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bright.
    “I’ll get there, young Reverend,” Wilfred Armer said, squeezing Jane’s hand. “I’ll be blowing out all those candles, you’ll see.”
    Jane doubted if he would live through the next twenty-four hours. He wanted her to stay with him, to listen as he wheezed out story after story about his boyhood, of fishing in Lafferton’s canal and swimming in the river.
    As she left the building, she switched on her mobile again. It beeped a message. “Jane?” Magda Fitzroy’s voice sounded distant and strange. “Are you there? Jane?”
    She pressed “call.” There was no reply and this time the answerphone did not come on. She sat under a tree, wondering what to do. There was only one of her mother’s Hampstead neighbours whose number Jane knew and he was in America for three months. The house on the other side belonged to a foreignbusinessman who seemed never to be there. The police? The hospitals? She hesitated because it seemed too dramatic to involve them when she was not even sure if anything was wrong.
    The clinic. That number was on her phone. Other numbers might be somewhere among her things which were still in boxes in the garden cottage of the Precentor’s house.
    A boy bounced past her on a bicycle doing wheelies over the cobbles. Jane smiled at him. He did not respond but when he had gone by, turned and stared over his shoulder. She was used to it. Here she was, a girl, wearing jeans, and a dog collar. People were still surprised.
    “Heathside Clinic.”
    “It’s Jane Fitzroy Is my mother there by any chance?”
    Magda Fitzroy still saw a few patients at her former workplace, though she had officially retired the year before and was now working with a fellow child psychiatrist on an academic textbook. She missed the clinic, Jane knew, missed the people and her own role there.
    “Sorry to keep you. No one’s seen Dr Fitzroy today, but she wasn’t expected. She hasn’t any appointments here at all this week.”
    Jane tried her mother’s number several times during the course of the next hour. Nothing. Still no reply and still no answer machine.
    Then she went across to the deanery. Geoffrey Peach was out and she left a message. By the time she wasaway from Lafferton heading towards the motorway it was early afternoon.
    The London traffic was dense and she sat on Haverstock Hill for twenty minutes without moving. From time to time, she dialled her mother’s number. There was never a reply and she turned the corner into Heath Place wishing she had called the police after all.
    As she drew up outside the Georgian cottage she saw that the front door was ajar.
    For a second Jane thought the hall seemed as usual; then she realised that the lamp usually on the walnut table was lying broken on the floor. The table itself had gone.
    “Mother?”
    Magda spent much of her time in the study overlooking the garden. It was a room Jane loved, with its purple walls and squashy, plum-covered sofa, her mother’s papers and books flowing from desk to chairs to floor. The room had a particular smell, partly because the windows were almost always open, even in winter, so that the garden scents drifted in, and also because her mother sometimes smoked small cigars, whose smoke had melded into the fabric of the room over the years.
    The study had been taken apart. The walls had been stripped of their pictures, the shelves of every piece of old china, and both the desk and a small table had had the drawers pulled out and overturned. There was an unmistakable smell of urine.
    It was only as Jane stood looking round in shock, trying to take everything in, that she heard a slight sound from the kitchen.
    Magda was lying on the floor beside the stove. One leg was buckled beneath her and there was dried blood on her head, matted into her hair and crusted down the side of her face. She was grey, her mouth pinched in.
    Jane knelt and took her hand. It was cold and her mother’s pulse was weak, but she was