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cross-examiner.
    ‘Who?’
    She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘There was no one else except her father, and he
was at work. The police had him thoroughly checked
and his alibi was unbreakable.’
    ‘There was Olive’s lover.’
    He stared at her.
    ‘She told me she’d had an abortion. Presumably,
then, she must have had a lover.’
    He found that very entertaining. ‘Poor Olive.’ He
laughed. ‘Well, I guess an abortion is as good a way
as any of keeping her end up. Especially’ – he laughed
again – ‘if everyone believes her. I shouldn’t be too
gullible, if I were you.’
    She smiled coldly. ‘Perhaps it’s you who is being
gullible by subscribing to the cheap male view that a
woman like Olive could not attract a lover.’
    Deedes studied her set face and wondered what was driving her. ‘You’re right, Miss Leigh, it was
cheap, and I apologise.’ He raised his hands briefly,
then dropped them again. ‘But this is the first I have
heard about an abortion. Let’s just say it strikes me
as a little unlikely. And somewhat convenient, perhaps?
It’s not something you can ever really check, is
it, not without Olive’s permission. If laymen were
allowed to browse through other people’s medical
records some very delicate secrets might be exposed.’
    Roz regretted her waspish remark. Deedes was a
nicer man than Crew and hadn’t deserved it. ‘Olive
mentioned an abortion. I assumed the lover. But perhaps
she was raped. Babies can be conceived as easily
in hate as in love.’
    He shrugged. ‘Beware of being used, Miss Leigh.
Olive Martin dominated the court the day she
appeared in it. I had the impression then, and still
have it, that it was we who were dancing to her tune
not she to ours.’

    Dawlington was a small eastern suburb of Southampton,
once an isolated village, now swallowed up
in the great urban expansion of the twentieth century.
It maintained an identity of a sort by the busy trunk-roads
that gave it tarmac boundaries but, even so, the
place was easy to miss. Only a tired peeling shop sign,
advertising Dawlington Newsagents , alerted Roz to
the fact that she had left one suburb and entered another. She drew into the kerb before a left-hand
turning and consulted her map. She was, presumably,
in the High Street and the road to the left – she
squinted at the sign – was Ainsley Street. She ran her
finger across the grid. ‘Ainsley Street,’ she muttered.
‘Come on, you bugger, where are you? OK. Leven
Road. First right, second left.’ With a glance in her
driving mirror, she pulled out into the traffic and
turned right.
    Olive’s story, she thought, grew odder by the
minute, as she studied number twenty-two, Leven
Road, from her parked car. Mr Crew had said the
house was unsaleable. She had imagined something
out of a Gothic novel, twelve months of dereliction
and decay since the death of Robert Martin, a house
condemned by the haunting horror in its kitchen.
Instead, the reality was a cheerful little semi, freshly
painted, with pink, white, and red geraniums nodding
in boxes beneath its windows. Who, she wondered,
had bought it? Who was brave enough (or ghoulish
enough?) to live with the ghosts of that tragic family?
She double-checked the address from press cuttings
she had put together that morning in the archives
basement of the local newspaper. There was no mistake.
A black and white photograph of ‘The House
of Horror’ showed this same neat semi, but without
its window-boxes.
    She climbed out of the car and crossed the road.
The house remained stubbornly silent to her ring on the doorbell, so she went next door and tried there. A
young woman answered with a sleepy toddler clinging
round her neck. ‘Yes?’
    ‘Hello,’ said Roz, ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’ She
indicated towards her right. ‘It’s your neighbours I
really want to talk to but there’s no one in. Have you
any idea when they might