‘What happened to “Jack”? You were friendlier last time we met.’

‘Last time we met, you hadn’t killed anyone.’ Naylor gave him a sad, faintly pitying look, as if he had failed to understand 264some fundamental truth, and Penrose remembered the conversation in the library the night before, when Richard Hartley – in Naylor’s hearing – had raised the possibility that there was more to the horror in the slums than had ever been revealed; suddenly he wondered if he had been wrong to dismiss the rumours so readily.

He took the snowman decoration out of his pocket and slid it across the table. ‘You kept this all those years.’

Naylor nodded, satisfied. ‘I wondered if you’d recognise it.’

‘That was taking a risk, wasn’t it? Leaving something I’d recognise with the body.’

‘Only if you assume I wanted to get away with it.’ He shook his head to emphasise the words. ‘No, this all started at Christmas, and it’s right that it should end there.’

‘But it doesn’t end, does it?’ Penrose said, angered by Naylor’s arrogance in deciding the course of the story. ‘Not for the people left behind. You should understand that better than anyone. It doesn’t end for Angela Hartley or for Johnny Soper, just because you say it does. It doesn’t end for Alex Fielding’s family or her colleagues at The Times. She was a young woman with a bright future ahead of her. Who knows what she might have achieved? What gives you the right to decide who lives and who dies?’

Naylor smiled, but there was no malice in it. ‘So you don’t know everything,’ he said, ‘but you’re still taking her side, just like everyone else did. They all favoured her, even then – the vicar and his wife, the newspapers, the authorities. She was the little girl, the clever one, the angel.’

‘You mean Alex Fielding …’

‘Was my sister, yes. Alice, as you knew her, although she 265never acknowledged that when she grew up.’ He accepted a cigarette from the packet that Penrose passed across the table. ‘Alex was my sister, and she looked out for me – putting me up in her living room, getting me a run-of-the-mill job in the place where she shone, sweeping me the crumbs off her table. But that was all right.’ He obviously sensed Penrose’s scepticism, because he added: ‘Really, it was. It was all right because I loved her and she loved me. Even what happened eighteen years ago was bearable because we faced it together. She never forgot your kindness, you know. Neither of us did, but she worshipped you.’

It came again, that familiar feeling of desolation that Penrose would have found hard to explain. ‘And what did happen eighteen years ago? Do we know the truth, or was there more to it?’

Naylor ignored the question, lost in his thoughts, and Penrose knew that he would have to wait for the story to unravel in its own time. ‘My sister said you saved her life that day. I always thought I’d done that, but apparently not.’