When Henry Martin was swinging from the gallows tree, I moved on to another equally pleasant ditty, and then another after that. The evening wore on into night as I played, and an unsettling feeling crept over me by degrees: a solid conviction based on the most fleeting and ephemeral of impressions.

Imagine you woke up to find yourself a prisoner in an unfamiliar room, in total darkness, with your hands and feet tied. Unable to move, unable to see, you’d have no way of finding out what kind of place you were in. But when you shouted for help, the echoes of your own voice would come back to you, and give you some sense of the size of the room: the extent and maybe even the shape of the volume of air that surrounded you.

That was kind of what I felt right then: playing the whistle woke up my death-sense, and my death-sense told me that the world had changed. The echoes of the simple, dolorous tune described a space that was subtly, infinitesimally altered from what I knew, what I’d expected. I wondered what in Hell that might mean.

Disconcerted, I lowered the whistle. I was about to try another tune when I saw Pen standing in the doorway, staring in at me. There was a tension in her pose and in her expression. ‘You’re upsetting the birds,’ she said.

I put the whistle down on the table beside my bed. ‘Everyone’s a critic,’ I deadpanned.

She stared at the whistle for a moment, then shook her head, visibly giving it up. She turned away, towards the stairs, but an afterthought struck her and she stopped on the top step, looking back at me over her shoulder. ‘You had some calls,’ she said.

‘When I was . . . out?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Anything I should know about?’

‘Some woman named Pax. She called lots of times. She said she had some news for you.’

Trudie could keep on stewing. There was nothing she could tell me that I wanted to hear. Her heart belonged to Mother Church, and I wasn’t interested in the rest of her, shapely though it undoubtedly was.

‘What else?’

‘Someone from the Brent Library Service. A woman . . .’

‘Susan Book.’

‘Sounds about right.’

That was more interesting. Susan is married to Juliet, and Juliet is always interesting, just by virtue of being Juliet.

‘And Gary Coldwood,’ Pen finished up. ‘He rang just now, but he couldn’t stay on.’

‘How come?’

‘He said he was on his way to a murder scene. And he wanted you to read it for him.’

3

Which brings me back around to where I was, more or less: standing in Ginny Parris’s drying blood and swallowing the bitter pill of her true identity with a growing sense of dread.

‘Rafi’s girlfriend.’ I repeated the words.