And then he turned on her. She couldn’t recall the words. Perhaps at the time there had been no words, or she hadn’t heard them. There was only the crack of the smashed bottle, like a pistol shot, the stink of whisky, a moment of searing pain which passed almost as soon as she felt it and the warm blood flowing from her cheek, dripping onto the seat of the chair, her mother’s anguished cry. “Oh God, look what you’ve done, Rhoda. The blood! They’ll never take it back now. They’ll never change it.”

Her father gave her one look before stumbling out and hauling himself up to bed. In the seconds in which their eyes met, she thought she saw a confusion of emotions: bafflement, horror and disbelief. Then her mother finally turned her attention to her child. Rhoda had been trying to hold the edges of the wound together, the blood sticky on her hands. Her mother fetched towels and a packet of sticking plasters and tried with shaking hands to open it, her tears mixing with the blood. It was Rhoda who gently took the packet from her, unpeeled the plasters from their covers and managed at last to close most of the wound. By the time, less than an hour later, she was lying stiffly in bed, the bleeding had been staunched and the future mapped out. There would be no visit to the doctor and no truthful explanation ever; she would stay away from school for a day or two, her mother would telephone, saying she was unwell. And when she did go back, her story would be ready: she had crashed against the edge of the open kitchen door.

And now the sharp-edged memory of that single slashing moment softened into the more mundane recollection of the following years. The wound, which became badly infected, healed painfully and slowly, but neither parent spoke of it. Her father had always found it difficult to meet her eyes; now he hardly ever came near her. Her classmates averted their gaze, but it seemed to her that fear had replaced active dislike. No one at school ever mentioned the disfigurement in her presence until she was in the sixth form and was sitting with her English mistress, who was trying to persuade her to try for Cambridge—her own university—instead of London. Without looking up from her papers, Miss Farrell had said, “Your facial scar, Rhoda. It’s wonderful what plastic surgeons can do today. Perhaps it would be sensible to make an appointment with your GP before you go up.” Their eyes had met, Rhoda’s mutinous with outrage, and after four seconds of silence, Miss Farrell, cringing in her chair, her face an angry rash of mottled scarlet, had bent again to her papers.

She began to be treated with wary respect. Neither dislike nor respect worried her. She had her own private life, an interest in finding out what others kept hidden, in making discoveries. Probing into other people’s secrets became a lifelong obsession, the substratum and direction of her whole career. She became a stalker of minds. Eighteen years after she had left Silford Green, the suburb had been enthralled by a notorious murder. She had studied the grainy pictures of victim and killer in the papers with no particular interest. The killer confessed within days, was taken away, the case closed. As an investigative journalist, by now becoming increasingly successful, she was interested less by Silford Green’s brief notoriety than by her own more subtle and more lucrative and fascinating lines of enquiry.