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been.”
    “An open blade?”
    Flinching, Fletcher nodded.
    “Can you remember how long?”
    “No, I … No, I can’t be certain.”
    “This long?” Naylor held his Biro before Fletcher’s face, tight between the tip of his middle finger and the ball of his thumb.
    “Blood pressure’s fine.”
    Fletcher closed his eyes.
    The nurse eased the thermometer out from beneath his arm and held it against the light. “Well?” she said, glancing down towards Naylor with a half-grin.
    “Well, what?”
    “Temperature, what d’you think?”
    “Look,” said Naylor, a touch of exasperation.
    “Thirty-seven point eight.”
    “Smaller,” said Fletcher weakly, opening his eyes.
    “You’re doing fine,” the nurse said, touching his shoulder lightly, almost a squeeze. “Soon be up and about. Dancing.” She looked at Naylor. “The doctor here, he’s a great dancer”
    “It was smaller,” Fletcher said again, an effort to breathe now, an effort to talk. “Smaller. Like a scalpel.”

Six
    Lynnie love, I know your job keeps you awful busy, but it do seem such a long time since your dad and me seen you. Try and come home, even if it’s just for a couple of days. That’d mean a lot to your dad specially. I worry about him, Lynnie, I do. More and more into himself he’s getting. Depressed. Sometimes it’s all I can do to get him to talk, sit down to his supper. Make an effort, there’s a love .
    Her mother’s words jostled inside Lynn Kellogg’s head as she crossed University Boulevard, dark green of the rhododendron bushes at her back. Ahead of her was the brighter green of the Science Park, technology disguised as an oversized child’s toy. Lynn had a friend she’d gone through school with, bright, but not much more intelligent than Lynn herself. “My God! You can’t be serious? The police? Whatever d’you want to throw your life away like that for?” The friend had gone to Cambridge Poly, got interested in computers, now she was earning thirty thousand a year plus, living with a zoologist in a converted windmill outside Ely.
    Thrown her life away, is that what Lynn had done? She didn’t think so, glad most of the time that she was in the job, enjoying it, something more worthwhile maybe than writing software programs to record the fertility and sexing of Rhode Island Reds. What did it matter, what other people thought? The neighbors in her block of housing association flats, who only spoke to her if someone had been tampering with their locks, trying to break into their parked car. Patients in the surgery, where Lynn was waiting for her check-up and a new supply of pills; nudging one another, staring, know what she is, don’t you? The way most men she spoke to in a bar or pub would evaporate at the mention of what she did, as if by magic.
    Lynnie, no! You aren’t serious?
    The job.
    She checked the address in her notebook and looked up at the front of the house. Mid-terraced, the one to its right was a prime example of seventies stone-cladding, that to the left sported a shiny new door, complete with brass knocker and mail box.
    Twenty-seven.
    Two curtains had been draped unevenly across the downstairs window, probably held up by pins. Among the half-dozen bottles clustered on the step was one ripe with yellowing, crusted milk At least, thought Lynn, she didn’t live like this.
    The girl who finally came to the door was a couple of inches taller than herself, even in woolly socks. She had near-black hair to her shoulders, unbrushed so that it made a ragged frame around the almost perfect oval of her face. She was slender in tapered black jeans, with a good figure that two jumpers—purple and green—failed to disguise. Her eyes were raw from lack of sleep or tears or both. Looking like that, she’d get the sympathy vote as well.
    “Karen Archer?”
    The girl nodded, stepping back to let Lynn enter. She scarcely glanced at Lynn’s warrant card, motioning her past the hall table with its telephone