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conscious.
    “Jane …?”
    “How long have you been here? Who did this to you? Oh God, you rang me and I didn’t realise.”
    “I, I think … this morning? Someone rang the doorbell and … just … I couldn’t manage to get up again to the phone … I … thought you might …”
    “Darling, I’m going to call the ambulance and the police. I’ll get a blanket but I won’t move you, they’d better do that … hold on a moment.”
    Every room that she glanced into as she ran upstairs had been ransacked and overturned. She felt sick.
    “This will keep you warm. They’ll be here soon.”
    “I am not going to hospital—”
    But Jane was already calling the emergency services.
    “I’ll die if I go to hospital.”
    “Much more likely to die if you don’t.”
    Jane sat on the floor and took her mother’s hand. She was a tall, strong woman, with grey hair usually coiled up into an idiosyncratic bun. Now, it was down and anyhow; her features, so full of character, so well defined, with the beaky nose and high cheekbones andforehead, seemed to have sunk in, so that she looked closer to eighty than the sixty-eight she was. In a few hours, old age and vulnerability had come upon her, changing her terribly.
    “Are you in pain?”
    “It’s … hard to tell … I feel numb …”
    “What kind of man was it? How did it happen for goodness’ sake?”
    “Two … youths … I heard a car … It’s difficult to remember.”
    “Don’t worry. I’m just angry with myself that I didn’t come sooner.”
    It was only then that the old look crossed her mother’s face, the one which Jane had come to know so well over the past few years. Magda’s eyes fell, briefly, on her collar and there it was, even now, after everything that had happened—the look of scorn and of disbelief.
    Magda Fitzroy was an atheist of the old school. Atheist, socialist, psychiatrist, rationalist, formed in the classic Hampstead mould. Where her daughter’s Christianity, let alone her desire to be ordained a priest, had come from was to her both a mystery and a matter for ridicule. And then the look was gone. Her mother lay, hurt and afraid, in shock and Jane felt for her; she let the paramedics in and told them the little she knew.
    One of them examined the cuts on Magda’s head. “I’m Larry,” he said, “and this is Al. What’s your name, my love?”
    “I am Dr Magda Fitzroy and I am not your love.”
    “Aw, pity about that, Magda.”
    “Dr Fitzroy.”
    He glanced up at Jane. “She always like this?”
    “Oh yes. Ignore her at your peril.”
    “You all right?”
    Jane had sat down suddenly, hit by the realisation that her mother had been robbed and attacked in her home one quiet weekday morning while the world went about its business, and that she might well have been dead. She began to cry.

Six
    The Holly Bush was like something out of a Hammer Horror film, Ed thought, driving up the steep slope to the forecourt. It stood above the fast main road, ugly, turreted and, at night, lit with neon and strings of fairy lights. At Christmas, an illuminated Santa with sleigh and reindeer leered out at the passing traffic, outlined in lights that chased each other endlessly round. Enough to give you a bloody migraine if you stared at them long enough. Only no one did. They shot past, or they were up the slope and in through the door.
    It smelled the way that kind of place always smelled, and in the day it looked frowsty and peeling. At least at night the lights gave it a bit of glamour. Not that Ed had been there more than a couple of times at night. Work and pleasure, such pleasure asthere was coming to drink in the Holly Bush, didn’t mix.
    “Brian?”
    Someone was whistling at the back. There had been one vehicle in the car park. It wasn’t a time of year for the sort of people who stopped overnight at the Holly Bush, the reps and lower-pond-life businessmen. The hotel had five bedrooms, which Ed had never seen, three bars, a