He might think about the police then. But that would get him nowhere at all. Five hours late wouldn’t earn a mention in the incident log. Not even in the light of two female murder victims in the same week. Because there was nothing to connect Marco Mather’s wife to a Polish pharmaceutical sales rep or Bradfield Cross’s chief pharmacist. There couldn’t be because apart from the fact that they looked right, they were random selections. People said you couldn’t judge a book by its cover, and unfortunately that was true. But he’d had to go by the cover. They were replacements, not substitutes. So they had to look right. They had to fit the fantasy in his head, the dream that had grown from those images of Lauren Hutton up on the screen. It was an exhausting process, but eventually he would find the right one. The one to replace the one who had cheated him out of serving up her just deserts.

But he was wandering off the point. Which was, what would Marco Mather do? He was so tempted to go and see for himself. There would be a delicious pleasure in glimpsing him through a window, wringing his hands or crying on the phone.

Why not give in to temptation? There was no virtue in denying himself that pleasure, was there? So he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and picked up her keys. Just in case Marco had gone out to drown his sorrows and he got the chance to pick over their pitiful married life.

Less than quarter of an hour later, he’d found a parking space in the next street and, sticking to the shadows, he walked briskly round the corner. In spite of the limp one of his father’s beatings had left him with, he could still move faster than most. At this time of night, the majority of the houses were in darkness, occasional slivers of light creeping through bedroom curtains, a few hall lights dimly seen through glass panels in front doors. This wasn’t the sort of area where people stayed up late and had fun, he thought. Solid suburbia to the core; either they had to get up for work in the morning or else they’d retired and acquired the old persons’ habit of early to bed and early to rise. Like they had something to get up for, he thought, imagining those unsatisfied lives where they’d settled for less than perfection. Not like him.