"Know what?" said Donna. "What are you talking about?"

"When we found your husband, he wasn't at a convention, unless it was a convention of perverts. He was tied to a hotel bed while a naked young lady had her way with him. Our Winsome here got a front-row seat, didn't you, love?"

"You bastard!" said Daniels. "I'll bloody have you for that."

"Is this true, Geoff? Who was she? That little bitch from the office, the one who can't keep her legs closed?"

Winsome rolled her eyes. "Calm down, everyone," she said. "I'm sorry, you'll just have to deal with this between yourselves later. We have more important things to talk about. And no one implied that your daughter was promiscuous, Mr. Daniels."

"She was innocent," Daniels said. "Innocent. A victim. Do you both get that?"

Winsome nodded, but she could see that Templeton was rallying for another attack. Not a good sign. "Of course," Templeton began. "And I'm sorry if I implied in any way that your late daughter was the town bicycle. That wasn't my intention. The point is that it has come to our attention that she might have had a secret boyfriend. We were wondering if you could shed any light on this."

"What boyfriend? Who said that?" said Daniels.

"It doesn't matter who said it," Templeton replied. "Is it true?"

"How would we know?" said Donna, still glaring at her husband. "If she kept it secret."

"What do you think?" Templeton asked. "Were there any signs, any unexplained absences, any occasions she wouldn't say where she was going, any nights she didn't come home?"

"She sometimes stayed with friends from college if she went into Eastvale for a night out."

"I know," said Templeton. "She didn't want to drive because she set out to get paralytic. Do you know that people can lose all sense of judgment when they're that pissed?"

"I don't think Hayley drank that much," said Donna. "She was just having fun with her mates."

"Come off it," said Templeton. "She was so bladdered on Saturday she went off into the Maze alone for a piss. You can't tell me that's using good judgment."

Donna started sobbing and Daniels lurched forward to make a grab for Templeton's jacket collar, shouting, "How can you talk about our daughter like that, you filthy heartless bastard?"

"Gerroff!" said Templeton, pushing him away and straightening his jacket.

Wonderful, thought Winsome, regretting that Daniels hadn't managed to land a good punch, another shambles of a Templeton interview. How on earth did such an insensitive pillock make sergeant in this day and age? She stepped into the breach. "Let's all calm down. DS Templeton might not always be diplomatic in his approach, but he has raised some serious questions, and any answers you give may help us catch Hayley's killer. Do either of you know anything about a boyfriend?"

They both shook their heads, Daniels glaring at Templeton the whole time and Donna looking as if she was ready to kill both of them.

"Well, somebody must know something," Templeton said. "Surely you didn't just let her run wild and do whatever she wanted?"

"She was nineteen, Mr. Templeton," said Donna. "You can't control a nineteen-year-old?"

"Did she never let anything slip?" Winsome asked. "Or didn't you notice any signs, woman to woman?"

"You're making me feel guilty now," Donna said, reaching for a tissue. "You're saying I should have paid more attention and it might not have happened."

"That's not true," Winsome said. "You shouldn't blame yourself. There's only one person responsible for what happened to Hayley, and that's the killer."

"But maybe if I'd just...I don't know...been there."

"Did you know she carried condoms in her handbag?" Templeton asked.

"No, I didn't," said Donna. "I never went through Hayley's handbag."

Daniels glanced over at Templeton in disgust.

"Does it surprise you?" Templeton asked.

"No," said Donna. "She knew if she was going to do anything she had to be careful. They all do these days."

"If she kept the boyfriend a secret," Winsome said, "we're wondering what the reason is. Perhaps he was an older man? Perhaps he was married?"

"I still can't tell you anything," said Donna.

Templeton turned to Daniels. "You've had some experience in that department, haven't you?" he said. "Shagging Martina Redfern while Hayley was getting herself killed? Like them young, do you? Maybe it's you we should be looking at a lot more closely."

If he expected to get a further rise out of Daniels, Winsome thought, he'd lost that one. Daniels sat there, spent and miserable. "I've made my mistakes," he said. "Plenty of them. And I only hope Donna can find it in her heart to forgive me. But my mistakes aren't going to help you catch my daughter's killer. Now, if you can't do anything except sit there and try to stir things up, why don't you just get up off your arse and start doing your job?"

