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the entrance was her friend, Jane Miller. As Kathryn approached she could see in her face that the news was not going to be good.

 
    5. Accident and Emergency.
     
     
    Accident and Emergency was always essentially the same, Terry thought. Ambulances and doctor’s cars outside, a receptionist asking someone to fill out a form, a collection of patients and their relatives on plastic chairs in the waiting room vacantly gazing at the television chattering mindlessly to itself between the vending machines. As usual, Terry marvelled at how many of these people seemed perfectly uninjured, malingerers apparently content to wait two hours simply to be treated for a headache or a tetanus booster injection. So trivial and mundane it seemed. And yet Terry could never walk through this place without fear. For at any time the most dreadful injuries could be wheeled though the door only few feet away, the paramedics buzzing with concentration and energy to stop their patient’s life ebbing away.
    But it was most painful, Terry thought, for the relatives who came in here in shock, their minds so inflamed with anxiety that they perceived everything with the sensitivity of someone who had lost two layers of skin. So it had seemed, at least, to Terry when he had come here for the death of his wife, Mary, whose body had been extracted from her car like so much butcher’s meat that was still, faintly, breathing. Three years later he could still vividly recall every word the doctor had spoken, every touch of the nurse’s hand, every embarrassed, sympathetic glance. He even remembered the two people arguing in the waiting room on the way out about changing the channel on the TV.
    A & E had no memory of Mary, of course, but Terry had forgotten nothing. Every time he came here he trembled. And today something similar would begin, he assumed, for the relatives of this young girl, Shelley Walters.
    He and Tracy were met at reception by a nurse who escorted them along a corridor with red and yellow lines to a doctor in a crumpled white coat, who was entering something on a computer. As he turned to face them Terry noticed streaks of blood on his coat, and the look of resignation and grey weariness on the absurdly young face.
    ‘Shelley Walters, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid we couldn’t save her.’
    Well, you should have tried harder, a voice buried deep in Terry’s subconscious screamed. You should never give up, never! This isn’t just a day’s work, it’s a life.
    ‘I see.’ Terry nodded slowly, glancing away from the doctor into a room full of medical technology, where a nurse was drawing the screens around a bed. ‘Was it suicide?’
    The doctor spread his hands apologetically. ‘That’ll be for the coroner to say, I suppose, after the post-mortem. But at first sight it looks like that, certainly. Wrists slit, massive loss of blood. Though she’d also nearly drowned in the process. We thought we’d recovered her from that when we lost her, unfortunately.’
    ‘So what did she die of, exactly?’
    ‘Heart failure, basically. Probably caused by blood loss and shock. Though the drowning couldn’t have helped either.’
    And so the main question. ‘Could it be murder?’
    The young doctor shrugged, again in a weary, off-hand way that made part of Terry want to pick him up and shake him hard. But then he’d probably been on duty for twelve hours already, seen other deaths and injuries.
    ‘That’s for you to decide, not me. It’s a possibility, I suppose. But as I say we’ll learn more from the post mortem ...’
    They were still talking when Kathryn appeared. Jane Miller had met her at the front door but Kathryn ran ahead of her, still in her dark blue tracksuit and trainers, until she saw the doctor talking to a man and a woman whom she knew, instantly, must be police officers. She was still half-running, partly to keep ahead of Jane and avoid hearing what she feared she might say, partly because if she kept moving,