"What sort of emotions?"
"Fear," she said. "It hits me suddenly and I start shivering. I remember fear."
These revelations had come at him so suddenly that he wasn't ready for them, and he experienced a terrible sadness, for she seemed to be remembering an overwhelming guilt. "Tell me about Meg," he prompted at last.
"She was begging, holding her hands out. Please, please, please." Her eyelashes glittered with held-back tears.
"Was she begging from you?"
"I don't know. I just keep seeing her on her knees."
"Where were you?"
"I don't know."
"Was anyone else there?''
"I don't know."
"Okay, tell me what you remember about going to Meg's flat and finding Leo there."
"I just had this image of Leo opening the door to me, and I knew it was Meg's flat because Leo was holding Marmaduke. Marmaduke's a cat," she explained. "The funny thing is, I heard him purring, but the rest of it was completely static, like a photograph."
"But you remember feeling angry with Leo."
"I wanted to hit him." She pressed her lips together. "That's really what the memory was, not the picture so much as a sense of incredible rage. It came to me suddenly that Leo had made me furious and then I saw him in Meg's doorway."
"Do you know when that was?"
She pondered deeply. "It must have happened after June the fourth because that's the last thing I remember-saying good-bye to Leo. He came into the hall and said, 'Be good, Jinxy, and be happy'..." She lapsed into another thoughtful silence.
"What did you say?"
"I don't know. I just remember what he said."
He pulled forward a notepad and pen. "Give me a rundown of the day before. What sort of day was that?"
She spoke with confidence. "I was at work. We were doing some publicity shots of a new teenage band. It was tough to come up with anything original because they were deeply uninteresting and horribly pleased with themselves. Four clean-cut young men with flashing white teeth and hairless chests, who thought they were so pretty we could just take a few snapshots and every prepubescent girl in the country would swoon." She laughed suddenly. "So I told Dean to needle them a bit, and after three hours, we ended up with some brilliant shots of four extremely angry young men glowering into the lens."
Alan chuckled in response. "What did Dean say to them?"
"He just kept calling them his 'pretty little virgins.' They got pissed off very quickly, especially as we kept them hanging around for a couple of hours while we fiddled with lights and lenses. They really hated us by the end of it but we got some good pictures as a result."
"So you developed the film straightaway?"
"No. We had some location work in the afternoon and we were running out of time, so we grabbed some sandwiches and left." She paused in sudden confusion. "I went straight home afterwards." She stared at him. "So when did I see those photographs?''
"Well, let's not worry about that for the moment. Was Leo there when you got home?"
"No," she said slowly, "but he wasn't supposed to be." Her eyes lit with sudden excitement. "I remember checking the rooms to make sure he'd really gone, and then I felt a sense of absolute peace because I'd got the house to myself again." She clapped her hands to her face. "I remember. He wasn't there, and I was pleased."
Protheroe wondered why she hadn't noticed the glaring inconsistency. Or perhaps the inconsistency was part of the game. "So now did you celebrate?"
Her eyes gleamed with sudden amusement. "I drank two pints of beer, ate baked beans out of a tin, smoked ten cigarettes in half an hour, watched soaps on the telly, and had fried eggs and bacon in bed at half past ten."
He looked up with a smile. "That's very precise."
"I was making a statement."
"Because they were the things Leo disapproved of?"
"A mere fraction of them. His view of how women should behave was modeled on his mother, and she's kept herself in clover by constant appeasement of a chauvinistic husband."
He arched an interested eyebrow but didn't pursue the issue. "So what did you watch on television?"
"Wall-to-wall soap. One after the other. EastEnders. The Bill. Brookside." She smiled. "Then I couldn't stand it anymore, so I watched the news. Soap operas are pretty bloody boring when you haven't a clue what's going on."
"Why didn't you watch Coronation Street?"
"It wasn't on."
"Are you sure about that?"
"Positive," she said. "I went through the Radio Times and picked out the soaps deliberately. If it had been on, I'd have watched it."
He stroked his beard thoughtfully. "I'm not much of an expert, admittedly, but I'm sure Coronation Street goes out on a Friday, and you say you remember this as being Friday, the third of June." He eased gingerly out of his chair, his shoulder protesting at the movement, and went to the desk. "Hilda,'' he said into the intercom, "can you rustle up a Radio Times from somewhere and bring it in? I need to know which days of the week don't have Coronation Street, but do have EastEnders, The Bill, and Brookside.''
Her giggle rattled tinnily down the wire. "There now, and I always thought you preferred the intellectual stuff."
"Very funny. This is important, Hilda."
"Sorry, well, I can tell you without the Radio Times. Coronation Street is Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. EastEnders is Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. The Bill is Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and Brookside is Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So, if you don't want Coronation Street but you do want the others, then that means Tuesday."
"Good Lord!" said Alan in amazement. "Do you watch them all?"
"Most days," she agreed cheerfully. "Anything else I can help you with?"
"No, that's fine, thank you." He returned to his seat. "Did you hear that?" he asked Jinx. "You appear to be remembering a Tuesday and not a Friday, and it does seem a little unlikely that Leo would have returned for breakfast immediately after he had packed his bags and gone."
She stared unhappily at her hands.
"I wonder if you're quite as clear about Saturday the fourth as you think you are. You remember saying good-bye to Leo and you're very specific about the day and the date, but do you know why? What happened to fix Saturday the fourth in your mind?"
"It was in my diary for ages," she said. "Week at the Hall, beginning June the fourth."
"And you were definitely leaving for the Hall when you said good-bye to Leo?''
"Yes."
"So how many suitcases were you carrying?"
She stared at him in confusion.
"Did you have any suitcases?" he asked.
"I know I was going to see my father," she said slowly.
He waited. "And?" he prompted at last.
"My bag was hanging on the back of the chair." She stared into the past. "It's a small leather pouch on a long strap. I slung it over my shoulder and said, 'I'm off now.' " She frowned. "I think I must have put the suitcases in the car the night before."
"Is that what you usually did?"
"It's the only thing that makes sense."
"I wonder if it is." He took a diary out of his jacket pocket. "Let's work forward," he suggested, "beginning with what you know to be true. Tell me about the first time you met Leo."