“Knowing her, it wouldn’t have been the hunters who shot her mother,” Helen said darkly. “She drives a metallic green Fiat Punto and she lives in some trendy warehouse conversion on the canal behind King’s Cross station when she’s not round Guy’s flat in Stoke Newington. She wears that skin-tight fashion that looks great on Kate Moss and would make you and me look like sausages that need to go on a diet. As for friends, I shouldn’t think she’s got any.”

“Fine, but I still don’t know where to start digging,” Lindsay insisted firmly.

“You could start by following her.”

“Helen, I haven’t even got a car,” Lindsay protested.

“That’s no problem. We use a hire firm just round the corner when we need some extra wheels. I’ll take you round there and sort you out with something right now.” She finished her beer in one swallow and looked expectantly at Lindsay.

Lindsay closed her eyes and sighed. In the long years of their friendship, Helen had only ever asked for Lindsay’s help once before. It had seemed straightforward that time too, but it had led Lindsay into a confrontation with a murderer that had forced her into the hardest decision she’d ever taken and had altered the course of her life irrevocably. It wasn’t an experience she’d willingly repeat. But even putting the most pessimistic of glosses on Helen’s present request, it was hard to see how it could get her into the kind of trouble she’d been trying to avoid ever since that bitter tragedy in Glasgow.

She opened her eyes and shook her head with an air of fatalism. “I have a horrible feeling that I’m going to regret this,” she said, picking up her glass and following Helen’s example. “Let’s go and get me a set of wheels.”

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Lindsay fiddled with the radio tuning buttons again. She’d been parked across the street from the industrial unit that housed Watergaw Films for the best part of an hour. So far, she’d grown irritated with one presenter’s attempts at controversiality, bored with a magazine program that seemed to cater for the prurience of people without a life of their own, and infuriated to discover a play she’d been listening to was the first of three episodes of a serial. Now she’d never know why Prunella had taken the Old English sheepdog to the archbishop’s consecration. Giving up on talk radio, she settled for a station that played oldies with minimal chatter between records.