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distant past some years ago: joyful images of Moira before her happiness began to fragment. It was a day in April, the sky was a deep cobalt blue, the blossom from the trees shimmering in the brilliance of a sun which seemed to have been reborn after a long, cold absence. She was in the garden, sipping a long drink, waiting for him to come home. When she saw him, she jumped up and ran across the grass, reaching her arms out in welcome, the miraculous news of her first pregnancy tumbling from her lips, because she simply couldn’t hold back the flood of her delight. They had hugged and kissed each other until they were breathless.
    He lifted his hands, touching his lips – the lips Moira had kissed. He recalled the soft sweetness of her breath on his cheek, the warmth of her lips. He fought to push away the last memory of her face as it had been when he made the formal identification earlier. A face waxen and still, her beautiful lips tinged with blue, her body covered with the white mortuary sheet.
    He closed his eyes tightly shut, bracing himself against the pain of loss, willing himself not to cry out.
    Why hadn’t she told him about this pregnancy? And, of course, why hadn’t he, himself, noticed or formed some intuition about it? The answer lay in the coolness that had been growing between them. Nothing shattering, nothing made ugly with cold silences or insults hurled in anger. Just a slow distancing, a gradual erosion of their need to share thoughts and feelings, both negative and positive. They had been polite strangers. Apart from that early morning back in the autumn when they had come home from the hospital ball and made love, their senses fuelled and blurred with the champagne they had been drinking through the evening. It was then that she must have conceived: the very last time they had had sex.
    He told himself she must have been waiting to get well past the dangerous twelve week stage, that must have been the reason shehadn’t confided in him. But he didn’t believe his own reassurances. Something had been going on in her life. Something much more menacing than her recent disturbing determination to commit professional suicide.
    And now he had lost her, his dearest wife. And the baby he would never know. No! The two babies he would never know. He had lost an entire family.
     
    Swift sent his team home for some well-earned rest at seven that evening. He judged that the start of the investigation had not been too promising. So far they had no witnesses, nothing from house to house enquiries, no CCTV footage to help them, no weapon come to light.
    After reviewing the information sheets in his desk he decided to call and see Serena Fox, the doctor whose number had kept coming up on Moira Farrell’s mobile. Her address brought him to a renovated Victorian semi-detached on the outskirts of the town. As he got out of the car he saw that the house was in darkness apart from a pale white glow shining from behind blinds on the large window flanking the doorway. A brass plate with Dr Fox’s name and string of medical qualifications gleamed faintly beside the door as he pressed the bell.
    Eventually he heard footsteps. A shadow moved behind the door and the lock made a click.
    ‘Yes!’ The woman who opened the door had a strong fearless gaze and a challenging note to her voice; clearly not a person to be dismayed by an unannounced caller on a dark winter evening.
    Swift had his ID ready. ‘Dr Fox?’
    She took a careful look at his identification. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.
    Following her down the hallway he noted that she was tall and bony, her long frame clad in a flowing African-style garment made up of red and orange cotton.
    She gestured him to a chair beside the fireplace where a wood burning stove blazed, then took her place on the chair’s matching mate at the other side of the fire. The large mantelpiece was crowded with African face masks and carvings of human heads,the floor stripped and