'I think she plays with your sister, doesn't she, Harry?' Jo pursued.

'Yeah. Most days.'

'I wonder what happened to her father.' When neither boy responded, Jo put it more directly. 'Has she ever mentioned what happened to him?'

'He was killed in a car accident,' Harry volunteered. 'Or maybe a plane crash.'

'Why are you so interested in her anyway?' asked Sean.

'Oh no reason. Just making conversation. Her mother came here just now, delivering leaflets.'

'Then why didn't you ask her?'

By the time Marcus returned next day, she had fabricated a story about the car close enough to the truth, but altering the time of the accident by several hours, and saying nothing about her real reason for being in the vicinity.

'That's a nasty bend above the ferry,' was his only comment. 'It's lucky there was no one close behind, or they might have gone into the back of you.'

A little later he asked, 'You haven't been to the doctor, have you?'

'No. What for?'

'I thought, you know, maybe you had hurt yourself when the car went into the wall.'

'No, I was fine. The only damage was to the car.'

'You haven't been to see him about your nerves? He hasn't given you to take?'

'No. Now what are you saying? That you think I went into the wall because I'm on something?'

'Of course not.' He laughed and quickly turned his attention to the TV guide, remarking a moment or two later that BBC4 were showing a doc.u.mentary about elephants that evening. 'It sounds interesting,' he said. 'I think I'd like to have a look at it.' In fact he had been wondering if she was on something. Her eyes seemed unusually bright, and she was so restless, scarcely able to sit still. Maybe it was just that she needed to be on something. The situation was getting away from him. At one time Jo would have accepted his advice without question: he had been mentor, lover, friend. But looking back, he could see now that he had only been in the driving seat because she had been a willing pa.s.senger. Now it was not just that she was travelling separately; they weren't even going in the same direction any more. Sooner or later there was going to be a collision.

He scarcely liked to admit to himself how glad he was that Sean was going to stay with his ex-wife for a few days. He was very conscious that Sean was uncomfortable with Jo's increasingly erratic behaviour, and it troubled him that, having agreed to take Sean on with the best of intentions, he might have let his boy down. There never seemed to be enough time to get to know him properly, particularly now that he, Marcus, was away more often than he was at home. In a real partnership these absences would not matter. Twelve months ago he had been encouraged by Jo's a.s.sertions that she welcomed the arrival of his son, and would do her best to make a good home for him, but the reality was that her relationship with Sean had never progressed much beyond the uneasy provision of meals and a laundry service. Marcus was forced to acknowledge to himself that it might have been better for Sean in the long run if, rather than actively encouraging him to come and live up here, he had persuaded him to try and make a go of it with his mother, stepfather and the new baby. Had he encouraged Sean for selfish reasons? Of course he had wanted to spend more time with him, to do the lads-and-dads things which his divorce had mostly denied them. But could it also have been to score a point against the ex-wife, who had hurt him and yet managed to keep their child?

He half wondered whether losing Sean to his first wife, while nothing like so traumatic or painful as the loss which Jo had sustained, had been among the factors which forged the original bond between them. Maybe his getting Sean back a resolution which, if he was being realistic, was never going to happen for her with Lauren had helped to fuel her breakdown. Breakdown: the word which so accurately described the condition towards which both Jo's mental state and their own relationship was teetering.

Without the tours and heaven knows, she couldn't be trusted with them at the moment he was aware that she had very little in her life. He tried to suggest things she could do, because he knew that she was in perpetual need of distraction from the tragedy she carried with her every day, but at the moment there seemed to be nothing much she was prepared to interest herself in apart from perhaps her drawing. His eye fell on her sketch book, which had been left lying on a chair near the sitting-room door. She never liked him to look at her work, but since she was out of the room for a moment, it could not do any harm. He reached across and began to flick through the book.

Jo's offer to make some coffee had been motivated by an urgent need to escape from the sitting room, where she had been finding it almost impossible to concentrate on what Marcus was saying. Why had there been no one to meet her at Claife Station? Had she failed in some way? Or maybe she was looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe she had pa.s.sed the test: after all, she had made it to the rendezvous alone, without telling anyone. The abductor would not want to risk capture by the police, so perhaps the idea had been to see if she would follow instructions to the letter. Claife Station might be just the first of many tests. Only when trust had been established could a real meeting be set up and Lauren handed over.

Or it could have been a cruel, pointless hoax? That had always been the line taken by the Marcus and the police. But why send someone on a wild goose chase, unless you intended to be there to spring a nasty surprise at their destination? How would you even have the satisfaction of knowing whether or not the target had taken the bait ... unless you watched them leave and waited up to see them return home?

