The Peter James Collection

by Peter James

Genres: Horror; High-tech & Sci-fi Thrillers

Synopsis

THREE PETER JAMES TITLES IN ONE! Twilight Three muffled thuds ring from the partially filled grave of the newly wed girl. Only the verger hears them and he dismisses the noise as his imagination. But when an exhumation order is granted, reporter Kate Hemingway sneaks into the small suburban churchyard when the coffin is opened, and the scene she witnesses is so horrific she can never forget it. As she starts work on the story, Kate finds herself caught up in a sinister and macabre cover-up. Denial Introducing policeman Glenn Branson... When actress Gloria Lamark takes her own life, her devoted son, Thomas, is heart-broken. Something must be wrong with a world in which such a tragedy is allowed to happen. How could her high-profile, media-star psychiatrist have failed to save such a special person, whom Thomas loved in such a very special way? Dr Tennent has a lesson to learn - a very painful one. Michael Tennent is caught up in the first flush of love - but has no idea how dangerous romance can be. For both Michael and Thomas will do anything for the women they love . Sweetheart Charley has a strange feeling when she sees the idyllic mill house; a powerful sense of recognition, as if she has been there before. Except she knows she hasn't. After Charley and her husband Tom move into Elmwood Mill, sinister memories of a previous existence start to haunt her. Despite both their attempts to dismiss everything with rational explanations, the feeling turns to certainty as the memories become increasingly vivid and terrifying.

Release date: May 28, 2020

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 1213

Sample

Tuesday, 16 October 1990

The first hint came less than an hour after the funeral cortège left the small cemetery behind the church. Three muffled thuds from the partially filled-in grave. It was the verger who heard them, although one of the pall-bearers would admit later that he thought something had moved inside the coffin, but had not wanted to make a fool of himself by saying so.

The verger was a widower, sixty-seven years old, a diligent and not impressionable man who carried his private grief in the slack of his face and sometimes envied the dead in their graves. On that particular afternoon he came through the rear gate, as he always did, and hurried down the brick path through the cemetery, anxious to prepare the church for the following morning’s communion service and get home before the rain started.

He cast his eyes down respectfully as he passed the fresh grave, and the wreaths and sprays of flowers laid around it, and felt the prick of discomfort new graves always gave him, bringing back the pain of his wife’s funeral seven years before. Since her death other people’s tragedies seldom touched him. This one did, for some reason; perhaps because he had known the girl all her life; perhaps because of her age; or perhaps simply because she had been so pretty and so lively it was impossible to accept that she was dead.

He stopped suddenly, startled by a sound that seemed at first to have come from the ground, and listened, looking around, wondering if he had imagined it. A branch of a yew tree rattled noisily against the church wall. Above him the marble sky, darker than the tombstones, darkened further.

The wind, he thought, just the wind, and hurried on, his head bowed. As he reached the entrance to the porch he heard it again.

The first spots of rain were falling, but he ignored them and listened carefully, trying to hear above the sound of his own wheezing. He walked slowly back through the lines of headstones of the tiny cemetery, approaching the new grave warily, the way he might have approached the edge of a cliff, and stopped at a safe distance, staring at the dark rectangle and the neat mound of raw, chalky earth beside it that the gravedigger would finish shovelling in tomorrow.

Sally Mackenzie. Or Mrs Sally Donaldson as she had become. Twenty-three years old. Sparkling with life, always had time for everyone. Christened here; had been a Brownie, a Girl Guide, then had won a place at university where she met her husband, Kevin, a sharp, confident young man, in insurance, someone said. They had been married here barely a year ago and he could remember their wedding day, the husband beaming with the pride of a man who had won the greatest prize on earth. Yesterday that young man’s face had been twisted into numb shock, everything that was good and happy wrung out of it by a tourniquet of grief.

It was the way it had happened, people said. Sudden, so sudden. That made it even worse, if that was possible, they murmured. The verger was not sure whether sudden death was any worse than long lingering death; whether it was any better for the person who was dying or the people left behind. Merciful release they had said when his wife died. For her, not for him.

A red sweet wrapper scudded along the path in front of him. He listened, motionless, ignoring the rain. The wind blew again; the cellophane around a spray of flowers rustled, and he was aware of the intensity of their colours: whites, reds, pinks, vividly alive against the raw earth and the dry grass and the autumnal shades of the beech hedge that bounded the cemetery. A tag fluttered and he bent to read it. ‘To Sals, with all our love.’ Another, on a huge bouquet of crimson roses, flipped itself over, tugging capriciously on its leash of green string. ‘To Sals, for ever. Kevin.’