"We are trying to do our jobs, sir," Winsome said, surprising herself that she was coming to Templeton's defence. But to defend the interview, she had to defend Templeton. She vowed she would never let anyone put her in this position again, no matter what they said. "Did she ever talk about any of her lecturers at college, for example?" she asked.

"Sometimes," said Donna. "But I didn't know them, so it never meant much to me."

"Was there any one in particular?"

"Austin," said Daniels suddenly. "Malcolm Austin. Remember, Donna, that bloke that led the class trip to Paris last April?"

"Yes," said Donna. "She mentioned him a few times. But that was her favourite class. I don't think there was...I mean..."

"Have you met him?" Winsome asked.

"No," said Donna. "We haven't met any of them. When she was at school we met her teachers, like, but when they're at college, I mean, you don't, do you?"

"So you don't know how old he is, whether he's married or anything?"

"Sorry," said Donna. "Can't help you there. You asked if she ever mentioned anyone and that was the only one."

"Romantic city, Paris," said Templeton, buffing his fingernails on his thigh the way a cricketer rubs the ball.

Winsome got to her feet. "Well, thanks," she said. "It's a start. We'll have a word with Mr. Austin."

Templeton remained seated, and his lack of movement was making Winsome nervous. She knew that he outranked her, so he should be the one to give the signal to leave, but she was so intent on damage control and getting out of there that she hadn't really thought about that. Finally, he stood up slowly, gave Daniels a long, lingering look and said, "We'll be talking to you again soon, mate." Then he took out his card and pointedly handed it to Donna, who was contemplating her husband as a matador contemplates a bull. "If you think of anything else, love," Templeton said, "don't hesitate to ring me, day or night."

When they got outside to the car, he grabbed Winsome's arm and leaned so close to her that she could smell the spearmint chewing gum on his breath and said, "Don't you ever do that to me again."

"There won't be any again," Winsome said, surprised at her own vehemence. Then she jerked her arm free and surprised herself even more by saying, "And take your fucking hands off me. Sir."

Banks was glad to get home at a reasonable hour on Tuesday, though he was still preoccupied with what Annie had told him about Lucy Payne's murder. He had watched Brough's Eastern Area press conference in the station that afternoon, and now Lucy Payne and the murders at 35 The Hill, or the House of Payne, as one newspaper had dubbed it at the time, were all over the news again.

Banks put Maria Muldaur's Heart of Mine on the CD player and peered out of his front window as he tried to decide whether to warm up the lamb korma or try another Marks and Spencer's chicken Kiev. Maria was singing Dylan's "Buckets of Rain," but the weather had improved considerably. The sun was going down and streaks of vermilion, magenta and crimson shot through the western sky, casting light on the fast-flowing Gratly Beck, so that at moments it seemed like a dark, swirling oil slick. Next weekend they would be putting the clocks ahead, and it would be light until late in the evening.

In the end, he made himself a ham-and-cheese sandwich and poured a glass of Peter Lehmann Shiraz. The main sound system was in the extension, along with the plasma TV, but he had set up speakers in the kitchen and in the front room, where he would sometimes sit and read or work on the computer. The couch was comfortable, the shaded lamps cozy, and the peat fire useful on cool winter evenings. He didn't need it tonight, but he decided to eat his dinner in there anyway and read the notes he had brought home with him from the office. He had got both Ken Blackstone and Phil Hartnell to agree to a meeting in Leeds the following morning. Annie was staying over at her cottage in Harkside that night, and he was due to pick her up there at half past nine in the morning. But before that, he needed to do his homework.

In a way, though, he already knew his subject. He didn't have to read the files to know their names: Kimberley Myers, aged fifteen, failed to return home from a school dance one Friday night; Kelly Diane Matthews, aged seventeen, went missing during a New Year's Eve party in Roundhay Park, Leeds; Samantha Jane Foster, eighteen years old, disappeared on her way home from a poetry reading at a pub near the University of Bradford; Leanne Wray, sixteen, vanished on a ten-minute walk between a pub and her parents' house in Eastvale; Melissa Horrocks, seventeen, failed to return home from a pop concert in Harrogate. Five young girls, all victims of Terence Payne (who came to be called the Chameleon) and, many people believed, also of his wife, Lucy Payne (who later became the notorious Friend of the Devil).

