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‘I've checked. Because he's on remand and hasn't had a chance to plead, they're more lenient than they might be otherwise. And they know that, the condition he's in, there's no real risk. They've let me see him as family. Surely you won't have any difficulty, given your position.'

‘I'm not so sure about that, Lizzie. In the circumstances, the authorities might have reasonable suspicions about why I'd want to see your father.' In her mind's eye, Marie was contemplating the prospect of seeking permission from Salter to see Welsby. It would be too risky to see Welsby without letting Salter know first. But, actually, the more she thought about that, the more interesting the idea seemed. ‘We've got to make it formal,' she said. ‘Your dad's got to put in an explicit request for me to visit him. Tell them he's got something to say, but he's only prepared to speak to me. That way, they won't say no.'

‘Okay. He wants to talk to you.'

I'll bet he does, Marie thought. She said polite goodbyes and ended the call. Welsby's condition was obviously improving. On the grapevine, she'd heard that he was likely to stand trial after all, although his lawyer was still trying to play the sickness card. Welsby was no fool. He'd have dirt on Kerridge's empire, and that meant that he'd have dirt on Boyle. And that, as surely as the hungover morning follows the drunken night before, meant that he'd have whatever dirt there might be on Hugh Salter.

If Welsby was going to go down – and there was little doubt that he would, unless his health decided otherwise – he'd make damn sure he took as many as possible down with him. That wouldn't even be about trying to mitigate his own sentence. It would be revenge, pure and simple. It was questionable whether his evidence against Boyle would cut much ice, given Welsby's history with the Boyle case. But any accusations against Salter might be more damaging. Even if he had nothing definitive, he could probably dish enough dirt to do serious harm to Salter's career. If Welsby made credible accusations, Professional Standards would be duty bound to investigate. And that, combined with whatever evidence Brennan had been able to muster, might start to put the skids under Salter's progress.

Marie stood silently in the garden, feeling the increasing chill of the autumn evening. She could hear the sounds of cars on the main road, the shouts of teenagers knocking back cider or worse in the park behind the terraced houses. In the back of the house opposite, she could see a woman standing washing up at her kitchen sink.

There were people out there who had lives. Maybe not happy lives. Maybe tough lives. But normal lives. Not the kind of life where you have to take calls in your back fucking garden because someone might be listening in. Not the kind of life where someone breaks into your house and tries to kill you. Not, she thought, the kind of life where your partner, the love of your life, is slowly slipping away from you, but still has to take second place to your work.

Not her kind of life.

So she had to change it. And change it now. And Keith Welsby seemed the best place to start.

‘I can't allow it. It's too risky.'

She watched him coolly across the table, enjoying the discomfort he was trying hard to conceal. ‘What's the risk, Hugh? He's a sick old man.'

‘A sick old man who tried to kill us both.'

‘Seriously, Hugh, we can't just let this go.'

‘He's playing with us, sis. You know what he's like. The devious old bugger. I thought we'd got rid of him, but he even comes back from the dead to bloody haunt us.'

‘It might be serious, Hugh. He's not well. Maybe he wants to clear the decks before it's too late. If we can get him to cough up what he knows, it won't just make his trial easier. It might open doors for us.'

‘And what's Welsby's testimony worth? He's a bent cop, sis. Whatever he comes up with won't be worth the time you spend listening to it.'

He looked rattled, she thought. Salter was a good actor – he'd worked undercover himself – and he was putting on a good show of being his usual urbane, cynical self. But he wasn't quite pulling it off. He was saying a little too much, and saying it a little too quickly.

‘You know that's not true, Hugh. Okay, it might not be useful, or even admissible, as evidence, but it'll be critical intelligence. You're not telling me that Welsby couldn't provide us with more leads than we'd know what to do with if he wanted.'

‘If he wanted. That's the point. And – if he wanted – he could bugger us around till three weeks after doomsday. You know Keith Welsby.'

‘Jesus, Hugh. What have we got to lose? If I see him, the worse that happens is I spend an hour listening to fluent bollocks.'