A lone pigeon raced above him and the branch of the yew rattled again on the church wall. The patter of rain increased. Tomorrow the verger would collect the flowers and take them to the hospice in Brighton at the suggestion of the girl’s husband. He watched the dark rectangle; only a thin layer of soil covered the coffin so far. The earth was still hard and crumbly after the long dry summer, and a few chunks had fallen away from the sides of the grave. Bits of chalk rattling on to the coffin roof, that was all it had been.

He turned and hurried into the shelter of the porch, past the notice board with its thumb-tacked signs, JUMBLE SALE, COFFEE MORNING, CHURCH ROOF FUND, turned the iron ring of the oak door and went inside the small church, closing it with an echoing clunk behind him. It was silent in here, and still. His eyes glanced routinely at the stone font and the neat stacks of hymn books and the faded frescoes on the wall. Christ stared mournfully down from the stained glass above the altar. Tablets on the wall near the door contained a roll of the local war dead. A wooden rack beneath it held badly printed booklet histories of the church and parish; thirty pence each. There was a box for the money.

He walked down the aisle to the pulpit and pulled the yellowing bakelite numbers of the hymns sung at the funeral off the indicator on the wall – ‘Abide With Me’ and ‘Jerusalem’. As he tidied away the kneelers, prayer books and service sheets left by the mourners, and listlessly mouthed ‘And did those feet in ancient time,’ he did not hear the frantic burst of muffled thuds that again came from the grave of the girl they had buried that afternoon.

Tuesday, 9 May 1967

Harvey Swire sat pensively on the bench in the locker room that smelled of stale sweat, latrines and boot polish, a short eighteen-year-old, with straight brown hair and small grey eyes set deep in his pudgy face. He was overweight and unfit, and sport bored him. He had a small, slightly high-pitched voice that had earned him the nickname Piggy which he had only succeeded in shedding in recent years.

He was always distant, aloof, wrapped in his own thoughts, in his own world inside his head. His mother had been his only close friend in life. She had nurtured him through his childhood sickliness, protected him from his father’s scorn, believed in him and loved him and understood him. She had died five months ago, aged thirty-eight, from a heart attack.

She had been beautiful and he had been proud of her, had loved it when she came to school to collect him and he could see the heads of other boys and their parents turn. It was different when his father came. They had never got on with each other, and since his mother’s death their relationship had deteriorated further.

One day he would understand that his father resented him because although he had not inherited her beauty, there was so much of his mother’s looks in his face. And because he had lived and she had died. There were a lot of things Harvey Swire would one day understand.

He began to tie the laces on his cricket boots, oblivious to the clatter of studs on the stone floor and the banter of conversation going on around him, thinking about the letter that had arrived that morning and was in his jacket hanging on the hook above him. Angie. He hadn’t expected to hear from her again, after what had happened. Part of him felt disgusted by what he had done. Embarrassed. He could still see clearly the expression on her face, feel her flinching, and his face reddened. He stared at the ground, at his boots. Part of him thought, ‘You deserved it, you bitch.’

He wasn’t sure why she angered him so much. She’d been good when his mother had died, comforting, caring, genuinely upset. She had even managed to make his father smile back at the house, after it was over. But she had not let him go any further than snogging and made even that seem as if she was doing him a favour. Until ten days ago; the last night of his Easter holiday, before returning to boarding school, when he’d forced her to touch him, had grabbed her hand and pushed it down inside his trousers and held it there whilst she struggled, and she’d refused to speak all the way home.

And now, unexpectedly, the letter had arrived; like the ones she always wrote, on small, thick sheets of paper tightly folded and smelling of her perfume, chatty and affectionate in her large looped handwriting, in fountain pen with aquamarine ink.

‘Love you lots, Angie.’ A dozen kisses.

She hadn’t even mentioned it.

He double-knotted each lace. There was the hiss of an aerosol and he smelled a sickly sweet whiff of Brut. Dacre was standing above him, pursing his face in the mirror, checking for spots; his study-mate shook his blond hair off his forehead, sprayed his other armpit, gave a quick squirt inside his jock strap, then tugged on his cricket shirt. Dacre had a thing about smell at the moment. He seemed convinced that the way to score was to smell right.

Rob Reckett came into the room, chewing gum, and farted loudly.

‘God, Reckett, you’re revolting,’ Dacre said.

Reckett responded by pushing his bum further out behind his jacket and farting again.

