‘ALL FINE HERE. COULD YOU BRING THE DIARY ROUND?’

The two men approved the content and Jude sent the text. To Carole’s old mobile.

It seemed to take forever for Carole to arrive. The two men allowed Jude to sit, but they were restive, moving threateningly around her sitting room. The doctor had not put away the scalpel.

And when the doorbell finally rang, he grabbed her arms behind her back and once again held the weapon to her throat while Jeremiah opened the door.

Which was just as well, because the police whom Carole had summoned when she got the prearranged text signal were able to see the precise nature of the threat being made to Jude.

And, even if they hadn’t seen it live, they would have seen it later in the recording that Carole’s new mobile had been making from the mantelpiece from the moment Jeremiah and Dr Rawley had arrived at Woodside Cottage.

She’d certainly cracked making the video work.

TWENTY-SEVEN

A couple of days later, Carole was walking with Gulliver on Fethering Beach when she heard heavy footsteps running up behind her. She turned to see a breathless Adrian Greenford.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, without enthusiasm.

‘I … Gwyneth said I’ve got to say something to you.’

‘I don’t think I really want to hear anything from you.’

‘No, please, Carole. She’ll really make me suffer if I don’t say it.’

‘“Make you suffer”?’

‘That’s what she does, Gwyneth. She makes me suffer. She makes me do things for her. It’s because … you know, with the woman in Ilkley … I hurt Gwyneth so much. That’s why she’s confined to the wheelchair. She’s making me suffer for what I did. And then I fell in love with you and—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Carole, now really angry.

‘No, I did. From the first moment I saw you, I just knew. But Gwyneth knew too, and she made me do the things …’

‘What things?’

‘The unpleasant things.’ Carole still looked puzzled. ‘Like leaving the notes … going along the alley behind our house, going into your garden and …’ He swallowed uncomfortably. ‘And smashing the glass on your car.’

‘You did all that?’

‘Yes. Gwyneth made me.’

She looked at him, this pathetic man, locked into a marriage whose psychological depths she did not wish to plumb, and thought that, often, there was a lot to be said for divorce. Not, of course, that Gwyneth Greenford would ever allow her husband such an easy way out.

And what made the whole scenario even more ghastly was that Adrian Greenford clearly got some kind of charge out of the situation.

‘Goodbye,’ said Carole. ‘Come along, Gulliver.’

Woman and dog strode over the sand in the direction of High Tor.