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flowerbed and the grass beyond. Now exposed to the breeze, the curtains billowed a little but didn’t give me a view into the room. I looked over my shoulder to check there was no one creeping up behind me, then put my ear close to the fabric and listened.
    All was silence.
    This was where I was going to have to take a big risk. For all I knew, one of my pursuers could be just the other side of the curtains waiting for me to show my face. I could be dead in the next few seconds. My heart was beating hard in my chest and I had to steady my breathing to prevent it being audible.
    Slowly, very slowly, I parted the curtains a few inches. This time I could smell the death in the room. It came at me in a pungent, sour wave, like meat left out to rot in the hot sun, and I had to fight off nausea. I couldn’t see the bodies from the angle I was at, but the room looked empty. After taking another look behind me, I parted the curtains a few inches more, lifted my leg over the window sill and climbed inside.
    I’d done a good job of being silent, and the carpet beneath my feet was thick enough to muffle my footfalls as I crept further inside.
    I looked over at the two corpses. There was a second hole in the back of Tom’s head where Pen must have shot him again, just to make sure, and this time he was actually dead. It seemed ironic that he’d saved my life by refusing to die quietly – a fact I was sure would have annoyed him if he’d known anything about it. Still, I felt an odd pang of gratitude.
    Jane lay on her side where she’d been pulled from the chair, one arm sprawled behind her in an almost flamboyant gesture. Her gown had fallen open, revealing a full, shapely breast – a sight that looked so wrong against the terrible damage to her face. She’d been a fraud. But why? What had been her motive? I felt a familiar wave of frustration as I moved across the carpet, stopping at the half-open door to look round it.
    Which was when I saw Pen.
    She was standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall with her back to me, watching the kitchen door, the gun down by her side. As I’d anticipated, she was waiting to see if I’d come in the back way again. Twelve feet separated us, but the hallway floor was polished mahogany and it creaked. If I tried to creep up behind her, I’d never make it.
    And then, as I watched, she turned round in my direction.
    Thankfully her movement was casual enough to give me time to pull my head back behind the door without being spotted.
    I heard her yawn and, as I watched through the narrow half-inch gap between the door and its jamb, she turned back round again, and sighed wearily. Clearly she was tired of waiting around. The problem was, I was just going to have to stay put and keep quiet until she decided I wasn’t coming back.
    A minute passed. Then two. I considered retreating towards the window and hiding behind the chaise longue where I’d be less exposed if she decided to come back into the room, but before I could make my decision, I heard the crackle of static. Through the gap in the door I could see that Pen had a two-way radio in her free hand.
    ‘I’m not sure how much longer we should give it,’ she whispered into it. ‘The phone keeps ringing, and that’s not a good sign.’
    Which was a surprise to me. The landline rarely rang. Once a week at most. The only times I answered, it was people trying to sell me stuff.
    I heard a male voice talking back but couldn’t hear what he was saying, then she was speaking again. ‘OK,’ she hissed, ‘pick me up in ten minutes.’
    She replaced the radio in her jacket and then, without warning, turned and strode into the lounge.
    I didn’t even have time to be scared. As she came past the door, barely a foot away from me, I shot out of my hiding place, grabbed her gun arm at the wrist with one hand and wrapped my free arm round her neck, my fingers pressing decisively into soft skin. It was as if I was being piloted by my