‘You’re a yob, Reckett,’ Worral said.

‘He’s not a yob, he’s a slob,’ Walls Minor corrected him.

Reckett blew a bubble which popped with a sharp crack and tugged off his tie. A hulking, arrogant boy with a fringe of brown hair that covered his forehead, Reckett claimed he was banging the assistant house cook, a hugely fat girl who, it was rumoured, was willing to ‘do it’ for the asking. ‘Wild for it,’ he’d announced. ‘Put it everywhere; even in her ear. Older women are the best. They’re crazy for it.’

Harvey Swire found Reckett’s description of ‘putting it in her ear’ oddly arousing and he wasn’t sure why. He’d thought about making advances to the girl himself, but she was too fat, too greasy. Her skin reminded him of an oven-ready turkey. He did not want it to be like that, not the first time, not any time. He tried to imagine Angie grabbing him and putting it in her ear. Some chance.

Her letter bothered him, suddenly. His relief at receiving it was turning to anger. Part of him wanted her to be furious with him. To be disgusted. He almost felt cheated that she wasn’t.

‘Jesus, you’re a poof, Dacre,’ Tom Hanson said.

‘Screw off, will you, Hanson? At least I don’t go around smelling like an arsehole.’

‘No, just looking like one,’ Hanson said, opening his locker and laughing with glee at his own wit.

‘Poof in boots!’ Jones Minor said, pulling on his trousers, his brow furrowing as he grinned, making the spots on his forehead break through their thin layer of Clearasyl.

‘If you think I’m a queer what about that new pop group with the high voices? What are they called? You know, Harvey. You nearly puked over their photograph yesterday.’

‘The Chimpanzees,’ Harvey Swire said.

‘Monkees, you wanker,’ Horstead said. ‘God, you’re really thick, Swire, you don’t know anything.’

Harvey tossed his hair off his face and finished the second knot.

‘You’re never going to get to medical school. You have to be intelligent to be a doctor.’

In eight weeks’ time he would be sitting his A-level exams, physics, chemistry and biology for a place at Queen’s Hospital, his father’s old medical school; where his father had graduated top in his year in gynaecology with the Queen’s medal of merit that hung on the wall of his Harley Street clinic. Quentin Swire, a strong, dapper man, who had made a fortune from providing an abortion service for overseas visitors, and had survived a major exposition by the News of the World whom he had successfully sued.

His father had also been to Wesley, where Harvey was now. Quentin Swire had been good at everything here; his name looked down from the honours boards in the halls and corridors. Cricket. Football. Hockey. Scholarships to university.

‘There’s a new Beatles LP coming out,’ someone said.

A voice in mock falsetto screeched, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’

‘I think the Beatles are really infra-dig,’ Worral said.

‘Bugger off, Worral, they’re groovy.’

‘Pink Floyd are a million times groovier.’

‘I’m going to get tickets for Bob Dylan when he’s over in August. You coming, Harvey?’

‘Dylan’s cool,’ Dacre said.

Harvey watched Reckett pull off his trousers and stained underpants in one go. Reckett had an enormous circumcised cock; he wondered suddenly what happened to people’s penises when they died. Someone had told him that hanged men died with an erection. Reckett swirled his cock around several times like a bandolero before stuffing it inside his jock strap.

‘Matlock went the whole way on Saturday,’ Walls Minor announced.

The others looked at him, startled. ‘All the way?’ Dacre said.

Walls Minor nodded.

‘Never,’ Horstead said, his voice clogged with envy. ‘He couldn’t possibly have done – he never went out of the dance hall.’

‘He said he did it when the girls were getting ready to go, before the coach came.’

‘Where?’

‘Inhere.’

‘Crap!’

‘He probably got a finger up. Wouldn’t know the difference.’

‘I think he’s telling the truth,’ Walls Minor said.

‘How come?’ Harvey said with interest.

‘Coz he’s been worried sick all week; said he used a thingummy, and it came off inside her – all the spunk sort of leaked.’

‘What a prat,’ Powell said.

Horstead nodded at Swire. ‘Poked that bird you brought to Reckett’s party at Easter yet? What was her name?’

Harvey reddened and said nothing.

‘Why d’you never talk about it, Harvey?’

‘Hey, come on, we’re late.’ Dacre tapped his watch and tucked his cricket bat under his arm.

