“Her, right.” With no lessening of puzzlement Roy said “Why were you seeing her?”

“She wanted me to see someone she said was watching her.”

“Did you see her?” Bella said. “Miss Dennison, I mean.”

“Saw her, but I was too late.” To stop the phone trembling I laid it on the dashboard. “It’s as if history’s repeating itself,” I said in the hope of rendering the memory less immediate. “She’d fallen from the tower block just as my aunt did.”

“Is she dead as well?” Roy said.

If this seemed callous, he’d known her no better than I had. “Very,” I said as if this might fend off the recollection.

“Did you speak to her, Patrick?”

“She’d gone by the time I got there. I did talk to her on the phone, but she didn’t really say much. As I said, she wanted me to see for myself.”

“Why did she go up the block?” Roy said. “I thought she didn’t want anything to do with it or anybody in there.”

“I think she may have been running away from whoever she called me to see.”

“Maybe she was just pretending to be down on drugs. Maybe she was after some and that’s why she went in.”

This struck me as wildly unlikely, and I was about to say so when the enlarged voice announced a bus for Mountfoot. “There’s ours now,” Roy said, and dutifully “Will you be okay, dad?”

“I’ll do my best to be,” I said, which felt like a sly rebuke for leaving me on my own. Before I could reassure him or myself, he’d gone. So he and Bella were on their way to yet another site from Thelma’s journal. I gripped the wheel and then rested my hands on it, all of which gradually helped them to stop shaking. After a while I started the car, though I felt as if I was distracting myself from some recent observation I’d failed to make. If there was something I ought to have noticed, I couldn’t help dreading what it might be.

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Beneath the Trees

“What’s wrong, dad?”

“Nothing, I hope. Why does anything have to be wrong?”

“Just you never call me this early.”

“Apologies if I woke you up.”

“You didn’t. I’m making coffee. You might have woken someone else, though.”

“Apologies to your mother if I did.”

“Anyway, I’m here now if you need to talk.”

“I just wanted to be sure of catching you before you head off wherever you’re going today.”

“Okay,” Roy said after a pause like a withheld answer, “you did.”

“Where might that be?”

“Dad, why do you keep wanting to know?”