“I made you a coffee. I’ve got to run, but you said you had a lot to do today, so I thought I’d better wake you. You were sleeping like the dead,” Sophie greeted her.

Memory of the night before flooded back to Lindsay, and a satisfied grin spread across her face. “You did right,” she said. “So the bumper sticker is really true?”

“What bumper sticker?”

“Gynecologists do it with their fingers,” Lindsay teased.

“We do other things with our fingers too,” Sophie exclaimed, grabbing Lindsay and tickling her ribs.

“Whoa!” Lindsay yelled. “Mind the coffee!” Sophie hugged her. “I’ll see you later,” she said, kissing her smiling mouth.

“I can’t wait!”

The stinging needles of the shower chased the last trace of sleep from Lindsay’s brain. She wasn’t ready yet to examine the new basis of her relationship with Sophie. Her body felt relaxed and comfortable after their love-making, but her head was still spinning with the implications of Sophie’s bombshell. Why hadn’t she thought of Claire? If Jackie hadn’t been the obvious choice, Claire could well have been the next person the police would have looked at.

As she toweled herself dry, Lindsay examined the idea step by step. Claire had carefully presented an image of herself as cool and rational, the woman who had been hurt but who had forgiven. But what if the reality had been different? What if she had known Jackie well enough to realize that she would never be able to rid herself of her obsession while Alison was still alive? She could easily have gone to the block of flats and waited in the rubbish chute cupboard till she saw Jackie leaving, then slipped in to Alison’s flat and killed her. But if so, why was she going through the charade of asking Lindsay to help clear Jackie’s name?

Sophie’s answer to that was the double bluff. What would someone in Claire’s position be expected to do? Answer: she’d be expected to do exactly what she had done. Anything else would have looked suspicious. Added to that was Claire’s insistence when she’d first briefed Lindsay that she didn’t have to uncover the true identity of the murderer, merely cast enough doubt on Jackie’s conviction.

And the fact remained that she hadn’t actually tracked Lindsay down. What if her involvement with Cordelia had started as a convenient distraction for the one woman who could reasonably be expected to know where to look for Lindsay? Once Claire and Cordelia were lovers, there would be a certain reluctance on Cordelia’s part to searching too diligently for Lindsay, after all.