Harvey lifted his sweater off the hook above his head. The name tag was coming off; it was now only held on by a single stitch. He stared at it for a moment, his name in small red letters on the white background, H.Q.E. Swire, and a wave of sadness swilled through him. His mother had stitched the tags on, in the small upstairs room where she did her ironing, listening, as she always seemed to be, to a play on the radio, her head tilted to one side so her blonde tresses of hair fell that way and her pretty face which always looked a little tired, a little sad.

He wondered how she was now. Sometimes he could feel her around. She had been in his room at home, recently, when he had been doing his experiments in the holidays; he could tell she approved. He had never let her see his experiments when she was alive, because he knew that she was squeamish. But now she was dead it was OK.

‘Hey, Harve, coming?’

He grabbed his bat, and they clattered out across the stone floor and down the path to the corrugated iron bicycle shed.

‘It’s quicker to walk,’ said Powell. ‘We’re playing on Horizon and can cut straight through.’

‘Bollocks,’ Dacre said. ‘You carry our bats.’ He swung his white Claude Butler racer out and jumped on to it in one manoeuvre, then pedalled at Harvey ringing his bell. ‘Hey, Harve, what’s up? You’re half asleep today.’

‘He’s always half asleep,’ Powell said.

There was a clacking sound as Dacre freewheeled in a loop over the rough grass, accelerating down the side of the house and out into the street without looking. He arced round and pedalled fast back. ‘Come on, I’m meant to be doing the toss in two minutes.’

‘Toss yourself off,’ Powell said.

Harvey climbed on to his blue Raleigh, flipping the pedals over and sliding his spiked cricket boots awkwardly into the toe straps. Dacre charged at him and he swerved out of the way, irritated, and caught a strong whiff of the Brut.

‘Race you, Harve, last one there’s wet!’ Dacre zoomed off ahead. Harvey dropped a few gears, heard the grating of the chain and pedalled hard after him, racing down the side of the house. Dacre swung out into the street and Harvey heard the blare of a car horn as he followed him, heeling the bike over hard.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the car. It seemed to be motionless, like a still photograph. He could see detail so clearly it surprised him. It was a large Ford with dull green paint and a shiny chromium grille. A woman was driving, her hair neatly curled as if she had just been to the hairdresser, and there was a filter tip cigarette in her left hand wedged between two jewelled rings on her bony fingers. Her glossy red lips were forming a circle as if she had just blown a smoke ring, and there was too much white of her eyes showing, much too much, as if her eyes were about to pop out.

The photograph changed as if a projector had moved on to the next slide, and the car was a towering shadow over him. A voice somewhere screamed: ‘Harve! Look out!’

Then he felt as if a brick wall had hit him, powering him into the air. He saw the woman’s face even closer. The eyes bulging even more. He was looking down on her, through the windscreen; her hands were raised to her face. He could hear her scream.

The projector clicked and there was a close-up of the windscreen now. A split second before he heard the crack, he felt a crunch deep inside his body; the windscreen exploded around him into brilliant white sparks. Red hot, they seemed to burn his face and hands in a million places at once.

Then he was hurtling up in the air and the sparks were dropping away beneath him. Something else dropped away, a huge shadow. At first he thought it was his bike, or his cricket sweater; or his trousers. He watched it fall back into the sparks, strike the bonnet of the green Ford and bounce up, flopping like a rag doll; a huge dent appeared on the bonnet and paint flaked off it. The shadow flew up in the air beneath him, fell back down, thudding on to the roof of the Ford, slithered off the rear, on to the boot, then thumped to the tarmac of the road and rolled furiously, jerkily along, as if electricity were shorting through it, until it slammed to a halt against the kerb.

He watched the door of the Ford open and the woman stumble out, wailing. Dacre was getting off his bike. Reckett was sprinting across the road. Harvey saw his bike trapped under the front of the Ford; its front wheel was sticking up at an odd angle, buckled; several of the spokes were broken and splayed out and he was annoyed, and wondered if he could get it fixed without his father finding out.

‘Harve? Harve? You OK?’ Dacre was kneeling beside the thing in the gutter, the thing that had dropped away from him. Then he realised, with interest, that the thing Dacre was kneeling beside was himself.

He was watching his own body. Watching all of them from above. He could see blood trickling from his forehead.

‘Don’t move him!’ someone shouted.

‘Oh my God, I’ve killed him,’ the woman screamed.

‘Get an ambulance,’ Dacre said. Harvey watched Dacre frantically feeling for his pulse; he wondered if Dacre had any idea what to look for. He saw Worral throw his own bike on to the pavement and run back into the house, shouting, ‘Mr Matthey, Mr Matthey! Sir, Mr Matthey, sir! Sir! Sir!’

