‘All right, all right.’ Nipper heaved a sigh. ‘So what now?’ Ludo with his flashy ways and tight-arsed clean habits sometimes seriously pissed him off.

‘What now is we go on lookin’. We spread the net further, we knock on more doors, we go on. Because I’m not goin’ back to Harlan Stone and tellin’ him we can’t finish this, OK?’

Nipper looked surly but what could he do but agree? He didn’t want to face Harlan and tell him it was a no-go, either. ‘Yeah. OK.’

Ludo started the engine.

121

The day came at last, as Belle knew it must.

‘Right, let’s get those stitches out, yeah?’ said Jack after they’d had breakfast one morning.

Belle stared at him. ‘What, so soon? Can’t we wait a few more days?’

‘For what? It’s all healed up now, it’s been weeks, it’s best they come out.’

Sometimes, if she tried hard enough, Belle found that she could almost forget that she was scarred. While Jack went out most days about the farm doing jobs, she stayed in the house making herself useful. It was the least she could do. Mum had never liked too much intervention from anyone in her kitchen, but she’d shown Belle the basics so she could knock up a passable stew or a curry or even a risotto if she had to.

She did the washing, Hoovered the floors, wet-dusted the mantelpiece and cleaned out the fire. All things she’d never once done in her life. Above all, she tried not to think. If when she was preparing a meal she happened to glimpse her distorted reflection in a pan’s surface, she was quick to look away. Mostly, she was left alone, and she was glad of that. Most days, late in the afternoon, Jack went outside with a towel over his shoulder and came back about an hour later. He didn’t say where he went and she didn’t ask, but his lack of communication did puzzle her and it did make her question her own relaxed attitude around him.

He could be anyone. A rapist. A killer. He could, in fact, be lulling her into a false sense of security, playing the nice guy, getting ready to pounce. But strangely enough, she trusted him, even though she had no reason to. Then she thought of her ruined face and thought: no. She was ugly. Somehow she kept forgetting that. No man would want her now.

She was hiding. Hiding from the world, hiding from her injuries, from herself. So far, she’d done a damned good job of it, too. But now Jack wanted to take out her stitches, and she had promised herself that, when he did that, she would be brave enough to look herself in the face once again, to accept that this was how it was going to be from here on in.