No, of course they won’t, Meadows thought. If they find out, I’m finished. If they find out, I’ve lost everything.

  But she said nothing.

  ‘Of course, they don’t have to know,’ Lofthouse continued, ‘and if I keep quiet about it, it will remain our secret. But I’ll want something in return for my silence.’

  ‘I won’t betray Jane,’ Meadows said fiercely. ‘If that’s the price, it’s too much, and you’d better do your worst.’

  ‘I’m perfectly willing to leave Jane out of this,’ Lofthouse told her.

  ‘Then what do you want?’

  ‘We can’t discuss it here. We should go somewhere private. I think we’ll go back to my place.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to your place,’ she said.

  ‘I know you don’t,’ he replied, ‘but you don’t have any choice do you?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she agreed, ‘I don’t have any bloody choice.’

  FIVE

  Wednesday 2 February

  When Clara Frisk – a cleaner by occupation and larcenist by inclination – boarded the bus close to her home, it was still dark. As she changed buses at Whitebridge Central Station, dawn was breaking, and by the time she got off the second bus at Cotton Lane it was almost full daylight (or, at least, as full as daylight got in February in Whitebridge).

  There were those who claimed that the affluence of a neighbourhood could be gauged by the width of the grass verges which separated the pavement from the road. Thus, while some of the poorer parts of Whitebridge had no verges (and sometimes even no pavements) Cotton Lane’s verges were wide and lush and regularly trimmed by the council.

  The verges did not look so lush that morning. An overnight frost had frozen each and every blade of grass into a spike, and glancing down at it was like being given an aerial view of an aging punk’s head. The pavement, too, bore witness to the drop in temperature. It glistened most attractively – and offered the unwary the opportunity to lose their footing and go arse over tit.

  Clara Frisk was not one of the unwary. She made her way cautiously down the street until she reached the house which she had privately nicknamed Lofthouseham Palace. It was a big place, even by the standards of the street, with windows running almost floor to ceiling and pillars like the ones you saw in the old films about the American south.

  ‘Just goes to show there’s money in soft drinks,’ she said to herself, not for the first time.

  She let herself in through the back door into what she called the kitchen, but had heard her employers refer to as ‘the tradesmen’s entrance’. It was a large room, with an Aga and two dishwashers (one of them exclusively for crystal drinking glasses). It had two internal doors, one of which opened into the entrance hall (a vast area with a sweeping marble staircase which led to a minstrels’ gallery) and a second of which led into the back living room (which the Lofthouses insisted on calling a reception room).

  Clara Frisk opened the door to the entrance hall and called, ‘Is there anyone at home?’

  In the old days, Mrs Lofthouse, standing on the gallery at the top of the staircase, would have shouted back, ‘I’m just finishing off in the bathroom, Mrs F,’ or, ‘I’ll be down in a minute. Could you put the kettle on, will you?’

  But things were different since her sudden, unannounced disappearance. Now, the house was usually empty, because Mr Lofthouse had gone out by this time of day, or else had still not got back from the night before (Clara was never sure which). Still, it was as well to check she had a safe run at it before setting about her business.

  Satisfied she had the house to herself, she opened the other door and stepped into the reception room. This room had sliding glass doors which opened into the patio and the barbeque, but more importantly, it was where the bar was located.

  The bar resembled the one in the best room of her local boozer, except that this bar’s tabletop was made of teak, and the padding that ran along the front was genuine leather.

  Clara Frisk let her eyes travel along the rows of bottles of gin, brandy, whisky, vodka and rum. Some she rejected straight away, because they were either unopened or very nearly full. Others, she discounted for the opposite reason – there was so little left in them that one or two more glasses would drain them completely. But that still left quite a number of bottles in the third category – neither nearly full nor nearly empty.

  Clara opened her bag, and let her hand feel its way through the several layers of cleaning rags to the bottles concealed under them.

