That night James had another nightmare, the worst since we’d left university. He kept screaming a name over and over, a name I couldn’t make out; he kept screaming it and moaning, ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry …’ When I eventually managed to wake him, his eyes were wide with fear. He said he couldn’t remember anything, but his distress was tangible.

* * *

The next morning I drove to Albion Manor but it was boarded and shuttered – no cars, no horses in the field. I took a deep breath and rang Danny, but his voicemail was always on. I tried to call Hadi Kattan, as James already had, but his number was unobtainable. I tried Maya too, several times, but although it rang, she never answered her phone or returned my calls.

At night James paced the house, too frightened to close his eyes in case the nightmares came again; in the day he dozed on the sofa. Liam came and went, they spoke to endless lawyers, they muttered to one another – but they never really told me what was going on. However hard I tried to get it out of James, he was constantly vague. ‘Set up’ became his mantra; deep down I was terrified he was guilty.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Liam knew more than he was admitting, but he was at great pains to avoid being on his own with me at any time. I’d still never understood why he’d collected my children that day, and I’d lost my trust in him. My paranoia was growing, I was aware of that, but our world was falling apart and my reason was following close behind.

At the end of that week, one morning around dawn, the police came and took James away again – and this time he looked broken. Fred woke up crying with all the noise and confusion, and I scooped him out of bed and carried him downstairs. He was too heavy for me these days to hold for long, but now I held him tight in my arms, his head heavy on my shoulder, blinking and bewildered, tears like dewdrops on his lashes. We stood on the doorstep in the early morning mist, the distant hills wreathed as if in dragon’s breath, shivering in our pyjamas.

I watched DS Montford escort my husband into the back of an unmarked car: I thanked God at least two of my children were still sleeping. James stared out at me, and he looked just like his son, like a little boy – and my heart went out to him. He looked like someone who had lost his fight. I held Fred’s hand up to wave to his father.

And later the expression on James’s face – oh God, it haunted me. I’d seen that look before. The same look he wore the day that Dalziel tried to kill his own brother.

Chapter Twenty-Four
THE TIMES, MAY 2008