music, that sort of thing. No one called, no one saw me.’

  I marshalled the loose crumbs on the tabletop into a neat line.

  ‘Actually, I was wondering if perhaps you’d do it.’

  Alison sipped the last of her coffee and bent over the cup, studying the swirl of grounds on the glazed ceramic.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Vouch for me.’

  ‘Me? I wasn’t even here myself!’

  ‘What time did you leave?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I left the house about one thirty or two, but …’

  ‘That’s good enough. Instead of phoning, let’s say you drove over to tell me in person that you wouldn’t be able to make lunch. We had a brief chat, then you went on to Dorset. It would have been on your way, more or less.’

  Alison frowned.

  ‘But I didn’t.’

  ‘No, but you might have.’

  ‘But I didn’t!’

  I nodded vigorously, as though we were discussing some abstract issue such as nuclear power or the poll tax.

  ‘I see your point, Alison, but I wonder if you aren’t being slightly over-literal about this. Why should we have to go through months of grief and disruption just because fate intervened to break our lunch appointment? All the police want is a token statement. You won’t be under oath, no one is going to cross-examine you. You’ll just be confirming what they already know, namely that I was in Oxford that day and therefore can’t have had any hand in what happened in Wales.’

  Alison stared at me for longer than I would have believed possible. Time must have got jammed, I thought, or maybe I was suffering a stroke. Then there was a thunder of feet on the stairs, a thrush gave voice outside the window, and Rebecca burst into the room.

  ‘Crime!’ she cried.

  Alison’s face melted back into an expression of maternal warmth. I realized how unnaturally set and strained it had become.

  ‘What do you mean, dear?’

  The solution to that crossword clue. It’s an anagram. The iceman is Mr Ice.’

  I forced a congratulatory smile.

  ‘And “buyeth not his round”?’

  ‘Crime doesn’t pay.’

  As she strode out to the hallway, I felt a shiver of panic, like one who realizes he is the victim of black magic. In the mouth of that unsuspecting child the phrase resounded like the judgement of the Delphic oracle. I knew that nothing would go right for me now.

  ‘I don’t know what amazes me more,’ Alison said quietly, ‘that you should be prepared to perjure yourself or that you imagined that I would. Evidently we don’t know each other as well as I thought.’

  The Perrier had flowed like water during lunch, but we had consumed nothing stronger. When I tried to stand up, though, I staggered like a drunk.

  ‘Well thanks, Alison. It’s been real. The police will be in touch some time this afternoon or tomorrow, I expect. A Chief Inspector Moss. I’d keep an eye on him if I were you. Just between the two of us, he struck me as a bit of a DOM. Prosing on about female pulchritude with his hands buried deep in his raincoat pockets, that sort of thing. I have a feeling that you’re the sort of woman he might go for in a big way, Alison.’

  She stared at me in shock. I had never spoken like this to her before. I had never been flippant, ambiguous or disrespectful. Above all, I had never mentioned the Wonderful World of Sex.

  ‘I think you’d better leave,’ she said with quiet dignity.

  Quiet dignity, like omelette aux fines herbes, was very much Alison’s forte. She did it superbly well.

  I walked along the hallway to the front door. The strains of the piano rang out from the living room, where Rebecca was practising. It was the same piece I had heard over the phone, but the effect was quite different now, like a landscape one is leaving for ever.

  On the way home I made a detour through the back-streets of East Oxford, just for old times’ sake. I found myself staring out of the window of the BMW with something approaching envy. Yes, there was squalor and despair, but also a range of human contact, a warmth and vivacity quite foreign to the genteel suburbs where I now lived. What violence there was here was only for show, a desperate appeal for help or attention, the uncoordinated flailings of a drunk too far gone to do any damage. But Alison and her kind were kung fu masters, all formal smiles, elaborate politeness and swift, vicious dispatch.

  I had thought I was one of them, that was my mistake. I thought my birth and education entitled me to a place among them. I couldn’t have been more wrong. My place was here, among the people I despised. Them I could manipulate, as I had Dennis and Karen. From the moment I tried to move up to Alison’s level I was lost. I’d wanted her because she was the real thing. It had never occurred to me that I was not. But the real thing is not charm and chat but a clinically precise sense of what you can get away with. And that I lacked. Otherwise I would never have made the fatal blunder of trying to seduce Alison morally. I had mistaken her for a jumped-up shopgirl like Karen, to whom the ties of romantic love were sacred and who would sacrifice anything to stand by her man. Karen would have lied to the police for me without a second thought, but to propose it to Alison was as gauche as asking her to give me a blow-job in the Bod.