Harvey saw an Austin car coming the other way stop sharply and a man in a blue blazer jump out and sprint across. ‘I’m a doctor!’ he said.

‘I didn’t see him!’ the woman screamed. ‘Oh, God, I didn’t see him!’

The front door of the house opened and a woman came running out. Mrs Matthey, the housemaster’s wife. She tripped and sprawled. He watched the doctor kneel down beside him and feel his pulse. The doctor tensed and slipped his hand inside his chest on to his heart. Then he saw the doctor prise open his mouth, and thrust his hand in. ‘He’s swallowed his tongue,’ he said, panicky. ‘Has someone called an ambulance?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dacre said.

The doctor prised his tongue out. Harvey could see his face was blue. ‘How long has he been here?’ the doctor asked, moving fast, methodically.

‘Only a few seconds.’

He laid Harvey flat, clasped his hands together and pressed hard downwards on Harvey’s chest. Then again, more urgently. He studied Harvey for a second, pressed down again, then again, getting increasingly frantic in his movement.

The housemaster’s wife ran up, breathless. ‘Is he all right? Is he all right?’

The doctor spoke without stopping his artificial respiration. ‘No,’ he said grimly. ‘He’s not breathing.’

‘I’m fine,’ Harvey said. ‘I’m OK, really, I’m fine!’ But his mouth did not move, no sound came out. He tried to speak again, but felt himself being sucked upwards suddenly. He was being pulled away from the scene and did not want to go. ‘No!’ he screamed. ‘No!’ But no words came out of the mouth of the motionless body between the doctor’s knees. Darkness closed around him. It was getting cold, icy cold. He felt alone, helpless. Fear swept through him; walls of a tunnel encircled him, sucked him like an insect down a drain and he was hurtling, spinning through a vortex of blackness.

It seemed as if he would go on spinning in blackness for ever, getting colder and colder. Then he saw a tiny pinprick of light in the distance, and felt the first faint glimmer of warmth.

The light grew larger and with it he felt warmth coming down the tunnel to greet him, seeping through him, melting away his fears, becoming a part of him, giving him a strange new energy.

Then he was immersed in the light and the tunnel had gone. He was no longer moving. The light was brilliant but did not dazzle him; it seemed to flood through him the way the warmth had done, and he sensed someone was in the light with him whom he could not see.

For a brief moment he felt a deep sensation of ecstasy. He wanted to stay here in this spot in this light and never move.

Then a man’s voice spoke, calmly, chiding. ‘What do you think you are doing, Harvey? Do you think you are being clever?’

The voice chilled him. Chilled the light which faded, seemed to drain away and left him standing in an opening that was like a glade in a forest under a grey sky. He felt exposed, as if there were people around watching him. He turned. There was nothing but empty fields behind him, stretching away to the horizon.

Then he heard his mother’s voice.

‘Darling!’

A figure was coming towards him, indistinct, bleached out at first, but it grew darker, more distinct, as it came closer. A woman walking slowly, elegantly, effortlessly, as if she had all of time in which to reach him.

Then suddenly he could see her clearly, see the familiar blonde tresses of hair, the serene smile, the summer dress he had always liked her in so much. A feeling of immense joy swept through him as he reached out, tried to run towards her. ‘Mummy!’ he shouted. His voice was strangely flat, as if he were shouting underwater. He could not move, but stood, arms stretched out, trying to reach her, to hold her, to hug her.

She stopped, a few yards from him, and smiled a deep loving smile. ‘You have to go back, darling,’ she said.

Other figures were appearing out of the grey light behind her, dark, shadowy shapes, people with no faces.

‘Mummy! How are you?’ He tried to run to her, but he could not move forwards.

‘Darling, God is very unhappy with you.’

‘Why?’ he mouthed.

The dark shapes were getting closer, were surrounding him, were crowding between him and his mother.

‘Because you’re –’ The words faded. She was shouting now, as if she was having to shout above a crowd to be heard, but the words were sucked into the dark shadowy shapes.

‘Why?’ Again he tried to run towards her, but icy hands were pulling him away. ‘Why?’ he yelled.

The shadows pulled at him.

‘Let me talk to her! Let me!’

He struggled, thrashed.

‘You have to go back,’ a voice said.

‘She doesn’t want you,’ another said.

‘She doesn’t ever want to see you again,’ said a third.

‘You’re lying!’ he screamed, trying to break free of the cold hands that were tearing at him. He felt their breath, like the air of a freezer. The light was fading.

