“Helen,” Sophie, warned. “Not now.”

“No, it’s okay,” Lindsay said. Either Sophie’s arrival or the hospital tea seemed to have revived her. Apart from the ache in her shoulder and leg and twinges penetrating the local anesthetic in her face, she felt almost alert. “My brain seems to have reconnected with the rest of me.”

“See?” Helen said triumphantly. “Call yourself a doctor, Hartley?”

Sophie smiled. “You have your medical adviser’s permission to tell her to shut up any time you want,” she told Lindsay, pulling her closer. “To be honest, I’m curious myself. Helen met me at Heathrow and told me you were working alone at her office, where nothing bad could possibly happen. The next thing I know is you look like Mike Tyson’s speed bag.”

“Watch who you’re calling a bag,” Lindsay said. “The short answer is that I don’t really know what happened. I’d done everything I had to do at Watergaw, so I set the alarm and locked up. The security lights weren’t on, so it was really dark. I was walking to my car and I stood on some glass. I bent down to see if I could see what it was, then I heard these footsteps running behind me. I jumped up and turned round just in time to get out of the way of some maniac with a baseball bat. I managed to dodge him, but I was concentrating so hard on getting away that I didn’t see the wall until it was too late.” For Sophie’s benefit, she added, “There’s this little wall runs along the frontage of Watergaw, and I took a header over it. Unfortunately, I came down on a bit of broken glass. Hence the duelling scar.”

“It sounds like you would have come off a lot worse if you’d stuck around,” Kirsten commented.

“Trust a journalist to look on the bright side,” Helen said. “So, did you see who it was doing the Joe DiMaggio impersonation? Was it Guy? Or even Stella?”

Lindsay sighed. “I don’t think it was Stella. I couldn’t see much except a silhouette, and it looked like a male body shape. I don’t think he was as tall as Guy, but I couldn’t swear to it. I think he was wearing a stocking over his head as well. I was giving it some thought back in the hospital. At first I couldn’t work out why his head was such a neat shape, then I realized what he must have done.”

“It must have been Guy,” Helen said. “He knows me well enough to realize I wouldn’t just lie down and die after what he’s done to me. He’ll have left that bitch Stella in charge of the night shoot, and he’ll have come back to stake out the offices. The bastard!”