As she poured hot water into the cafetiere, she saw in her mind's eye the light glowing above the door of The Old Forge. Gilda certainly could not have followed her, then got back to Easter Bridge before she did without being seen; but she would not have needed to. She could have sat comfortably inside The Old Forge, observing Jo's departure and return. She tried to recall exactly what Gilda had said: 'I was just drawing my bedroom curtains when I saw your car turning on to the drive. I wonder where Jo has been at this time of night, I said to myself.' Was there something wrong with that statement? How had she known who was in the car? No there was no mileage in that. Gilda had been living in Easter Bridge long enough to differentiate her car from Marcus's.

She put the cafetiere, milk jug and two mugs on a tray, then carried them through to the sitting room while artlessly humming a tune, trying to frame a smile as she entered the room. It died instantly on her lips when she saw the look on Marcus's face and what he had in his hands. The sketch book was open and his face was almost as white as its pages. She stopped dead, a pace into the room.

'What the h.e.l.l is this?'

Jo could feel the tray shaking in her hands. The mugs c.h.i.n.ked like chattering teeth as she walked across and placed her burden unsteadily on the coffee table.

'Why are you looking at my drawings?'

'Is there any reason why I shouldn't? I wasn't aware that they were really a secret not until now, anyway.'

'Those should have been rubbed out. I should have got rid of them ages ago, put them in the fire.'

Marcus's voice was taut. 'It's Melissa, isn't it?'

'No. It isn't meant to be.'

'Come off it, Jo. They don't just look like her, you've even drawn in her b.l.o.o.d.y necklace the one with the "M" on it.'

Jo was unable to say anything. She sank into a chair before her legs gave way on her.

Marcus glanced down again, sparing the page only the briefest moment of attention, as if he could scarcely bear to let his eyes linger on it. 'I had no idea,' he said, slowly. 'I didn't imagine you were capable of this kind of of stuff.'

In a moment of madness she half considered saying, 'No, they're pretty amazing, aren't they? I didn't think I could achieve such a good likeness, but maybe portraiture's my thing.' She knew it was not funny.

'This is sick.' He stood up and strode across the room, shoving the book in front of her face. 'Look at this one it's bordering on p.o.r.n, s.a.d.i.s.tic p.o.r.n.'

She tried to draw back, but he shoved the book closer to her face, then abruptly withdrew it and flung it across the room. Jo gave a wail of distress as it landed at an angle against the book case, its pages crushed and askew.

'Are those the only drawings like that, or are there others somewhere, showing what tortures you imagine subjecting the rest of us to?'

'It isn't like that ...'

'Are there any more?' Marcus thundered.

'No.' Jo cowered back in the chair. Marcus hardly ever really lost his temper. He had never spoken to her like this before. 'There are no others. I didn't draw them deliberately.'

'You don't draw something by accident. They don't just appear in the book by themselves.'

'But they do. That's the thing. They're like doodles the sort of thing your pen does when you're on the phone and you're not thinking.'

'Don't be so b.l.o.o.d.y ridiculous.'

'I'm not. Everyone doodles. You do it.'

'No one doodles like that. No one who's this side of the gates of Broadmoor, anyway.'

'Marcus, you must believe me. I did them without thinking. I didn't sit down and draw them on purpose. I don't really think about Melissa in that way. I'm not even agreeing that they are of Melissa they're just doodles.'

'Of a woman who is being tortured or murdered.'

'I didn't do them on purpose.' Her voice had sunk to a whisper.

He returned to his chair, sat down, drew in a long breath, then said more calmly, 'OK, if it isn't a deliberate, conscious thing, then it must be something that's going on in your subconscious mind am I right?'

'I'll get rid of them,' she began. 'I'll do it now. We can light a fire and burn them, if you like. If I had only destroyed them, when I first saw them ...'

'Then I wouldn't have seen them. But I have seen them, and you have seen them, and we both know that this is not something a normal person ' he corrected himself quickly, 'an untroubled person would have done. If these are the kinds of images in your subconscious, then you need '

'No, Marcus! Don't start all that. I am not going to see any d.a.m.n psychiatrists or ' She stopped short, catching sight of Sean standing in the doorway.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I think there's a problem with the broadband. Can you come and have a look, Dad?'

'Of course.' Marcus collected himself and rose from his chair.

'It could wait until later,' Sean said; but Marcus was all for attending to it there and then. As he crossed the room he scooped up the sketch book in a swift movement, ignoring the crushed pages as he compressed it closed under his arm and carried it from the room.

Jo watched him go without a word, her possessions confiscated like a child found reading an unsuitable book in cla.s.s, and instinctively knowing that the volume will never be restored to her. Marcus no doubt intended to keep it, she thought. Not destroying, but rather preserving the page of tormented Melissa lookalikes, to use as evidence against her in the future.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

The three days before Marcus left to take charge of Battlefields of York and Lancaster was an uneasy period of silences and rows, all of them turning on the question of the disputed sketches.