He was falling.

Monday, 22 October 1990

Kate Hemingway was woken from a troubling dream at six thirty a.m. by the click of her radio. She listened to the headlines as she did every morning, then pressed the snooze button and savoured the silence and the snug warmth of her bedclothes for a few minutes more whilst she tried to stop the dream fading completely from her mind.

Another of the anxiety dreams she had most nights at the moment; worrying about her new job, she realised, or her sister, Dara, or her recently terminated disastrous affair.

Kate Hemingway was twenty-four years old, and five feet five inches tall. Born in Boston, she was strong and slender, with grey-blue eyes that sparkled with life behind high, deep cheek bones, a small, straight nose, and a smiling mouth with good teeth that she took care of. With her long flaxen hair, currently styled in a fashionable ragged look, and her fresh, healthy complexion, she had the kind of sensational all-American college girl looks to which few men failed to respond with interest, and some women with envy.

Kate was an intelligent girl who read widely and was as happy at times to be on her own as in company. The two things she lacked were self-confidence and a boyfriend. The sarcasm and scorn she had received throughout her childhood from her elder sister, Dara, and the way her parents had always seemed to favour Dara rather than her had left her flayed and uncertain about her abilities. She did not even believe that she was attractive, and worked hard at keeping herself in shape by eating sensibly – but not faddishly, because she enjoyed and was knowledgeable about food and wine – and by jogging at weekends.

Life was going well for her at the moment, for the first time in a long while. She was doing a job she loved, in a town to which she had come as a stranger and already liked a lot, and was living in an apartment which she had decorated herself and was proud of.

After three months in her new job as a reporter for a local newspaper, the Sussex Evening News, she still found her work fresh and challenging and looked forward to each day, happy to be on a paper from which she had a real prospect of moving to Fleet Street. It was a considerable change of pace and quality from the free weekly rag she had worked on in Birmingham previously.

Her confidence was growing and the wounds from her last relationship were healing. Getting the job on the News had been a real career break, although her elder sister, smug in her Washington duplex, would never understand that. Dara sneered at her for not being married, not having any children and not having achieved anything yet. Dara, an economist in Washington married to a rich lawyer who was a budding senator, and had three exquisite children, reminded Kate constantly, in her own subtle ways, that she had always told her she would be a failure in life and Kate got scared sometimes that she was being proven right.

Tony Arnold had been a disaster. A nowhere relationship. And yet she still thought about him, got reminded of him every time she smelled Paco Rabanne out on the street, still fancied him, dammit. Kate liked to pretend to herself that she wasn’t sure how the affair had begun, but she knew she was deceiving herself. He had been the deputy editor of the Birmingham Messenger, a position that had seemed to her then, at twenty-two years old, of immense power, and she had been flattered initially by his interest.

She’d never had an affair with a married man before. At first it had been a game and she did not realise how deeply she was falling in love with him. For eighteen months she dutifully maintained the conspiracy with him to keep it secret, cooked meals for him which he’d never had time to eat, and spent whole weekends waiting in for him to get an hour away; all the time he told her his marriage was on the rocks, and they planned their future together.

Then she had bumped into him in a supermarket one Saturday, arm in arm with his wife and trailing three cute kids. In the brief glance they exchanged, Kate had realised suddenly how little she understood about life.

He got offered the editorship of a Scottish paper shortly afterwards and made no suggestion she should join him there. Instead he put in a good word when the vacancy on the Sussex Evening News came up. They had left the Birmingham Messenger within one week of each other and she had not heard from him since.

Kate had come to England when she was fourteen with her parents, and Dara. She had an elder brother, Howie, who drowned in a sailing accident, and it was his death that had brought about the move. Her father, a lecturer in English at Harvard University, thought it would be good therapy for them to have a change and accepted a two-year posting at the University of London that turned into five years.

They lived a bohemian existence in a draughty Victorian house in Highgate. Her mother was a small-town girl who had dropped out in the sixties along with half of America because it had been the thing to do. Whether it was the lousy heating and spartan furnishings of bare oak floors and hessian mats and Afghan rugs on the walls, or the dope-smoking student lodgers whom they needed to help with the rent and who always drank the milk and ate the bread and left dirty dishes lying around, or her father’s continued practising of his ‘free love’ philosophy, Kate was not sure, but her mother finally had enough and ran off with a pleasant but dull civil engineer who had a cosy modern house in Cheam. Soon after, he had been sent to oversee a project in Hong Kong and her mother now lived there with him.

Kate had stayed o