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been that afternoon …
    Did the others think like this? Did they remember when they looked at this extension of the room that the conversion had been done to hide what had once been there? To make it utterly different, just as houses where murderers had lived and bodies been concealed were razed to the ground and gardens planted where they had been?
    She hadn’t heard a word Pamela had said, though she made replies, a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ and a ‘why not?’, drank her coffee, gave Madame Bonnard another glance and went off to meet Andrew. It was a coincidence, she thought, that Pamela had mentioned Michael whom she had been thinking about just half an hour before. He had been Guy’s friend, she thought as she walked along the edge of the Common, or at any rate, he had worked with Guy, and it had been he and Pamela who had introduced Guy to Beatrix. Ismay couldn’t remember what Michael had looked like. Dark, she thought, not very tall. Not as good-looking as Guy. He never appeared in that recurring dream, the one where Guy was dead under the water, or in other dreams peopled by her mother and Pamela and Heather, and once the older of the two policemen.
    Six months after Pamela and Michael arranged that meeting Beatrix married Guy. He was a few years younger than she and people thought weird, dowdy Beatrix lucky to get him. She was, and always had been, one of those women who look like witches, young fey witches with pointed features and wispy hair when they are young, and grey witches in trailing garments hung on their skinny frames when they are older. Heather disliked Guy from the first and he seemed to make no efforts to endear himself to her. With Ismay it was adifferent story. He said he regarded himself as her father, wanted her to call him daddy but didn’t try to force it when she was reluctant to do so. Ismay had often wondered since if he realised why calling him daddy wasn’t acceptable to her. Perhaps he thought this usage would be painful to her since her real father had been dead so short a time. This was not, of course, the reason.
    He showed her a lot of affection. For instance, he often took her to sit on his knee. This, which would have been inappropriate for Heather who was nearly as tall as he and with a womanly shape, seemed simply charming towards slight, dainty Ismay, though she was the elder. He kissed her goodbye when he went to work in the morning and kissed her in greeting when he came home. He called her his sweetheart and his angel.
    â€˜You can’t
like
it when he does that,’ Heather said, referring to the kisses.
    â€˜I don’t mind,’ said Ismay.
    One day he told her something he said was a secret. She must never tell anyone. He had seen her long before he met her mother. Both girls were staying with Pamela, and he and Michael and several others were her guests for dinner. Ismay and Heather hadn’t been able to sleep and had come down to say there was a wasp in their room. Did she remember? No, he knew she wouldn’t. But he had seen her and never forgotten the little blonde child who had come downstairs crying.
    Even when she was nearly fifteen she could look very innocent and younger than she was. Guy was thirty-four but could be taken for ten years younger. He was attractive to women, a source of jealous misery to Beatrix, his wife. Ismay sat on his knee and when they all went out together she held his hand. Sometimes he kissed her when no one else was present and then the kisses were different from those given and received under Beatrix’sand Heather’s eyes. Until one day Heather saw. She saw Guy kiss Ismay on the mouth, her face held in his hands in the dark hall, and Ismay pull away, turn and run. She was close to fifteen when that happened and Heather was thirteen, five feet seven inches tall with a straight back, full breasts, muscular arms and considerable physical strength. Ismay had run away because