  They were all small bottles – one had held eau-de-Cologne, another cough mixture and a third shampoo, though they had now, of course, been thoroughly rinsed out. She placed them on the top of the bar, and then produced the last piece of equipment she needed for this operation – a small plastic funnel.

  As she reached for a Bacardi bottle, she found herself thinking about the rows Mr and Mrs Lofthouse used to have.

  God, they were humdingers, though.

  Clara had no idea what they were about, since they always took place in some other part of the house – she could imagine Mr Lofthouse saying, ‘Not in front of the servants, dear,’ as they did in all those old black-and-white films – but they were certainly loud enough.

  Slowly and carefully, Clara filled the eau-de-Cologne bottle with the Bacardi. That task successfully completed, she opened the cough mixture bottle, which would soon be filled with brandy.

  Actually, it wasn’t quite accurate to call what had happened rows, she thought, because rows were between two people, and the only voice she’d ever heard raised in anger was Mr Lofthouse’s. Of course, it was always possible that Mrs Lofthouse was rowing in a whisper – but she didn’t think it likely.

  Maybe it was because of all the shouting and screaming that Mrs Lofthouse had left. Mr Lofthouse tried to explain it away by saying that she had gone to visit relatives, but if you believed that, you’d believe Minnie Mouse was as virginal as she looked.

  In a way, Mrs Frisk did miss Mrs Lofthouse, because she had been so much nicer to her than most of the snotty buggers she worked for were. On the other hand, she was much more aware of what was going on around her than Mr L was, and the incidents of petty larceny with which Mrs Frisk enriched her day could never have occurred under Mrs Lofthouse’s watchful eye.

  The decanting was completed, and Mrs Frisk placed her booty back in her bag.

  And now, she supposed, it was time to go and do a bit of cleaning.

  Mrs Frisk usually started cleaning upstairs, and worked her way down (‘Then I don’t have to climb any stairs when I’m starting to feel knackered,’ she’d explain to her cronies in the snug bar of the Bull and Bush) so she stepped into the entrance hall with every intention of making her way to the master bedroom.

  It was when she was almost at the staircase that she saw the round thing. At first she just assumed it was a ball of some kind, though why Mr Lofthouse should want to have balls in the house was beyond her.

  Then she realized that the ball was looking at her, and that the eyes it was using were Mr Lofthouse’s.

  And that was when she screamed.

  In the old days, when Whitebridge had been a thriving cotton town, the Whitebridge–Liverpool canal had played a central part in the town’s prosperity. It had been the highway along which countless barges (pulled by countless horses) had carried raw cotton to Whitebridge from the Lancashire port, and returned to Liverpool with the bolts of cotton which the mill workers had produced (sometimes under hellish conditions). But now there were no mills, and the tow path was rarely graced by anyone, other than a few fishermen who could not afford to go further afield to pursue their hobby.

  Kate Meadows had not seen a soul since she began her mammoth walk along the canal bank. It had still been dark back then, and several times she had stumbled on the stones – smoothed and rounded by years of horses’ hooves – which were embedded in the clay to form the path.

  She did not know how far she had walked back and forth, or even how long she had been walking, though from the position of the sun, she guessed it was around half-past eight. What she did know was that her legs ached, and her heart was warning her she had pushed it far enough.

  It had been insane to go to the Hellfire Club the previous evening, she told herself for the thousandth time – completely bloody insane. If she hadn’t gone, none of it would have happened. If she hadn’t gone, her life could have carried on pretty much as it had for the last few years.

  But it was pointless to dwell on what might have been. Now, she needed to do all she could to rescue at least something from the wreckage.

  She had almost reached the bridge where she had parked her car. It seemed like a sign – but then perhaps she was so desperate that anything would seem like a sign.

  She drove out of town – using little-used side roads whenever possible – until she reached the moors.

  The air was crisp and brisk out there, and the heather, though clothed in its winter dullness, was still reminiscent of a calm purple sea. A sparrowhawk hovered overhead, vigilantly desperate, and the occasional shrew broke cover as it dashed from one clump of vegetation to another.

