Part of that rebuilding took the shape of the attractive, dark-haired woman who sat next to her during the trial. As far as Jackie was concerned, Cordelia Brown was simply a friend who had done her best to help the defense in the buildup to the trial. In her despair at ever clearing her name of the charge, Jackie had dredged up the name of one person that she believed might be able to find out the truth. When Claire had gone looking for Lindsay Gordon she had quickly discovered that Cordelia was their only hope of finding her. But their efforts had been fruitless. Like everything else that had happened to Jackie since her last visit to Alison’s flat, things hadn’t worked out according to plan. But for Claire, it was a very different story.

Duncan Leslie got to his feet and slowly surveyed the jury. The trial was almost over, and he was filled with a quiet confidence. He had spun his web around Jackie Mitchell. Now, all he had to do was to draw the threads together to present her to the jury as a tightly wrapped cocoon with no prospect of escape.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began, pacing slowly backward and forward in front of the jury box. “This has not been a pleasant case for any of us. A woman has been brutally killed in the one place where she could reasonably hope to be safe—in the bedroom of her own flat, in the arms of her lover. The defense have tried to cloud your judgment with tawdry allegations about the victim of this particularly horrific crime. But I’d like to remind you that it is not Alison Maxwell who is on trial here today—it is her killer, Jackie Mitchell.

“You have heard how, on the afternoon of 16 October, Jackie Mitchell visited Alison Maxwell in her flat, thus betraying her own live-in lover. The two women went to bed together and had sex. A quarrel followed. Jackie Mitchell then left the flat. Within minutes of her departure, Alison Maxwell’s strangled body was discovered, still warm. None of these facts is in dispute.” Leslie stopped walking to and fro and turned to face the jury, fixing them one by one with an unblinking stare that, more effectively than any histrionics, gave force to his words.

“My colleague for the defense is asking you to believe that in those few short moments, a third party managed to enter a block of flats protected by security entryphones and contrived to get into Alison Maxwell’s flat, leaving no signs of any break-in. Then this unknown assailant strangled her with Jackie Mitchell’s own scarf—a method of killing, incidentally, which does not lend itself to speed. This mysterious murderer then managed to make a clean getaway. And during all this, our killer was never seen, never heard.