'I want my drawings back,' she demanded.

'That's not possible, I'm afraid.'

'But it's my book.'

'You can buy another one.'

'I want that one.'

'Agree to come and see the doctor and we'll see what he says about it.'

'No. I don't need to see a doctor.'

She tried hunting for the book, but he had either found a very good hiding place or else taken it off the premises altogether.

'You didn't take my book into the office, did you, when you went to Kirkby Lonsdale, yesterday?'

'No.'

'You haven't shown the drawings to Melissa?'

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'Then what have you done with them?'

'Make an appointment with the doctor.'

She did not buy another drawing book. It was mostly too wet for sketching outdoors, anyway the worst summer anyone could remember in years. Damp, miserable days slid one into another. The garden dripped, perpetually damp underfoot, with any short-lived blooms starved of sunshine and battered by wind and rain. The view from the kitchen window was like a watercolour done in greens and browns, which had run to deleterious effect.

Sean's week with his mother turned into a fortnight, after which Marcus took the unprecedented step of taking Sean with him on one of the tours. Jo tried not to think that he was frightened to leave Sean alone with her.

In spite of having plenty of time on her hands, it was hard to get anything done. Emails from Nerys sat on the machine for days, awaiting her reply. What was there to say?

Every day she waited for another sign a postcard bearing fresh instructions, another seash.e.l.l, anything to indicate that the abductor was still in contact but nothing came. Thin strands of gra.s.s crept up between the stones which formed her message of compliance on the lawn, and since it was impossible to mow around the edges, the letters began to look untidy. By the end of August b.u.t.tercups and cranesbill had woven insidious patterns across the stones, transforming their positive message into no more than an overgrown rockery.

Whenever Marcus came home she expected him to start harping on about the doctor again, and although he did not often raise the issue directly, she knew it was continually in his mind. They were mutually watchful. She was aware of his scrutiny, and felt that he was forever on the lookout for signs of instability, storing up a lot of little clues to use against her, yet more leverage with which to persuade her that she needed professional help. One morning when they were both in the office, she rummaged in a drawer to find a highlighter pen and came up with a pack of blank white postcards she had not known were there. It was one of those forgotten stationery purchases, like the bundle of coloured treasury tags which were never used for anything but no one ever got round to throwing away; except that when she looked up she saw that Marcus was watching her, and knew what he was thinking. The cards were burning her fingers, but she did not know what to do with them returning them to the drawer or consigning them to the bin both seemed suspect. At one time, she might have said, 'What on earth did we buy these for?' but now the words remained unuttered. The last thing she wanted to do was invite comment, give him an opening.

The constant sense of being under observation made her nervous, so that she forgot things, became confused, lost her thread in the middle of sentences, offered him only garbled accounts of what she had been doing with her time.

There was a lot she did not tell him now. She had returned several times to Claife Station, half hoping that a visit by daylight might provide a clue. She wondered if Lauren had ever been there. Certainly the abductor must know the place, otherwise why choose it? The abductor must be somewhere near which meant that Lauren was too. She changed the bedding in the spare room regularly and replenished the flowers. Soon Lauren would be coming home. That would change everything. Then she would show Marcus that she could be a real mother. She would be vindicated, and they could remake themselves into a real family. There would be fun and laughter in their lives again.

September finally brought another postcard. Jo had been surrept.i.tiously lying in wait for the postman as usual, and seized on the card almost as soon as it hit the mat, clutching it to her chest and hurriedly retreating upstairs, so that Marcus, who happened to be at home that day, would be unaware of its arrival. She did not turn it over to read the message until she was safely behind the closed bedroom door. I still have her.

'No, no.' She wanted to beat her fists against the door. This was going backwards. It was hopeless. She had to take a few minutes to compose herself. Marcus must not find out about the postcard. At least it was some form of contact to hold on to. Maybe it was meant to rea.s.sure her, and presaged something more positive to arrive soon.

'Why?' she whispered. 'Why are you torturing me? Why won't you just give her back?'

When she returned downstairs, she felt Marcus watching her. Where once his glance might have been admiring, now he was just keeping her under surveillance. He loved me so much, she thought, and I loved him as much as I could give. But now we just circle around one another. Both our lives have become about something else.

When Marcus and Sean were not there, her footsteps seemed to echo more loudly around the house. It reminded her of walking through rooms stripped of their furniture and ready for the decorators. The house had acquired that same hollow chill she a.s.sociated with curtainless windows and bared floorboards. Everything in The Hideaway was still in its place, but it had faded, become insubstantial. She waited for the postman to arrive each day, then drove somewhere to escape the emptiness of her disappointment. She no longer began and ended her walks in Easter Bridge, since that opened up the possibility of having to stop and speak with neighbours. Often she just drove to a lay-by or a car park, where she sat watching people come and go, killing time until she felt obliged to return to the empty house, where the tune of 'The Laughing Policeman' sometimes crept into her head, as if it were being sung by some unseen maniac in another room.