‘The worse that happens is that he tries to save his own arse by sending us off on a wild goose chase.'

‘He's not going to pull the wool over our eyes for long, is he? If we follow up what he gives us and it turns out to be nonsense, we just abandon it.'

‘We don't even know he's going to give us anything,' Salter pointed out. ‘He might just want to beg your forgiveness in his last days on earth. Or, alternatively, tell you he's sorry he didn't finish the job properly. Knowing that bastard, it could be either.'

‘But Welsby's not going down without a fight, is he? He's going to muddy the waters with as much dirt as he can dish.' She paused, looking to play her advantage. ‘If it comes out at the trial that he wanted to squeal and we said no, what kind of ammunition would that give to a defence council?'

Salter stared back at her as if he were construing her words as a threat. For a moment, she thought that he might lose his temper, something she'd never witnessed in her years of working with him. Then he shook his head. ‘It's your funeral. Go and have a chat with him. See if he drops any pearls of wisdom in your ear. You're much more likely to get an earful of abuse.'

‘Wouldn't be the first time, Hugh. I'm a big girl. And I think this is worth a shot.'

‘If you say so, sis.' He looked down at the papers on the desk in front of him, in what was clearly intended as a gesture of dismissal.

‘Thanks, Hugh. You won't regret it.'

He looked sharply up at her. ‘I bloody well hope not. Just get it over with. And Marie?'

He still looked tense, but she couldn't read his expression. ‘Yes, Hugh?'

‘Give the bastard my regards, won't you? Tell him he's always in my thoughts.'

She returned from Salter's office thinking that she ought to feel pleased with herself. She'd secured Salter's permission for her visit to Welsby, and had dislodged his usual equanimity in the process. Things were moving.

But she felt uneasy at meeting Keith Welsby again. In her head, Welsby had transformed from a near father figure into a man who had intended to kill her. Almost fairytale territory. Maybe the meeting would bring what Winsor, their in-house shrink, would no doubt describe as closure.

Even so, it wouldn't be a comfortable meeting. It was a fashionable idea. Restorative justice. Putting the perpetrators of a crime in communication with its victims. It was supposed to be helpful to both parties. But Marie suspected that, when she met Welsby, her overwhelming desire would be simply for retribution.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully. Salter had allocated her to back room tasks, working through yet more intelligence records. He'd told her to take a few days off, and she knew she should take up the offer. As it was, she spent the day staring into a computer screen, correlating numbers, trying to spot patterns of calls that might be worth investigating further, reviewing the trends that the computer analyses had identified. Getting nowhere slowly. She exchanged a few words with colleagues she barely knew, got up now and again to fetch water from the cooler, stretch her legs, grab a sandwich from the restaurant. Part of her wanted to spend the rest of her working life like this. Another part of was screaming inwardly at the very thought.

On the dot of five, she called it a day and took the Northern Line home. Autumn was well set in now, and it was growing dark as she walked back along the High Street from South Wimbledon station. Only a few weeks until the clocks went back. She was feeling a growing sense of anxiety. More than once she glanced over her shoulder, almost convinced that she was being followed. More likely, her paranoia was simply growing.

Sue and a fellow carer were still in the house, preparing an evening meal for Liam. They were running late because of some minor crisis with another client, and Marie found that she was grateful for the other women's presence. Their domestic bustling in the kitchen gave the house a more comfortable, homely feel, reassuring after the nagging concerns of Marie's day.

Even Liam seemed a little better. He was still sitting in the armchair, his posture slightly twisted and awkward. But he looked up and acknowledged her presence with a smile. ‘Hi,' he said. ‘Good day?'

‘Not bad,' she said. ‘Just in the office. You know.'

He nodded. ‘That's good,' he said. ‘Wanted to paint today.' He shrugged. ‘But – well. Watched TV.'

For a moment, she could feel tears welling in her eyes. It wasn't just the sense of loss. It was that, for the first time, Liam didn't even care about what had gone. His mind is likely to slow down, the doctor had said. He'll become more passive, more apathetic. Now she could see it in front of her.

