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‘Winds you up? Winds you up? You put me and Chris in jeopardy and you expect me to care about winding you up?’ She was so close now I could feel the warmth of her breath on my mouth.

‘We’ll talk about it inside,’ I said. ‘And I mean talk, not shout.’ I ducked under the hand that was moving towards my shoulder, swivelled on the balls of my feet and walked smartly up the path. It was follow me or lose me.

Alexis was right behind me as I opened the inside door and marched into the kitchen. Mercifully, she was silent. Without asking, I headed for the fridge freezer and made us both stiff drinks. I pushed hers down the worktop towards her and after a long moment, she picked it up and took a deep swallow. ‘Can we start again?’ I asked.

‘I hired you to make some discreet inquiries and cover our backs, not stir up a hornet’s nest,’ Alexis said, normal volume resumed.

‘My professional opinion is that talking to other women in the same position as you is not exposing you to any danger, particularly since I have not identified you as my client to any of the women I have spoken to,’ I said formally, trying to take the heat out of the situation. I knew it was fear not fury that really lay behind her display. In her stressed-out place, I’d probably have behaved in exactly the same way, best friend or not. ‘I had a perfectly credible cover story.’

‘Yeah, I heard that load of toffee about lesbian history,’ Alexis said derisively, lighting a cigarette. She knows I hate smoking in my kitchen, but she clearly reckoned this was one time she was going to get away with it. ‘No flaming wonder you set off more alarm bells than all the burglars in Greater Manchester. It’s not on, girl. I asked you to make sure we weren’t going to be exposed because of Sarah Blackstone’s murder. I didn’t expect you to go round putting the fear of God into half the lesbian mothers in Manchester. What the hell did you think you were playing at?’

It was a good question, and one I didn’t have an answer for yet. The one thing I knew for sure was that this wasn’t the right time to tell Alexis that Sarah Blackstone had added her mystery ingredient to the primordial soup. I was far from certain there was ever going to be a right time, but I know a wrong one when I see it. ‘Who told you anyway?’ I stalled.

‘Jude Webster rang me. She assumed that because you had the names and addresses of all the women involved that you were kosher. But she thought she’d better warn me in case I didn’t want Chris bothered in her condition. So what’s the game?’

Inspiration had provided me with an attempt at an answer. ‘I wanted to make sure none of them knew Blackstone’s real identity,’ I said. ‘If they had, they might have contacted her at her home under her real name, and there could be a record of that. A letter, an entry in an address book. I need to be certain that there isn’t a chink in the armour that could lead the police back to this group of women if they get suspicious about the burglar theory and start routine background inquiries.’ I spread my hands in front of me and tried for wide-eyed innocence.

Alexis looked doubtful. ‘But they’re not going to, are they? I’ve been keeping an eye on the local papers, and there’s no sign the police are even thinking it might have been anything more than a burglary that went wrong. What makes you think it was?’

I shrugged. ‘If anybody she worked with had found out what she was up to, they had a great motive for getting rid of her. A scandal like this associated with the IVF unit at St Hilda’s would have the place closed down overnight.’ This was thinner than Kate Moss, but given what I couldn’t tell Alexis, it was the best I could do.

‘Hey, I know it’s hard getting a decent job these days, but I can’t get my head round the idea of somebody knocking off a doctor just to avoid signing on,’ Alexis protested. Her anger had evaporated now I had anaesthetized her fears and her sense of humour had kicked in.

‘Heat of the moment? She’s arguing with somebody? They grab a knife?’

‘I suppose,’ Alexis conceded. ‘OK, I accept you did what you did with the best of motives. Only it stops here, all right? No more terrorizing poor innocent women, all right?’

That’s the trouble when friends become clients. You lose the power to ignore them.

Midnight, and we were arranged tastefully round the outer office of Mortensen and Brannigan. As soon as Richard had mentioned the f-word to Tony Tambo, the manager of Manassas had insisted that we meet somewhere nobody from clubland could possibly see him talking to a woman who’d already been publicly asking questions on the subject. Otherwise, flyposting was definitely off the agenda. He’d vetoed a rendezvous in a Chinese restaurant, a casino, an all-night caff in the industrial zone over in Trafford Park and the motorway services area. Richard’s house was off limits because it was next door to mine. But the office was OK. I couldn’t work out the logic in that until Richard explained.

‘Now they’ve converted the neighbouring building into a student hall of residence, if anybody sees Tony coming out of your building, they’ll assume he’s been having a leg-over with some teenage raver,’ he said.

‘And I bet he wouldn’t mind that,’ I said drily.

‘Show me a man over thirty who’d object to people making that assumption and I’ll show you a liar,’ Richard replied wistfully.

So we were sitting with the blinds drawn, the only light coming from the standard lamp in the corner and Shelley’s desk lamp. Tony Tambo was hunched into one corner of the sofa, somehow managing to make his six feet of muscles look half their usual size. Although it was cold enough in the office for me to have kept my jacket on, the slanting light revealed a sheen of sweat on skin the colour of a cooked chestnut that covered Tony’s shaved skull. He was wearing immaculate taupe chinos, black Wannabes, a black silk T-shirt that seemed moulded to his pectorals and a beige jacket whose soft folds revealed it was made of some mixture of natural materials like silk and cashmere.

It’s a mystery to me, silk. For centuries it was a rare, exotic fabric, worn only by the seriously rich. Then, almost overnight, somewhere around 1992, it was everywhere. From Marks and Spencer to market stalls, you couldn’t get away from the stuff. Kids on council estates living on benefits were suddenly wearing silk shirts. What I want to know is where it all came from. Were the Chinese giving silkworms fertility drugs? Had they been stockpiling it since the Boxer rebellion? Or is there some deeper, darker secret lurking behind the silk explosion? And why does nobody know the answer? One of these days, I’m going to drive over to Macclesfield, grip the curator of the Silk Museum by the throat and demand an answer.

I was sitting in an armchair at right angles to the opposite end of the sofa from Tony. Richard was in Shelley’s chair, his feet on the desk. The pool of light illuminated him to somewhere around mid-thigh, then he disappeared into darkness. The whole scenario looked like a straight lift from a bad French cop movie. I decided pretty quickly that there weren’t going to be any subtitles to help me out. The questions were down to me.

‘I really appreciate you talking to me, Tony,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well,’ he mumbled. ‘I ain’t said nothing yet. It’s edgy out there right now, you know? Stability’s gone, know what I mean? It’s not a good time to stick your head above the parapet, people are too twitchy.’

‘Anything you tell me, nobody’s going to know it came from you,’ I tried.

He snorted. ‘So you say. But if some bruiser’s got you up against the wall, how do I know you ain’t going to give him me?’

‘You don’t know for sure.’ I gestured round the office, which we’ve spent enough on to impress corporate clients. ‘But I didn’t get a gaff like this by dropping people in the shit. Anyway, in my experience, if some bruiser’s got you up against the wall, he’s going to do what he’s going to do. So there’s not a lot of point in giving him any more bodies. It doesn’t save you any grief.’