The phone went dead, before I even had the chance to tell her about Fat Freddy. I decided I’d try her again in the evening, once she’d had a bit of time to get used to being home alone again. I used the rest of the morning to type up a report for Bill and our clients about the morning’s events. It was a sorry ending to a successful investigation.

I was putting a new pack of microcassettes in my handbag when I caught sight of the detailed info Josh had faxed me about Moira’s financial problems. In the recent chaos, I’d completely forgotten to look at it. I smoothed it out and started to read.

The very first debt, for £175, caught my eye immediately. The County Court judgement on it dated from a few months after she’d left Jett. The creditors were an outfit called Cullen Holdings in Bradford. The name rang a vague bell. I went through to Shelley’s office for the Bradford phone directory and looked it up. There was no listing for Cullen Holdings, but there was a listing for the Cullen Clinic. That was what had rung the bell. Before

Shelley found the relevant records disc and I loaded it into my computer. The Cullen Clinic was owned by Dr. Theodore Donn. In spite of the title, he was no medical man. His degree was a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Strathclyde University. He’d set up the Cullen Clinic for one reason only. To make money out of abortion. He’d been running the clinic at a substantial profit for nearly ten years. He’d even survived a Department of Health inquiry into the connection between his business and a pregnancy advisory service owned by his sister, which referred their unhappily pregnant clients to the Cullen Clinic for terminations. Very cozy. And they’d sued Moira Pollock for the non-payment of a bill incurred just a week after she’d left Jett.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I couldn’t believe that Jett had known about that when he hired me to find her. If he’d found out after she’d come back, it gave him one hell of a motive. I knew his rigidly hostile views on abortion. I’d seen how mercurial he could be. I’d seen his rages. And above all, this crime was spontaneous, panicky and angry.

I changed discs, just to confirm what Josh’s printout had told me, and called up Moira’s medical records from the Seagull Project. Halfway down the page, there it was. VAT. Voluntary Assisted Termination. She must have been going through hell. Hooked on smack, pregnant, alone. It was a miracle she’d survived as well as she had. And all the more of a crime that someone had killed her when she’d finally got her life back together.