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most nights, his mind feeding on the great wrong that had been done, to dream, as always, of revenge.
    Jake was singing as he washed the breakfast dishes, his shirt sleeves rolled up. It was not an image associated with his tough, public one.
    The kitchen windows were steamy, bubbles flew as he squirted detergent into the hot water with abandon. He enjoyed washing up, he said it was therapeutic. He sang in the kitchen like other people sang in the bath, ritually, his not very tuneful baritone belting out songs from his youth, or from the latest show.
    ' Yesterday. All my troubles seemed so far away – ' he sang under his breath, off key, plunging muscular, hairy forearms into the sinkful of hot, soapy water.
    'You've put too much Fairy Liquid in,' Christine said, annoyed, picking up a teatowel and wiping the suds off a plate. 'And what's wrong with the dishwasher?'
    'Doesn't do the saucepans properly.'
    'You could wash up twenty times with that amount.'
    'If that's all you're bothered about, I'll buy you another bottle, for God's sake. And I believe in yes-ter-day.'
    'Jake –!'
    Last night they'd been lovers and this morning here they were, washing up and bickering like any old married couple, she thought, dispirited, as she turned to put a pile of plates away.
    'Hey, what's the matter?'
    She felt his arms round her waist from the back and leaned into him. 'Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But Jake -'
    'Hm?' He nuzzled his chin into her shoulder.
    She turned herself round in his arms. 'Jake, we have to talk. Please don't try to put me off again.'
    'About?'
    'About Cassie. I think we ought to know more about her.' She had a sense of urgency about this that she didn't quite understand. 'I'd like to meet her mother.'
    Jake was silent for a while. 'I need notice of that question,' he said eventually, 'though personally I don't see any point in it. If it's Matt you're worried about, forget it. He's more interested at the moment in long-legged blondes with nothing much between their ears than in Cassie Andreas.'
    'I'm not worried in that way! Not when their sole topic of conversation's compression ratios and overhead camshafts and differentials-'
    Jake gave a snort of laughter.
    'But I'd still like to meet that mother of hers.'
    'Leave it. Let things take their course.' Jake was terse.
    There was a warning there, if she had heeded it. 'Anyway, I'll bet you wouldn't – like to meet her, that is. It seems to me that one Andreas is more than enough.'

4
    It was shady in the plot at the back of the brick house above the railway embankment, and quiet enough between trains, though they ran for most of the twenty-four hours, the big Intercity ones whooshing by every half hour, gone in an instant. Each time any one of them passed, the unsteady little house, erected by the railway with other, now derelict buildings at the turn of the century for some obscure and long-forgotten purpose, seemed to have moved one step nearer total extinction.
    Outside at the back, there were three old apple trees which, in a garden of this size, made the kitchen as dark as Hades, but they were already heavy with the early-ripened fruit of this hot summer. A great many apples had dropped off and lay rotting on the ground, giving off a boozy, cidery smell. The untended, uncut grass where Naomi walked was shiveringly sensuous and cool under her bare feet. They were long and elegant feet, brown but not very clean.
    She was wearing an ankle length granny print cotton skirt with a deep frill round the hem that she'd had for maybe twenty years, and an embroidered cotton blouse brought home from a far-off holiday in the Greek islands with that painter whose name she'd forgotten. She'd had a lot of style when she was younger and still had when she took the trouble, though she was beginning to do that less and less. Her hair was grey and untidy, tucked carelessly behind her ears. She had a long, aquiline face and she would never see forty again. It wasn't until you