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Simon. The DNA match.
The knife wound in Laura Cryer's chest.' She was as vigilant in defending her certainties as Simon was in examining his doubts. The combination wasn't always comfortable.
    `Did you interview the family? The Fancourts?'
    `God, if only we'd thought of that! Of course we bloody did. David
Fancourt and Laura Cryer had been separated for several years by the
time she was killed. They were in the process of getting a divorce and
he was engaged to his second wife. He had no reason to want Cryer
dead.'
    `Alimony? Custody?' She'd avoided mentioning Alice by name. It
could have been a coincidence.
    `Fancourt's not exactly strapped for cash. You've seen the house.
And why assume he'd have wanted full custody? He still got to see his
son, and he had his new romance to think of. Having a kid around fulltime might have been a bit of a passion-killer.'

    She had the air of somebody answering these questions for the first
time, which worried Simon. `The family would have closed ranks,' he
said. `They always do, especially when there's a prime suspect like Beer
in the frame. It's much easier to assume it's the outsider.'
    "`The outsider!"' Charlie sneered. `Aw, you make him sound all
sweet and lonely. He's a fucking drug addict piece of shit. Simon, come
off it, for Christ's sake. You know as well as I do that drugs are
always involved. There are three kinds of murders: domestics blown
up out of control, sex attacks, and drug-dealing scrotes with shooters
waging turf wars. But basically, most of them usually boil down to
drugs at some level.'
    `Usually that's true. But not always.' Simon's body and mind felt
numb, anaesthetised. What did he know now that he hadn't before?
There was a difference between facts and truth. Very fucking profound.
It was too easy to hide behind words. Movement now seemed impossible. Talking to Charlie had trapped him in the cerebral, the theoretical. He was discussing a woman he had never met, either alive or dead.
He might never get up out of his chair.
    `Okay, then, I'm listening. Why would David Fancourt want to kill
Laura Cryer? Why?' Charlie demanded.
    `They were separated. Did anyone ask why? Maybe the reason
they split up was relevant. There might have been some animosity
between them.' Coward, said the voice in his head. Do something.
    Charlie chewed the inside of her lip. `True,' she said. `And there
equally might not. Plenty of people separate because they fall out of love,
but they still like each other. Or so I'm told. Let's face it, you and I know
sod all about marriage. I'm sure the way we imagine it is nothing like the
real thing.' A knowing smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.
    Simon cast about for a plausible change of subject. Being single was
something Charlie thought they had in common, but Simon preferred
to think of himself as not yet attached. Single sounded too defensive.
If you felt defensive, you really didn't want to sound it.
    Charlie slept with a lot of men and was vocal about it at all the wrong times. Like now, when Simon had no space in his head for her
comic flippancy. If she hadn't mentioned sex yet, then she was about
to. She made a point of turning her love life into entertainment for her
team, which was enough to get Colin Sellers and Chris Gibbs in on
time every day for the next instalment. Was there a new one, daily? It
sometimes felt that way. And there was little love involved as far as
Simon could tell.

    He didn't like the thought of men mistreating Charlie. He couldn't
understand why she allowed so many to use and discard her. She
deserved better. He'd raised it once, tentatively, and she had pounced
on him, insisting that she was the one who did the using and discarding, the one in control.
    Simon shook his head. Charlie could distract him too easily. Alice
was the one who was missing. She was still missing. Nobody had come
to tell them it was a mistake.
    `You're wasting your time and mine with all this,