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children? Or would she simply have repeated what the tabloids were telling her, and what most people in the country appeared to believe, namely that the woman was inhuman, evil, a monster?
    In the autumn of 1999, Billy had spent some time in a newspaper library, reading up about the murders, and one story in particular had stayed with him. When the woman was a girl of fifteen, she’d been friends with a boy two years her junior. He was delicate, apparently, and she’d taken it upon herself to protect him. One day he asked her if she would come swimming. She told him she couldn’t. That afternoon he went up to the local reservoir on his own and drowned. For weeks afterwards, she was inconsolable. She wore nothing but black. The boy had always been a weak swimmer, and yet she had refused to go with him. She was to blame for his death. She couldn’t forgive herself. Some people said it was then that she first turned to the Catholic Church. There are moments in your life when something’s taken from you, and once you’ve lost it you don’t get it back. What you were before is neither here nor there. You’re different now.
    Billy didn’t pretend to be an expert—what did he know, really, except for what he had picked up on the streets?—but he couldn’t help wondering whether that boy’s death by drowning wasn’t a defining moment, a kind of turning-point. Supposing somewhere deep down in her there was the feeling that she had killed, and not a stranger either, but somebody who was dear to her, somebody who had—and this detail always sent a shiver through him—
the same initials as she did?
If that was the case, if that was how she had felt, did the psychopath from Glasgow see that abyss in her, that bottomless pit, the belief that she had nothing left to lose? Could that be what had attracted him? She’d done it once. She could do it again. What difference would it make? She was already guilty. And having more experience than he did, she could even, maybe, guide him, show him the way…It wasn’t an apology or an excuse. It might just be a fact, though. And that eerie coincidence with the initials…When the boy died in the reservoir, did part of her die with him?

10
    The image of Baines, the young porter, lingered—his gelled hair, his slouch, his barely concealed sneer.
Like your job, do you?
There were certain people who couldn’t resist having a go at you, and though Billy was used to it—after twenty-three years, how could he not be?—he was closer to losing control these days than at any other stage in his career. But he was acutely conscious of what had happened to his friend, Neil Batty. A couple of years ago, Neil had beaten a suspect so badly that the man had ended up in hospital, and in spite of an exemplary record, Neil had been thrown out of the force. Billy couldn’t help but sympathise. There had been moments when he, too, had been tempted: a Friday night in the mid-nineties, for instance.
    He had come home from work to find an unfamiliar car parked outside his house. It was exactly the sort of car that Sue’s stepfather, Tony, would put on his showroom forecourt—long, sleek, unnecessarily fast. But as Billy pulled up behind it he saw a chauffeur behind the wheel—he could make out the shape of a peaked cap above the head-rest—and, knowing only one man who’d be likely to have a chauffeur, he almost drove away again. At that moment, Newman came round the side of the house and moved languidly across the pavement. He was wearing a dark-blue suit and light-brown shoes, and his hands were in his pockets. His face was tanned. In the seven years that had passed since their first and only encounter, Newman didn’t appear to have aged at all.
    Billy slowly opened his car door and got out.
    “Still a constable, I see,” Newman said.
    Billy locked the door, then straightened up.
    Newman was standing on the narrow strip of grass next to the kerb, hands still in his pockets. “Failed our