‘I know that,’ Meadows told him. ‘I’ve known that since I first opened the door.’

  Lofthouse stroked his chin. ‘I’m the specified six steps from the door, and you’re right in front of it. What you have to ask yourself now is whether you can get inside and slam the safety chain in place before I reach you. Because if you can’t – and we both know you can’t – I just might hurt you. It will be accidental, of course, but that won’t make it any less painful. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ she said, ‘because instead of you hurting me, I might hurt you.’

  Such a ridiculous statement obviously called for a dramatic response, and Lofthouse was more than willing to provide one. He threw back his head and roared with laughter at her pathetic attempt to frighten him, just as she’d known he would, and while he was posed in this theatrical position, Meadows made her move, turning sharply back into the house.

  His roar changed from amusement to anger, and he flung himself at the door and managed to wedge his foot in the gap between the door and the jamb.

  They were both pushing against the door, but Lofthouse had the weight, and the outcome was inevitable.

  ‘If you want to know what a battered woman looks like, you’ll only have to look in the mirror,’ Lofthouse hissed.

  His foot was still in the gap, and Meadows brought the heel of her shoe hard down on it. Once she felt it make contact, she began to rotate her knee and ankle, like a one-legged dancer doing the twist. It was a vigorous movement, and any normal heel would probably have buckled, but this was one of Zelda’s shoes, and had been built to withstand such treatment.

  Lofthouse howled with pain, and stopped pushing. Then, slowly and carefully, he withdrew his foot.

  When Meadows opened the door, she saw he was hopping on one leg and holding the injured foot in his hand. He was probably finished, she thought, but it was better to be safe than sorry, and kicked him in the groin. Fresh waves of agony crossed his face, and he crashed to the ground in a most satisfactory manner.

  Meadows admired her handiwork for a second, and then, seeing an old couple observing her over the fence, she called to them, ‘Maybe next time he’ll remember to use the tradesmen’s entrance.’

  She smiled at them, to show she was joking.

  They did not smile back.

  TWO

  Meadows had first met Jane Lofthouse at a charity function for Overcroft House, when she was still Jane Bright.

  ‘She started out with nothing, you know,’ one of the shelter’s board of governors had told Kate, as the attractive, smartly dressed (and obviously energetic) Bright appeared in the doorway of the reception room. ‘Absolutely nothing! And look at her now – barely thirty, and she runs her own company.’

  Yes, back then, she had been so confident and self-assured that she had almost made Meadows feel like a shrinking violet.

  Yet what a change a few years of marriage to the wrong man had wrought. The confidence had gone, and it was difficult to accept that the Jane back then, and the Jane who had her face buried in Lizzie’s shoulder, were the same person.

  Equally remarkable was the change the situation had brought about in Lizzie. In the previous few minutes she had acquired a strength Meadows would never have believed she was capable of, and the thin waif seemed perfectly comfortable with being the rock to which Jane could anchor herself.

  Lizzie looked up. ‘Has he gone?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Meadows confirmed.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  And so she was – from the safety of the house she had tracked his progress as he hobbled down the path, climbed awkwardly into his Rolls-Royce, and drove away.

  Jane abandoned the security of Lizzie’s shoulder, and looked up. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face had all but collapsed.

  ‘You’ve only made matters worse,’ she moaned. ‘I know you didn’t mean to, but you have.’

  ‘You need to calm down, Jane,’ Meadows said soothingly.

  ‘You don’t know him,’ Jane said, on the verge of hysteria. ‘When he’s defied, he goes into a black rage – and he stays like that until he’s had his revenge.’ She sobbed. ‘So he’ll be back.’

  ‘The first thing in the morning, we’ll get a restraining order sworn out,’ Meadows promised.

  ‘It won’t happen,’ Jane said, fatalistically. ‘Andrew has a lot more influence in this town than you could even begin to imagine.’

