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quick explanation, fearing that Rex couldn’t be far away. At the mention of Megan’s name she sparked up.
    â€˜Oh, oh,’ she said. ‘It’s been so long. How is she?’
    â€˜I don’t know, Mrs French. I’m trying to find her. You love her?’
    â€˜Oh, yes. Megan is wonderful. The best thing in my life. But Rex …’
    â€˜Her natural mother is dying and wants to see her.’
    Her thin, blue-veined hands flew up to her face, almost hiding it. This was too much hard-edged information for her to process. She dropped the hands and looked up at me. ‘The poor woman.’
    â€˜Yes. Do you know where Megan might be, Mrs French? People seem to think she might have a place to go to.’
    â€˜People?’
    â€˜People who care for her. People who want to help her. She’s keeping bad company, Mrs French.’
    I could hear some sort of movement inside the house. Rex? I whipped out a card and extended it. She didn’t move and I had to grab one of her hands and wrap it around the card. She clutched it like a child with a toy. I asked her again where Megan might go but she’d heard the sounds herself by now and didn’t reply.
    The man who entered the room was big and bulky. He was fair, a redhead who’d turned grey I guessed. His pale skin was blotched with freckles and whitish skin cancers. He towered over his wife and almost shouldered her aside to confront me.
    â€˜You are?’
    I told him.
    â€˜Your business?’
    I told him.
    He sensed that his wife was moving so as to be able to look at me and he pushed her towards the door. ‘I’ll handle this, Dora.’
    She shot me a quick, hopeless look and left the room.
    â€˜Megan’s mother was a whore,’ Rex French said. ‘Like mother, like child.’
    It took every atom of self-control I had in me not to hit him. ‘That’s not a very Christian attitude,’ I said.
    â€˜The word is be-fouled by your use of it.’
    He was sixty or thereabouts, flabby and slackbodied in overalls and work boots. A decent punch would destroy him but I’d met enough fanatics to know how useless it is to argue with or assault them.
    â€˜You’re pathetic,’ I said. ‘She deserved something better than you.’
    â€˜Leave!’
    I had to clench my fists to control the impulse to plant one in that soft belly. ‘I’m going. By the way, your brother Frank doesn’t say hello.’
    French snorted. ‘Another sinner.’
    â€˜No, a human being. Not a sack of self-righteous shit like you.’
    â€˜How dare you,’ he shouted.
    Pastor John and two other men entered the room. They looked at me as if I’d shat on the carpet.
    â€˜I’m afraid you’ve upset Brother Rex,’ Pastor John said. ‘I must ask you to leave before you create more disharmony.’
    They represented no physical threat but I was repelled by their self-righteous disapproval. I drove away feeling sorry for Megan who’d spent something like sixteen years with Rex French, sorry for his wife, sorry for Cyn and sorry for myself. Sorry.

9
    â€˜Cultists!’ Cyn almost screamed at me. ‘What do you mean cultists?’
    â€˜Apparently they were Catholics …’
    â€˜That’s nearly as bad.’
    Religion, dislike of it, was one of the few attitudes Cyn and I had had in common and nothing had changed.
    We were sitting in the living room of Cyn’s flat. Contrary to what she’d told me, there were no signs of medication and illness. The flat was elegant, as I would’ve expected. Elegant, but not obsessively so. Cyn had always had good taste and had only let it slip once—when she’d married me. I couldn’t identify the pictures on the walls or tell who’d designed the furniture, but I knew someone had. I can’t tell a leather couch from a vinyl one on sight either, but I was sure what I was sitting on was