By the time the train stopped in York, paranoia had Zelda in its grip, and she was convinced that the police would be waiting for her. But they weren’t. The large station seemed fairly busy, and she was lucky to find a taxi idling out front. The Lyndgarth cottage was a good fare for the cabbie—close to forty pounds plus tip. Zelda settled in the back and tried to breathe normally. They could be waiting for her at the cottage, of course. She checked the Sky and BBC news bulletins on her mobile. There was nothing reported about a body being discovered at a London hotel. And Zelda was sure that if it hadn’t been discovered yet, that was because the others had got to it and made it disappear. She started to relax as the taxi drove around Eastvale and into the moorland near Lyndgarth. Soon she was at her door fumbling for money in her purse. The driver seemed happy with the fiver she added to the fare, and he even waited until she had got her door open before driving off. That certainly didn’t always happen these days.

The interior was as she had left it—which was tidy, for the most part, with the dishes washed and put away, the sink cleaned, living room dusted and electrical items unplugged. She plugged them all in again and boiled the kettle for tea. Luckily, it was a warm day, and she didn’t need to turn on the heating. The Internet router was still working fine, she saw, and once again checked the news sites. Again, there was nothing.

She had realized in the taxi that she’d had her mobile set on airplane mode since before her visit to the Hotel Belgrade, and when she had turned it off to check the news, she had noticed there was a telephone message from Alan Banks. In the cottage, the message light was flashing on the landline in the kitchen, too. Just for a moment, she panicked. Alan again? What if he was on to her? He was a policeman, after all. But she dismissed the idea as absurd. That wasn’t how they operated.

The message on the landline was from Alan. He was asking her to get in touch with him as soon as she got back. He sounded serious, and for a moment she wondered again if he could possibly have found out anything about what she had been doing, but soon decided that he couldn’t. Well, she was back now, she thought, so she reached out for the landline and dialed his number.

BANKS HAD to wait only about five minutes a few yards down the road from Frankie Wallace’s house before Annie pulled up behind him in her gray Nissan. There were no grounds or landscaped gardens here, not even a postage-stamp lawn between the pavement and the front door.