  Meadows noticed none of this. She was there for one purpose and one purpose alone.

  She drove off the road and bumped her car over perhaps a hundred yards of rough ground. When she spotted a patch that was heather-free, she drew up beside it and stopped the car. She got out, removed the clothing from the boot of the car, and placed it in the centre of the empty patch. Next, she took a piece of rubber hose out of the boot, stuck one end of it in her fuel tank, and put the other end in her mouth. She sucked, and when she could almost taste the petrol, she took the tube out of her mouth, and held it over the clothes.

  The petrol cascaded out, and landed on the clothes. Only when they were completely drenched did she stop the process.

  She got back into her car, drove it some distance away from the site, and returned again on foot. She took a lighter out of her pocket, and cautiously lit one corner of her bonfire. At first, it merely seemed to smoulder, but then it burst into flames.

  The fire did not last long, and soon all she was left with was a pile of ashes. She picked up a stick and poked the ashes, partly to aid their disintegration, partly to ensure that the fire had left no clues – like a button or a zip – behind. But it had done a good job, and not a trace of anything remained.

  A sudden wind blew up, swept down on the bonfire, and carried what was left of the ashes away in triumph. Now, there was only the scorched earth to show there had ever been a fire there.

  Meadows got into her car again, and drove back to Whitebridge.

  She wondered if she had done enough – and knew that she hadn’t.

  A dozen police officers had converged on the Lofthouse home, but most of them had been dispatched to the upper floor and the grounds, and only two men were left standing in the entrance hall.

  The shorter of the two was DCI Eric Dawson. He was in his early forties and had mousey-coloured hair which he wore off the collar. He had grown a small moustache under his rather pointed nose, but if he had hoped that would make his face memorable, he must have been sadly disappointed. Worry lines creased his forehead, and they were not there merely by chance.

  Dawson surveyed the scene with horror: the rope hanging from a rail which ran along the gallery, with a noose on the end; the body lying close to the noose, which looked vaguely uncomfortable without its head; and the head itself, which had bounced across the floor, only coming to a halt when it bumped against the side of the staircase.

  ‘How the hell did this happen?’ he asked the man who was standing next to him.

  The man in question was tall and gangly, with straw-coloured hair and a face which said it was much younger than his twenty-nine years. His name was DS Daniel Boyd, and the determination that he showed on any case he was assigned had earned him the nickname Dogged Dan.

  ‘How did it happen, sir?’ Boyd repeated. ‘Well, I can only assume that the body weight to drop ratio was all wrong.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean.’

  ‘There’s a mathematical calculation which works out just how far any given body mass has to drop if your intention is to break the man’s neck. If the drop’s too long, as it is here, decapitation can often occur.’

  He didn’t want this case, Dawson told himself, and he had a very good reason for that.

  If the victim had been some local snot rag, the killer would also have been a local snot rag, so while it would have looked good on the records if he’d been caught, nobody would really have given a damn if he hadn’t been. Andrew Lofthouse was different. He was an important man in the community, which meant that he was a man who mattered to the people who mattered.

  ‘The top floor will expect me to serve up the killer’s head on a silver platter,’ he said.

  Damn it! He hadn’t meant to put the thought into words, but it was too late now.

  ‘I didn’t realize how black your humour could be, sir,’ Boyd said, staring down at Lofthouse’s head.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to be funny,’ Dawson replied, angry with himself for saying it, and Boyd for noticing that he’d said it. ‘It wasn’t what I meant at all.’

  If the chief con had been there, he might have acted as a half-hearted ally, he thought, because, when all was said and done, they were both Masons. But the sod wasn’t there, was he? He was basking in the Caribbean sunshine, and instead they’d got Louisa-bloody-Rutter, a woman well-known to be even tougher on herself than she was on everybody else – a paragon who accepted no excuses for failure.