  This was a familiar scene being played out in front of her, Meadows thought. Over time, battered wives often grew to think of themselves as more and more useless, while their oppressors grew into supermen who could never be defeated.

  ‘Your husband’s not the only one with influence in this town,’ she said. ‘He may know which levers to pull, but I was a police officer for a long time, and I know where the bodies are buried. If I want a restraining order, I’ll get a restraining order.’

  For the briefest of moments, there was a flicker of hope in Jane’s eyes, then it died and she said, ‘It will be too late then. He’ll come for me tonight – I know he will. And this time, he won’t hold back. This time, he won’t stop until he’s killed me.’

  ‘He won’t be able to get in,’ Meadows said.

  ‘He’ll find a way,’ Jane moaned. ‘He always finds a way.’

  ‘This is the safest building in Whitebridge,’ Kate Meadows promised. ‘The glass is bulletproof. The locks on the doors are top-of-the-range. Everything is wired up, so that if anyone breaks in, the police are informed immediately, and they have strict instructions to make this call their number one priority.’

  Jane still did not look convinced.

  ‘There’s only one way of getting in or out without setting off all the alarms, and for that you need the right key,’ Meadows continued. ‘There are only two copies of that key. One of them is in the bank, and the other –’ she reached for the chain around her neck, and hauled up the key which had been resting between her breasts – ‘is here.’

  ‘It’s no consolation to me if he can’t make his escape after he’s killed me,’ Jane said miserably.

  ‘Stop feeling so sorry for yourself!’ screamed the Black Beast, from the dark void at the very edge of Meadows’ soul.

  She wanted to grab Jane and shake her. Wanted to tell her that she was not the first woman to suffer like this – that the young Kate’s situation had been even worse, but she had fought back and kept fighting back, right up to the point at which Clifford had his unfortunate accident.

  But that would never do, because these were the Beast’s words, not hers, and she had long ago decided that she would no longer allow him to speak for her.

  ‘Maybe if you inspected the security arrangements yourself you might feel a little more confident,’ she suggested.

  A spark of interest came into Jane’s eye – perhaps even a spark of hope.

  ‘I’ll get Hadley’s to check them out,’ she said. ‘They could be here within the hour.’

  Meadows whistled softly to herself. Talk about aiming high, she thought. Hadley Security was acknowledged to be the best security company in the whole of the north-west. She had tried to employ them herself, but they had demanded a king’s ransom before they even walked through the door, and appealing to the philanthropic side of their nature had been a total waste of time.

  ‘You might think of contacting some other firm,’ she said cautiously, ‘but whatever company you do end up with will probably not consider this an emergency, so you’ll have to wait three or four days at a minimum.’

  If she’d thought about it, she could probably have come up with two or three possible ways Jane might react to this last statement.

  She might have simply shrugged, as if to say, oh well, it was just a thought.

  She could have felt crushed, because she’d made a huge effort to be positive, only to have Meadows dismiss it as totally impractical.

  Or she could have been angry – with either the security company or Meadows – that they should choose to act like the Levite or priest in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and ignore the fact that she was desperately in need of help.

  Meadows would not have been surprised by any of these reactions. What did surprise her was that Jane laughed.

  And it wasn’t a hysterical laugh – it came from deep in the lungs and showed nothing but genuine amusement.

  ‘My God, you don’t know much about business, do you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve had no complaints about the way I run this place,’ Meadows said, and was shocked to hear a note of petulance in her voice.

  Jane noticed it, too, and the slightly mocking amusement drained from her face.

  ‘Look, I wasn’t meaning to insult you,’ she said. ‘You’ve saved my life here, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I admire you tremendously, and I’ll be grateful to you until the day I die.’

  ‘But …?’ Meadows asked, because with that kind of sentence there usually was a ‘but’ hiding somewhere under the clichés.