Two police officers on routine patrol had been called to the Payne house in west Leeds after a neighbour reported hearing sounds of an argument. There they found Lucy Payne unconscious in the hall, the apparent victim of an attack by her husband. In the cellar, Terence Payne had set upon the officers with a machete and killed PC Dennis Morrisey. Morrisey's partner, PC Janet Taylor, had managed to get in several blows with her nightstick, and she didn't stop hitting Terence Payne until he was no longer moving, no longer a threat. He subsequently died of his injuries.

Banks was called to the cellar, where the local police had found the body of Kimberley Myers bound naked and dead on a mattress surrounded by candles, her body slashed around the breasts and genitals. The other girls were found dismembered and buried in the next room, and post-mortems discovered them to have been similarly tortured. What Banks remembered most, apart from the smell, was the way their toes stuck up through the earth like tiny mushrooms. Sometimes he had nightmares about that time he had spent in the cellar at 35 The Hill.

He thought about his conversation with Annie that afternoon and decided that he had definitely been on the defensive. He remembered Lucy Payne best as she was the first time he had seen her in her hospital bed, when she hadn't been quite as beautiful as some of the photographs the newspapers printed. Half her face had been covered in bandages, her long hair had been spread out like a raven's wing on the pillow under her head, and the one good eye that stared at him with unnerving directness was as black as her hair.

Naturally, she had denied any involvement in or knowledge of her husband's crimes. When Banks had talked to her, he had sensed her striding always one step ahead, or aside, anticipating the questions, preparing her answers and the requisite emotions of regret and pain, but never of guilt. She had been, by turns, vulnerable or brazen, victim or willing sexual deviant. Her history, when it came out, recounted a childhood of unimaginable horrors in a remote coastal house, where the children of two families had been subjected to ritual sexual abuse by their parents until the social workers pounced one day amid rumours of Satanic rites.

Banks got up and poured another glass of wine. It was going down far too well. As he drank, he thought of the people he had encountered during the Chameleon investigation, from the parents of the victims to neighbours and schoolfriends of some of the girls. There was even a teacher who had come briefly under suspicion, a friend of Payne's called Geoffrey Brighouse. It was a large cast, but at least it would give Annie and her team somewhere to start.

Thinking of the Paynes' victims, Banks's mind drifted to Hayley Daniels. He couldn't let this new case of Annie's interfere with the investigation. He owed Hayley that much. With any luck, by the time he got back from Leeds tomorrow, some of the lab results would have started to trickle in, and between them, Wilson and Templeton would have talked to most of the friends Hayley was with on Saturday night and interviewed the possible boyfriend, Malcolm Austin.

Banks knew he had made a mistake in putting Winsome and Templeton together on the Daniels-McCarthy interview. He could tell from the atmosphere when the two returned to the station that it hadn't gone well. Neither would talk to him about it, he knew, though he sensed there was obviously more than Templeton's overactive libido behind it.

The problem was that Banks knew he had been right in what he told Annie: Templeton could be a good copper, and sometimes what made him one was his brusqueness and his disregard of the rules of common decency. But he also knew that when he had had to rethink whether there was room for someone like Templeton on the team, especially with Winsome progressing so well, he had decided that there wasn't. The transfer, then, was a good idea.

Banks tried to clear Lucy Payne and Hayley Daniels out of his mind. Maria Muldaur came to the end of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," so he went to put on a new CD. He decided on the Bill Evans Half Moon Bay concert, one he had always wished he had attended. After Evans introduced his bass player and drummer came the delightful "Waltz for Debby." It was still early, and Banks decided to spend the rest of the evening at home listening to the jazz collection that he was slowly rebuilding and reading Postwar. He was deeply into the Cold War and "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" by the time he noticed that his glass was empty for the second time.