  All of which made this case a bloody nightmare on which to be the chief investigating officer, and there was no way out, unless … unless …

  ‘Do you think there’s any chance this might just be a suicide, sergeant?’ he asked.

  ‘No chance at all, sir,’ Boyd said.

  Bastard!

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ Dawson asked.

  ‘Well, for a start, there’s the fact that victim is naked,’ Boyd said. ‘People don’t normally strip off when they’re about to kill themselves.’

  ‘No, they don’t normally,’ Dawson agreed, grasping at straws. ‘But there have to be some occasions when the normal doesn’t happen.’

  ‘And more importantly, there’s the blood spatter pattern,’ Boyd said.

  ‘What blood spatter pattern?’ Dawson asked. ‘There’s hardly any blood at all.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Boyd agreed. ‘And if he’d been alive when his head came off, his heart would have been spurting blood like the Trevi Fountain.’

  Now why couldn’t I work that out for myself, Dawson wondered.

  And then he realized that of course he could have worked it out if he’d really wanted to, but most of his brain was still clinging to the idea that it just might be possible to get away with calling this a suicide.

  ‘Do you have any theories as to why the killer may have stripped his victim, sir?’ Boyd asked.

  ‘We don’t know that the killer did undress him,’ Dawson said. ‘Maybe he was already undressed when the killer attacked him.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that, sir,’ Boyd admitted.

  ‘So you’re not quite as smart as you thought you were, are you?’ asked Dawson, who had long subscribed to the view that the best form of defence was attack – as long, that was, as the enemy was clearly weakened. ‘Well, are you?’

  ‘No, I …’ Boyd began, reddening.

  ‘So what’s your theory?’ Dawson asked.

  ‘The killer may have realized he’d left DNA traces on Mr Lofthouse’s clothes,’ Boyd said. ‘That would argue some basic knowledge of forensics, so he could be a bobby or an ex-bobby …’

  ‘Or a criminal who’s been caught by his DNA before, or someone who’s seen it in an American film,’ Dawson said.

  His heart was starting to beat faster, and he could feel beads of sweat forming on his brow. He was going to have to treat this as a murder – there was simply no way round it.

  ‘Hey ho, all the usual suspects, I see,’ said a cheery voice from somewhere near the front door.

  Dawson turned around to address the new arrival. ‘Good morning, doc.’

  ‘And a very good morning to you,’ Dr Horlick replied.

  The doctor was a perfect example of unhealthy living. He drank as if he feared a sudden flashing light which would proclaim pub closing time forever, and was almost never seen without a cigarette in his mouth. He was at least five stone overweight, and had the chins to prove it. His idea of exercise was a good long burp, and it was a generally held view among his colleagues that he would be unwise to make any long-term plans. But no one questioned his competence at his job, and it was said he could have been a brilliant surgeon but for his thick, stubby fingers and his tendency to tire easily.

  ‘So where’s the stiff?’ the doctor said.

  ‘There,’ Boyd told him, pointing to the trunk, ‘and there,’ indicating the head.

  ‘Well, that certainly makes a change,’ Horlick said. He walked over to the head, made a token gesture of willingness by bending his knees, then said, ‘You wouldn’t like to pick this up for me, would you, sergeant?’

  ‘Be glad to,’ Boyd lied.

  He’d never actually picked up a detached head before, and he was surprised how heavy it was. He passed it to Horlick, who examined it, then turned it several times, as if it weighed nothing.

  ‘Back of his head’s been bashed in with a blunt instrument,’ he announced. ‘My guess would be a hammer. On first examination, I’d say it was rather a powerful blow. You might find some blood at the spot the blow was delivered, but you might not – most of the bleeding will have been internal.’

  ‘Do you draw any conclusions from the fact that it was a powerful blow?’ Boyd asked.

  Skilfully balancing the head in one hand, Horlick scratched his nose with the index finger of the other.

  ‘Is this your first murder case, sergeant?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Boyd said, looking down at his feet.

  ‘But you haven’t been involved in many, have you?’