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stood up suddenly and turned the telly on to the news. Unemployment was running at one in ten. The Scott Lithgow shipyard was threatening to close with six and a half thousand layoffs. Boy George was pictured arriving in Paris, at Charles de Gaulle with his Japanese girlfriend. Then the local news.
    Mist rose from a lawn in a sharp morning. In the distance a Victorian villa with serious policemen in front of it, their frosted breath silver in the brittle morning air. It was the house she had stopped last night. The homeowner, Vhari Burnett, had been found this morning by a colleague who had come to give her a lift to work. They showed a grainy photo of the woman Paddy had seen in the mirror. Her hair was shorter in the picture and she was outside, her blond hair wind-ruffled, smiling crescent eyes.
    Paddy sat upright: the good-looking man had killed her. She remembered the flurry of light at the Bearsden window and it seemed to her now an arm swung in a punch, a machete strike, a death blow. She recalled the night cold on her cheeks, the wind brushing her hair back, and saw again the fingers clench the door handle, holding the door closed, keeping the woman inside.
    Burnett had been a prominent member of the prosecutor’s office, unmarried and a political activist. In the wide shot Paddy noticed that both BMWs were gone from the back of the house.
    As Paddy sat on the settee, slack and horrified, vaguely aware of the sound of voices out in the hall, she shifted and felt the fifty quid crumple in her pocket. She should phone the police and tell them about it. It could be important—not many people had the odd fifty-quid note sitting about in their hall. But the police would gossip. Her first and only bribe would become public knowledge.
    The front door clicked shut and Sean said something. She’d be known as corrupt and the note would end up in some policeman’s pocket. Evidence was misplaced all the time, generally money or other valuables, but it never seemed to happen to moldy jam sandwiches or hats with holes in them.
    “Did ye not make tea?” asked Sean, repeating himself. He was standing at the door of the living room.
    Paddy pointed at the telly. “He killed her.”
    “Who?”
    “I was at the door of that house last night and they’ve just said a woman was murdered after we left. I spoke to the guy who did it.”
    Sean glanced at the television. “Creepy.”
    Paddy drew a long breath, balancing the news of the fifty-quid note on the tip of her tongue, unsure if she wanted to commit herself to doing the right thing. She looked at Sean’s face and gave in. “He gave me money, a fifty-pound note, to go away.”
    “Fucking hell.”
    Paddy cringed. “Shitloads, isn’t it? Mum’d have a field day with a note that big.”
    Sean’s eyes widened thinking of all the things he could do with fifty quid. It was five weeks’ worth of benefit for him. He could send his mum to Rome on pilgrimage. Buy shoes that fitted him. Get new carpet for the threadbare hall.
    “Ye need to hand it in to the police though, Pad.”
    “Aye,” she agreed quickly, as if that was what she had been going to do all along. “Aye, I know.”
    “You’ll get it back, I’m sure.”
    “Oh, aye.” She turned back to face the telly and nodded, a little too vigorously. “I’ll get it back.”

THREE
HOME

I
    Kate had been awake for almost two days. Sitting behind the wheel of her smart new car she felt panicked and buzzed at the same time, giggly almost when she thought about the value of the thing in the boot, frightened when she thought about the consequences of what she had done. She turned a corner and saw a lorry lumbering along in front of her on the straight road. She stepped on the brake, touching it lightly, just curling her bare toes over the soft leather insole of her navy blue pump, and the sensitive car slowed on the wet road. Beautiful motion. Reflexively, her thumb stroked the enameled BMW badge at the center of the wheel.