Sh.e.l.ley's books on the Pre-Raphaelites sat reproachfully on a chair in the hall. She had neither read them nor returned them. Sh.e.l.ley came to the house and rang the doorbell once, but Jo had seen her coming and hid in the office until she had gone. Groups came to stay in the old farmhouse for a week or a fortnight, but the weather kept all but the hardiest of them indoors. There were no incursions into the garden of The Hideaway, by dogs, Frisbees or nosey temporary neighbours exercising their 'right to roam'. The stinky barbecue sat unused, dripping in the rain.

She occasionally saw the inhabitants of The Old Forge from a distance, usually pa.s.sing in their car, occasionally out on foot. Once Rebecca had gone back to school, Gilda Iceton appeared to be as solitary as she was herself. Gilda, who had never managed to make any friends at school, ever the loner, footling about on her own, just as she appeared to be now. She had stood by while the other kids taunted Gilda for her differences, but maybe she and Gilda had not been so different as she had liked to believe. Maybe the real difference had been that Gilda would not sell her soul in exchange for cheap popularity. She had joined in when the others laughed at Gilda and mocked her for being 'touched' and 'soft in the head', although Gilda was clearly neither. Now it was not Gilda but herself whose faculties were being called into question a sort of ironic justice, if you like. It had always been there, of course. Like mother, like daughter. If your mother is crazy, why not you? Bad blood. It didn't always follow, of course. Insanity did not have to run in families. No, said a voice in her head. It doesn't need to run; it just creeps and crawls, but it gets there in the end.

Jo tried to retreat from the memories of what they had put Gilda through the name-calling, and worse. There were so many things she did not want to remember and some she could not. Ever since the day of Aunty Joan's funeral, she had been forced to question the reliability of her own recall. What was truth and what was fiction? If she had been incorrect about her father's death, then maybe other mistakes had crept into the transcript of her life. Lately she had taken to waking suddenly in the early hours, desperately trying to remember something to do with Lauren's disappearance. Something significant that she had noticed that day. Something important that had been overlooked.

The transition from summer to autumn occurred without any noticeable change in the level of precipitation. Green leaves which had been shiny with water for weeks and weeks lost their colour, faded and fell sodden to the ground. With Harry and Charlotte long since departed for Heswall, and Rebecca Iceton gone back to her boarding school, Sean was again the only person in Easter Bridge who was not old enough to vote. He continued to tread warily around his stepmother, who seemed ever more withdrawn. She had developed a habit of occupying a particular chair in the sitting room, maintaining the same position for up to an hour or more in an att.i.tude of concentration, her eyes focused on a patch of carpet just beyond her feet. The first time he saw her like that he a.s.sumed she must be watching something a woodlouse or a spider, perhaps. But in the weeks that followed, he encountered her sitting in the same position again and again. In spite of his better judgement, his curiosity was aroused.

One evening when supper was long over and his father was away as usual, Sean had ventured downstairs to organize a snack. On his way back to his room, he paused in the doorway of the sitting room and stood watching her. He had been there for about a minute before she became aware of him and looked up.

'Sorry. I didn't mean to distract you if you were meditating or something.'

'I was sort of meditating but it's OK.'

'I didn't mean to disturb you.' He edged away into the hall.

'It's OK,' she repeated. 'Did you want something?'

'No. I just thought it was a bit funny, you sitting there like that. I wondered if you were ill.'

'It's OK,' she said again. 'I was trying to remember something, that's all. It's a technique I read about on the internet.' She would have elaborated, but Sean was already moving further in the direction of the stairs.

'Whatever,' he said.

Jo shrugged. A few months ago she might have been elated at the hint of a breakthrough Sean pausing to see if she was OK but now it hardly seemed to matter. She resumed her position. The trick was to be comfortable, relaxed but not overly so to keep your eyes open, but try not to concentrate too hard on what was in front of you, leaving the way open for internal visualizations was what the instructions said, the idea being that you reconfigure the scene, detail by detail, until what you were seeing then, you are seeing in the here and now. It was called The Doctor Heinsel Method. According to Dr Heinsel, everything you had ever seen or experienced was locked away in your mind, so that if you only went about it the right way you could remember everywhere you had ever been and everything that had ever happened to you or at least, some people could. Dr Heinsel claimed that with appropriate training, everyone had the capacity to do this, providing they were prepared to put enough time into achieving what he called Dynamic Cognitive Memory State.