  Yes, if I had been the cold, calculating killer portrayed by the press, I would have stayed well clear of any further entanglements with Ms Kraemer. Even without her support, I had little to fear from the law. It would have taken more than Clive’s word and the lack of an alibi to convict me. If any of the witnesses Moss had mentioned had been able to identify me positively, there could have been no question of keeping the file on the case closed. Even if they had, my chances would have been no worse than even. Not only does the law send innocent men like Clive Phillips and Hugh Starkey to prison, it even more frequently allows the guilty to walk free, particularly if they are white, middle-class, well-heeled and don’t speak with an Irish accent.

  But if Alison had been dismayed to find that we didn’t know each other as well as she had thought, the effect on me was no less traumatic. The woman I had idolized for so long, and for whose sake I had run the most terrible risks, had revealed herself to be a shallow, selfish prig. After all these years, Alison Kraemer still thought right and wrong were as clear and unambiguous as right and left. Even a decade of radical and regenerative government hadn’t taught her that her moral code — a ragbag of oddments from religious and philosophical uniforms which no one was prepared to wear entire any more — was as irrelevant to the contemporary world as theories about the great chain of being or the music of the spheres.

  Well, the time had come to set her right about this. It was my intellectual duty, as one Oxford man to another, so to speak. It was the least I could do in return for all she had done to me. Mind you, I won’t try and pretend that my motives were wholly altruistic. There was undeniably an element of personal satisfaction involved as well. I wanted to scare the living shit out of the stupid bag, to scar her psyche with scenes of horror she would relive every night until she died.

  Perhaps if I’d had time to think it over, cooler counsels might have prevailed. But it so happened that the madrigal group met that very evening, so I could count on Alison’s absence from the house. The children would be there, of course, but I could take care of them. I rounded up some tools and my trusty rubber gloves, and sat sipping a tumbler of The Macallan until it grew dark.

  The lane leading to the house was as quiet as an alley in a cemetery. Most women would have been frightened living there by themselves, but Alison Kraemer’s imagination was as well-trained as one of Barbara Woodhouse’s dogs. That could change though, I thought as I flitted across the lawn. That docile and obedient pooch was about to go rabid. A light was on in one of the front bedrooms. Rebecca was still up. When she heard me, she would assume at first that Mumsy had returned earlier than usual from her glees and catches. By the time she realized her mistake, it would be too late.

  Don’t worry, it’s not going to get that nasty. Murdering children has never appealed to me any more than the other English national pastimes. All I was planning to do to the kiddies was lock them up somewhere while I got on with my business. I was planning to start with the cat, run it through the Magimix and smear the puree liberally about the walls and furniture. After that I’d improvise. It’s astonishing how much damage you can do once you put your mind to it. I was quite looking forward to it. Let’s face it, there’s a bit of the yob in all of us.

  I made my way along the side of the house to the kitchen door. This would be locked and bolted, but the window next to it was forceable. Alison had told me she meant to get a security lock fitted, but I knew hadn’t got round to it. I slipped on my gloves and got to work jemmying the sash. It took longer than I had anticipated, but in the end the catch snapped in two, sending a fragment of cast iron tinkling loudly about the stone floor. I pushed the window up, hoisted myself on to the ledge and crawled through.

  The nocturnal silence was promptly shattered by an astonishing crash as a glass bowl I had failed to notice on the draining-board fell to the floor. My muscles locked up in panic, but no one came running or called out. I lowered myself gingerly to the ground, my shoes crunching on the fragments of broken glass. The light switch was by the open doorway leading to the hall. I made my way across the glass-strewn flagstones towards it, my eyes gradually adjusting to the darkness. I was about three feet away from the door, my hand already raised to the switch, when a disembodied limb reached in out of the darkness of the hallway and clicked it on.

  All vision went down in a blinding white-out as the fluorescent tube on the ceiling came to life. I blinked frantically, trying to stop my eyes down to a point where I could see what was going on.

