‘Why?’ asked Joe. He always had to ask the question I didn’t want to answer. I widened my eyes at him and smiled. Every brain cell I had telepathically shouted at him, ‘Shut up Joe!’, but it made no difference. Patsy Barnes stared at me, pen at the ready again, eager to jot down the pearls of wisdom that flowed from my mouth for her article. She smiled and nodded at Joe, fluttering her eyelids at him. ‘Joe’s right. Why would anyone go to the bother of trying to frame Dr Marshall?’ she asked.

‘Revenge?’ I offered.

‘It’s easier to kill him than set up an elaborate ploy like this. Maybe you’ll just have to accept, Brodie, that the bastard is guilty and you don’t have a hope in hell of getting him off.’ Joe’s comment didn’t help. Patsy was shadowing me to find out how I thought and it was embarrassing that I couldn’t be the perfect case study she expected. My mind tended to jump from subject to subject, and when I was in court I listened to my gut more than my head.

I’d asked Eddie Gibb to track down Renee Smith. If she wasn’t blackmailing Marshall, or Milne, or whatever I should call him, she might know who was. It was a condition imposed at the first trial, when they were ten, that Kevin and Renee had no further contact for the rest of their lives. I doubted that either of them had stuck to that. Eddie now came in smiling and waving a piece of paper with an address on it. I was surprised at what it revealed, but it was an area Renee knew. Her family had moved and the thirty-year-old Renee Smith would bear no resemblance to the little girl. It was clever of Renee to hide out in the last place the vigilantes would think of looking for her, but she hadn’t come across anyone quite like Eddie, who was learning tricks from his wife by the day ‘How did you do it?’ I asked. Just like Lavender, Eddie tapped the side of his nose. Lavender kept her methods and contacts very close to her chest, and I knew that was probably the safest way for Eddie to work as well.

I held the paper up. ‘Eddie,’ I said, and turned to face the journalist with an enormous smile on my face, ‘and Patsy…you can go with him to court. I need to check out this witness in London. Lois? Book me on the next shuttle–I should be back tonight.’ Patsy’s face had tightened into thin lines. She was no doubt furious at being sidestepped by me, and then Eddie slapped her on the back, adding insult to injury. ‘We’ll have a great time, hen,’ said Eddie.