  ‘But you can’t even begin to imagine what’s it’s like to build a business like mine. It involves developing a complex web of understandings and treaties, an intimate skein of duties and obligations. When I get on the phone to Jim Hadley, he’ll agree to help me. We’re part of the same tribe, and if he doesn’t owe me, he owes someone else who does. So trust me on this – he’ll be here.’

  She’d transformed herself, in just a few seconds, from a total wreck into a near force of nature. It was almost a miracle, but miracles rarely happened, and chances were, it wasn’t so much a transformation as a flashback, which would probably be gone as quickly as it had arrived.

  A minor miracle did occur about an hour later, when a van from Hadley Security pulled up outside, and the man who had been driving it announced himself to Meadows as Jim Hadley, the founder of the empire.

  He was a middle-aged man of average height and average build. His hair was a nondescript brown, and he had the sort of facial features that you tended to forget the moment he’d turned his back on you.

  ‘I’m surprised you came yourself,’ Meadows said. ‘Are you a close friend of Jane’s?’

  ‘Or just a member of the same tribe,’ she added silently.

  Hadley gave her an embarrassed shrug. ‘I’m not really what you might call a friend,’ he said. ‘I’d run into her at the golf club dinner or my lodge’s ladies’ night, and we always got on well, but I’d say we were never more than acquaintances.’

  ‘So what made you drop everything and rush over?’

  Hadley shrugged again. ‘Well, you know …’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Meadows confessed, ‘not really.’

  ‘I suppose I felt guilty.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Like I said, I wasn’t that close to Jane – but I was close enough to guess what was going on.’

  ‘So you knew she was getting beaten up by her husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t do anything about it.’

  ‘I wasn’t the only one, you know,’ Hadley said, with a sudden hint of aggression in his voice. ‘Everybody could see that was happening, and nobody did anything about it. When all’s said and done, what could we do?’

  He was right, Meadows thought. There were only two possible ways to handle that kind of situation – counsel the victim or report the whole thing to the police. But if you weren’t on close terms with the woman already, how the hell did you even begin that conversation? And if the victim seemed to be going along with what was happening to her, what was the point in telling the cops about it, since they could do nothing without the victim’s cooperation?

  It was a common enough story, but no less depressing, for all that.

  ‘I’m sorry if I seemed to be criticizing you, Mr Hadley,’ Meadows said. ‘I know there’s very little you can do in a situation like that.’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ Hadley said, cheerful enough now.

  ‘But I would appreciate it if you’d do your best to assure Jane that she’s safe here.’

  ‘I’ll do more than just assure her,’ Hadley said. ‘I’ll go over this place from top to bottom and make sure it’s safe.’

  At half-past seven, Mary Barnes, the assistant warden arrived, carrying a bag which contained her overnight toiletries and her pyjamas.

  ‘It’s not often you go out on a Tuesday, boss,’ she said.

  ‘I know I don’t,’ Meadows agreed, ‘and I’m sorry to give you so little notice, but I’ve had a rough day, and I feel like a change.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Mary said cheerily. ‘I need all the overtime I can get, because our Rose is off to college in September, and even though she’ll get a student loan, we’ll still have to cough up a fair amount of dosh.’ She paused for a moment, then, with an edge of concern creeping into her voice, asked, ‘So what was particularly rough about today?’

  ‘Jane’s husband turned up,’ Meadows said.

  Mary nodded. ‘Ah!’

  But now she thought about it, Meadows couldn’t quite see why that had made the day particularly difficult. True, there had been violence, but violence was nothing new to her – she had once been attacked by three lorry drivers, and they’d been the ones who ended up in hospital – and it never left her feeling this kind of lethargic pessimism. True, also, that she’d had two hysterical, terrified women on her hands, but that was really part and parcel of running the shelter.

  No, the problem was that she simply couldn’t shake off the feeling that something terrible was about to happen – something that would destroy the life she had known and come to depend on.

  ‘Don’t go nipping out for a quick drink while I’m out,’ Meadows said.