  The first thing I took in were the feet. They looked absurd, comic-book clodhoppers, all bumps and lumps and knobbly toes. Above them rose hairy legs, the left one bulging with varicose veins. The rest of the body was clad in a pink silk peignoir secured by a belt of the same material in a contrasting shade. A broad, flat, hirsute chest rose from the decolletage, and above it a head I recognized as belonging to Thomas Carter.

  ‘Let’s just get one thing straight,’ he said. ‘I was with Special Forces out in Nam. There are at least fifteen ways I could kill you with one hand.’

  I laughed aloud. He looked utterly ridiculous, standing there in a woman’s pink silk dressing-gown five sizes too small for him, talking tough.

  ‘Tom? Tom?’ a woman’s voice called from the stairs.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ll handle it. Go back to bed.’

  A series of creaks ascended towards the ceiling.

  ‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘I’ve suspected for a long time that you and Alison had something going. What I don’t quite see is where I fit into all this. Can’t you keep her satisfied, Carter, even with your big all-American Vietnam vet’s cock?’

  There was a blur of movement, and the next thing I knew I was lying crouched on the floor, a piece of broken glass up one nostril and the taste of recycled malt in my mouth.

  ‘That was what we used to call a SOB,’ I heard a voice remark somewhere in yawing spaces above me. ‘A euphemism that’s also an acronym, we really ate those up. A “soften-up blow”. Very popular in the brig.’

  ‘I’ve never witnessed such a display of unprovoked, cold-blooded brutality,’ I gasped indignantly, struggling to my knees.

  ‘Oh but I have! I’ve seen things I couldn’t believe were happening even when I was watching them. And the people who were doing these things were kids I’d grown up with, played ball games with, gone to movies with. A month before they’d have peed their pants at the thought of the cops catching them driving out to the lake with an open six-pack on the back seat. Now they were napalming babies, raping moms, torturing grand-dads, never mind what we used to do to any suspected Vietcong we got our hands on. Ordinary everyday atrocities, committed by ordinary everyday guys who would otherwise have been selling cars or pumping gas or serving hamburgers.’

  I stood up, leaning on the Welsh dresser. Alison’s collection of Sabatier cooking knives protruded invitingly from a wooden block just a few feet away.

  ‘That’s what brought me here,’ Carter went on. ‘When I got back to the States, I found I couldn’t pass a car showroom or a gas station or a burger bar without remembering what I’d seen. I didn’t believe in natural decency any more. I needed a society with a keel, a tradition of culture and civilization strong enough to balance all that. You want to grab one of those knives? Go right ahead. Stick it up your own ass, it’ll save me the trouble.’

  I drew my hand back.

  ‘Of course!’ I cried. ‘I get it! I was the stooge, the decoy! That’s why Alison took me to that restaurant that night, knowing that you and Lynn would be there. And that’s why you invited us both to dinner right afterwards. It was all designed to divert Lynn’s suspicions from you and Alison.’

  So potent was Thomas Carter’s aura of moral righteousness that I half-expected him to deny the whole thing and claim that he and Alison were just rehearsing a scene from a bedroom farce for a local amateur dramatic society production. I was really quite shocked when he calmly admitted the whole thing. Yes, he and Alison had been in love for several years, but they had kept it secret so as not to upset the children. Once or twice a month Rebecca and Alex were packed off to sleep over with friends the night the madrigal group met, leaving Thomas and Alison free to ‘make music together’. Just when Lynn had started to become suspicious, I had conveniently appeared on the scene. Alison had taken advantage of my infatuation as a cover behind which she and Thomas could continue their affair in safety.

  ‘Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘the real question is what we’re going to do about you now, my friend. What the fuck are you doing here anyway?’

  ‘I was beside myself with frustrated desire. I was going to strip naked, put on that dressing-gown and toss myself off to a cracked seventy-eight of Nellie Melba singing “Come into the Garden, Maude”. Do you ever get urges like that?’

  For a moment I thought he was going to hit me again. Then he grinned, showing his bad teeth.

  ‘Of course I could just call the police and have you charged with breaking and entering.’

  ‘But you won’t, because then you’d have to explain what you’re doing here at this time of night. Look, why don’t we just pretend this never happened?’

  Carter shook his head.

  ‘You can expose Ally and me any time you want. I can’t risk that.’

  ‘So what are you going to do, kill me?’