It seemed like ages since Annie had been to a restaurant in Eastvale, and she was glad that she had accepted Winsome's invitation, even though she knew it wouldn't be an entirely work-free evening. The Italian place they had picked above the shops built onto the back of the church in the market square was excellent: plenty of vegetarian choices and decent cheap plonk. She tucked into her pasta primavera and second glass of Chiantifeeling just a little guilty, but not too much, for not lasting longer on the wagonwhile Winsome ate cannelloni and went full speed ahead in her verbal assault on Templeton.

"So you told him what you thought?" Annie said, the first opening she got.

"I told him."

"And what did he say?"

"Nothing. Not a word. I think he was so shocked that I swore at him. I mean, I was so shocked I swore at him. I never swear." She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. Annie laughed with her.

"Don't worry," Annie said. "Insults are like water off a duck's back with Templeton. He'll be back to normal tomorrow, or what passes for normal in his case."

"I'm not sure I want that," said Winsome. "Really. I mean it this time. One of us has to go. I can't work with him again, watch the way he tramples all over people's feelings. I don't know if I can wait for his transfer to come through."

"Look," said Annie, "nobody ever said being a copper was easy. Sometimes you have to play dirty, tough it out. Be patient and hang in there."

"I can't believe you're doing this," Winsome said. "You're defending him."

"I'm not bloody defending him," said Annie. "I'm just trying to tell you that if you want to survive in this job you have to toughen up, that's all."

"You don't think I'm strong enough?"

"You need to develop a thicker skin."

"You don't think black skin is thicker than white?"

"What?" said Annie.

"You heard me. How do you think I deal with all the innuendos and outright insults? People either look down on you, or they go out of their way to pretend they don't notice your colour, that you're really just like anybody else, but they end up talking to you like they talk to children. I don't know which is worse. Do you know what it's like to have someone stare at you or insult you like some sort of lesser being, an animal, just because of the colour of your skin? Like Hayley Daniels's father, or those old men on the bridge at Swainshead."

"I don't know about Hayley Daniels's father," said Annie, "but those old men don't know any better. I know it's no excuse, but they don't. And I might not know how it feels to have people look at me that way because of the colour of my skin, but I do know how it feels when they treat me like a lesser species because I'm a woman."

"Then double it!" said Winsome.

Annie looked at her, and they both started laughing so loudly an elderly couple sitting nearby frowned at them. "Oh, what the hell," said Annie, raising her glass. "Here's to kicking against the pricks."

They clinked glasses. Annie's mobile rang and she pulled it out of her handbag. "Yes?"

"Annie? It's Eric."

"Eric. What the hell do you want?"

"That's not very nice."

"I told you not to ring me on my mobile. I'm having dinner with a colleague."

"Male or female?"

"That's none of your bloody business."

"Okay. Okay. Sorry. Just asking. Look, I was thinking about you, and I thought, Why wait till Thursday? You're obviously busy tonight, but what about tomorrow? Wednesday. Lunch?"

"I have to go to Leeds tomorrow," Annie said, wondering why she was even bothering to tell Eric this. "And I told you I'm not coming on Thursday."

"Thursday it is, then," said Eric. "Sorry to bother you." And he ended the call.

Annie shoved her mobile back in her handbag.

"Something wrong?" asked Winsome.

Annie ground her teeth, then took a deep breath and a swallow of wine. She looked at Winsome, weighed up the pros and cons and said, "Yes, I think there is. With me. Let's order another bottle of wine and I'll tell you all the sordid details."

The waitress came with the Chianti. Winsome finished her cannelloni and rested her elbows on the table. Annie poured them both a generous glass.

"Come on, then," Winsome said. "Do tell."

"It's nothing, really," Annie said, feeling embarrassed and awkward now the time had come.

"You seemed annoyed enough on the phone. Who was it?"

"It's just...well, you know, the other night, Saturday night, I went out on the town with some friends." She touched her hair and laughed. "As much as you can go out on the town in a place like Whitby."

"What happened?"

"Well, I met this bloke and...one thing led to another. I had way too much to drink and we smoked a couple of joints and to cut a long story short, the next morning I woke up in his bed."

"You did what?"