Marie left Sue to deal with helping Liam eat the soup and bread that she'd prepared, and made her way out into the hallway. She hadn't noticed on entering, but there was a small package on the floor by the front door. It had been sent special delivery, so must have been signed for by Sue on one of her earlier visits. Marie tore open the Jiffy bag and tipped the contents into her hand. A CD in a slim plastic wallet. Brennan's evidence.

She took it upstairs to the spare bedroom at the back of the house. Liam's old MacBook was sitting on a table in the corner, unused now for months. It would be wiser not to look at this on her Agency-supplied laptop, in case its presence could be traced later. She booted up Liam's machine and inserted the disc.

If anything, she thought, Brennan had undersold this. There were the photographs he'd described, and more of them than she'd expected. Blurred and distant for the most part, but unmistakably Salter and, in one or two cases, other figures that she recognised. One photograph, clearly a few years old, showed Salter enjoying a drink with Jeff Kerridge.

She played some snippets of the audio files. Unmistakably Salter's voice. She had no idea who the other speakers were, but the content was potentially incriminating.

There was probably nothing here that would stand up as evidence, and certainly not unless the identity of the various speakers could be confirmed. Most of the conversations sounded as if they'd been gathered from surveillance devices. But at least one was clearly a telephone conversation which would be inadmissible as evidence in any case. And a smart defence lawyer would challenge the rest unless their provenance could be proved.

But the material was better than she'd feared. It might not be enough to support a criminal trial, but it might be the foundation of something that could be presented to Professional Standards.

‘Marie?' Sue's voice from downstairs. ‘We're going to help Liam get to bed, then we'll be off. Is there anything else you need?'

She ejected the disc and stepped over to the door. ‘I'm fine, thanks, Sue. How is he?'

‘Seems more responsive today.'

We're already talking about him as if he were a child, Marie thought. She stood for a moment with the disc clutched in her hand, unsure what to do with it. She felt almost as if Salter were watching her, as if, whatever she did with the disc, he'd know.

She felt reluctant to leave the disc in any of the obvious places – in her handbag or a pocket. She contemplated hiding it in plain sight among the rows of discs – largely copies of his own work – that Liam had left piled on the bedroom table. As she considered the matter, another thought struck her. She sat down at Liam's laptop and picked up an unused CD-R from the half-empty box beside the computer. She burnt a new copy of the original disc, double-checked its contents, and ejected it. After a moment's thought, she knelt by the table and found a join in the carpet. She reached up to the desk where she'd noticed one of Liam's pallet knives. She slid the knife blade into the join, and, lifting up one side of the carpet, gently slid the disc, inside its wallet, underneath. She patted down the carpet and leaned back to inspect her work. There was no sign that the carpet had been disturbed.

‘I'm off now.'

Marie jumped to her feet just as Sue pushed open the door. ‘You okay, Marie?'

‘Yes. Thanks. Just sorting out some of Liam's bits and pieces.'

Sue looked past her to where a couple of Liam's paintings were propped against the wall. ‘He was good, wasn't he?' Then she caught herself and added: ‘Is good, I mean.'

‘You were right the first time,' Marie said. She gestured towards the pictures. ‘He's not going to get back to this, is he?'

Sue shrugged. ‘Who knows? All we can do is hope.'

‘You're right, though,' Marie said. ‘He was bloody good. Let's hope that others recognise it too, eventually.' She shook her head, staring at the canvases. ‘Poor bugger.'

‘Both of you,' Sue said. ‘You need support too.'

Marie glanced at the dark space under the table where the duplicate CD-R was concealed. ‘More than you know,' she said. ‘More than you bloody know.'

The first sight was a shock. He was lying on the bed, apparently asleep. There was a thin blanket over him, and he was dressed in an old pair of pyjamas. Even watching from the doorway, she could see he'd lost weight since she'd last seen him. His thinning hair was bone-white. It occurred to her that he must have dyed it in the old days. She'd never associated Keith Welsby with vanity.