  It was a joke, a weak one, but nonetheless still a joke, and it was designed to lighten the mood. They both knew Mary would not leave the building for any reason, because unless you had the master key, it was easy enough to exit through the fire door, but impossible to get back in again. Besides which, as Meadows had explained to Jane earlier, the very act of leaving the house would literally set alarm bells ringing in police headquarters.

  ‘I really can’t imagine what you get up to on these nights out of yours,’ Mary said, ‘“but if you can’t be good, be careful”!’

  Another attempt at humour, so maybe Mary, too, had a sense of the overhanging doom.

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ Meadows promised.

  She always was. She had become an expert at detecting situations which might turn nasty, and even better at backing away from them. She never began without firmly establishing a safe word. And she never went to a club near home, because she knew better than to shit in her own backyard.

  Tonight, however, she might break one of those rules, because she was too tired and dispirited to drive all way to Bolton or Preston in search of pain, and she had heard that there was a club right there in Whitebridge which might serve her needs.

  She picked up the bag in which Zelda and her instruments lived.

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Mary,’ she said.

  She was already feeling a little better, and if fate was laughing mockingly in her ear, she didn’t hear it.

  THREE

  Monika Paniatowski and her daughter, Louisa (née Rutter, and now, for professional reasons, Rutter again) were sitting at the kitchen table they had shared when Louisa was a child. There were two bottles on the table, one a Polish vodka for Monika, and the other a Spanish brandy for Louisa. It seemed strange to some people that these should be their drinks of choice, since Monika had left Poland when she was four (and never returned) and Louisa hadn’t set foot in Spain (the birthplace of her long dead natural mother) until she was fifteen. But it made sense to them. In a way, they were both orphans, and the drinks brought them a little closer to the past they had been denied.

  The conversation that evening (and indeed all the evenings they spent together), focussed on the old days – Louisa’s first crush on a boy who didn’t seem to even know she existed; the holiday in Spain with Uncle Charlie and Louisa’s Spanish family, after which the daughter had helped the mother to solve a murder; the way the arrival of the two totally unplanned baby boys had disrupted their lives …

  What they did not discuss was the daughter’s work. From Louisa’s side, this was because she wasn’t allowed to discuss most of it with a woman who, despite her past service, was now no more than a civilian. From Monika’s side, it was because she didn’t want to appear the old hand judging the work of a younger, less-experienced officer. And sometimes (she admitted to herself) she kept quiet because she would hate to seem like a dinosaur, blundering its way ignorantly through the intricacies of modern policing.

  At eight o’clock, Louisa glanced down at her watch and said, ‘Derek’s picking me up in about fifteen minutes.’

  ‘You don’t normally leave this early,’ Monika said, trying not to sound disappointed.

  ‘Derek’s got a business meeting in Seattle tomorrow, and I’m driving him down to Manchester Airport.’

  ‘I thought he drove himself, and left his car in the airport parking,’ Monika said, trying not to sound like the nosy mother-in-law.

  ‘He does normally do that,’ Louisa agreed. ‘But my car’s in for repairs, so I’ll need his Jag, and it wouldn’t be much use to me if it was left in Manchester.’

  ‘Would you like to drop in for a nightcap on your way home?’ Monika asked hopefully. ‘I’ll still be up.’

  Louisa shook her head. ‘I’ve got an exceptionally early start tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh? Why’s that?’ Monika asked. ‘Something special happening?’

  And she was thinking, ‘There you go breaking your own first rule, Monika.’

  ‘Not exactly special, no,’ Louisa said. ‘The chief con is off in the Caribbean. He’s supposed to be advising his opposite numbers over there on how to do their jobs – but I’m betting most of his advice will be dispensed on the golf course. As for the deputy chief – he’s been rushed into hospital with a burst appendix. So what that means is that one of the chief superintendents has to take charge – and I was the one sitting in the chair when the bottle stopped spinning.’