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The
Mail
had a double-page spread. That school photo of Jenny and one of Diamond.’
    ‘Ah, so Legs made the big time for a day, did he?’
    ‘It was the parents I felt sorry for. You know how the media hound people. They were there on Monday. Giving a press conference. It was awful. Just awful. Some bastard actually asked Mr Hyde how he felt. Can you imagine that? He was younger than I expected, Mr Hyde. Have you met them?’
    ‘Once, I think. I wasn’t smitten. She was something of a cow, I thought.’ He held his hand up. ‘I know, you shouldn’t speak ill of the parents of the dead. But life has to go on.’
    ‘Is that why you’re doing this?’ she asked him.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Investigating her death?’
    He chortled. ‘I’m not investigating her death,’ he said.
    ‘Well, what else would you call it, then?’
    ‘This?’ he asked. ‘Moving mountains, my dear girl, that’s all.’
    ‘I see.’ She looked up at him. ‘And tell me, Mr Maxwell, Mr I-Don’t-Want-To-Get-Involved Maxwell, whose mountains are they? Somebody else’s? Or yours?’
    He looked down at her, at her eyes bright in the firelight. Then he nodded. ‘They’re mine,’ he said. ‘My mountains.’
    She nodded. ‘Yours. Where will you start?’
    ‘That “you” has an appalling singularity about it, Sylvia darling. What happened to the “we” of earlier this evening, Kemo Sabe?’
    She rested her chin on his knee. ‘You can call round whenever you want to, Max,’ she told him. ‘I’ll burn the midnight oil with you. I’ll give you the benefit – for what it’s worth – of my feminine intuition. But more than that … No. You see, I saw their faces, the Hydes. I saw what it’s done to them. I’m not cut out for investigative journalism. Leave that to Fleet Street or wherever it is they keep journalists now. And the police. Leave it to the police.’
    ‘Is that what you’re telling me to do?’ he asked. ‘You just told me they’re my mountains. Jenny Hyde was my girl. As much as she was the Hydes’. Nobody kills one of my girls and says, “Lump it.” I’m not made that way.’
    She was smiling at him, her eyes glistening. ‘I know you’re not,’ she said, an iron-hard lump in her throat. Then she knelt up and kissed him hard on the lips. ‘Take care of yourself, Peter Maxwell. Because … because I’m afraid.’
    He smiled and held her face in his big, comfortable hands. ‘Why?’ he asked her. ‘Why are you afraid?’
    She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I’m afraid of the bogeyman I used to think lived in the folds of my curtains. And the gurgle of the plumbing when I pulled the chain as a kid. But most of all … most of all, I’m afraid of the Red House, Max. I’m afraid of the Red House.’

3
    It had been the
Clarion
once, at a time when newspapers were new and editors men of the people. Now it was the
Advertiser
, and the change of title reflected the way of the world. Maxwell had been to the front office before to look up old stories on the microfiche. That was an eternity ago when Leighford ran that ghastly Mode 3 CSE course on local history. It should have been a good one, but unfortunately, Mode 3 was synonymous with moron and the hapless Waynes and Traceys who were expected to tackle it couldn’t cope with the present, never mind the past.
    He asked at the desk in the palatial new offices. Whatever the depth of the recession, he noticed the media hadn’t felt it. A middle-aged woman looked at him suspiciously, then with reluctance collected a bundle of blue gels and switched on the machine for him. It was quicker, she said, than ploughing through the paper itself. Anyway, it had been the lead story for three weeks and there was the letters page. Easier to find it quickly on the screen.
    Maxwell forced himself to it. What had wood pulp done that the world so scorned it now? Why did an entire generation think it right to spend a fortune on computers and nothing on books?