the body she'd hoped for earlier in the evening. Of course, as soon as her head hit the pillow, her sleepiness vanished. The exhaustion was still there, but her mind was racing. Please God, by tomorrow afternoon, the awkwardness between her and Tony would have evaporated. The sting of humiliation would still be there for her, but she was a grown-up and a professional. Now she knew he was off limits, she wouldn't place him in a difficult position again, and now he knew she knew, maybe he'd be able to relax. Either way, the profile should provide more than enough neutral ground between them.
She could hardly wait to see what he'd come up with.
On the other side of the sleeping city. Tony too lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, tracing imaginary road maps in the cracks round the plaster rose. He knew there was no point in switching out his bedside lamp. Sleep would elude him, and in the darkness, he'd start to feel the slow choke of claustrophobia closing in on him. Counting sheep had never appealed; the slow watches of the night were when Tony Hill became his own therapist.
"Why did you have to ring tonight?" he murmured.
"I like Carol Jordan. I know I don't want her in my life, but I didn't want to hurt her either. Hearing your blandishments on the answering machine must have felt like a smack in the face, after me saying there wasn't anybody in my life.
"An outsider would say we hardly know each other, everything that happened tonight was an overreaction. But outsiders don't understand the bonding, the intimacy that springs out of nowhere when you're working closely together on a manhunt, when the clock's ticking the next victim's life away."
He sighed. At least he hadn't blurted out the one thing that might have convinced Carol he wasn't lying, the truth he'd so carefully kept locked inside himself. What was it he told his patients?
"Let it out. It doesn't matter what it is, speaking it is the first step in taking away the pain."
"What a load of crap that is," he said bitterly.
"It's just another one of the tricks in my magic bag, designed to legitimize my prurient curiosity, tailored to unleash the twisted minds of the fuck-ups who are driven to act out their fantasies in a way society can't accommodate. If I'd told Carol the truth, said the i-word, it wouldn't have taken my pain away. It would only have made me feel even more of a worthless piece of shit. It's all very well for old men to be impotent. Men my age who can't get it up are a joke."
The phone rang, startling him. He rolled over, scrambling for the receiver.
"Hello?" he said, his voice tentative.
"Anthony, at last. Oh, how I've missed you!"
His surge of anger at the languid, husky voice died as soon as it flared. What was the point in raging at her? She wasn't the problem. He was.
"I got your message," he said, resigning himself. She hadn't caused the awkwardness with Carol; there would have been no grounds for awkwardness at all if he hadn't been such a pathetic excuse for a man. No point in even thinking about relationships with nice, normal women. He would have blown it with Carol, just as he'd always blown it with women as soon as they got close. The best he could hope for was telephone sex. At least it generated a kind of equality; it allowed men to fake not just orgasm but erection too.
Angelica chuckled.
"I thought I'd leave you something nice to come home to. I hope you're not too tired for some recreation."
"I'm never too tired for your kind of recreation," Tony said, swallowing the self-disgust that threatened to overwhelm him. Think of it as therapy, he told himself. Tony lay back and let the voice flow over him, his hand straying down his chest towards his groin.
The cleaners were gossiping by the lift as Penny Burgess emerged on the third floor of the Bradfield Evening Sentinel Times office. She walked down the newsroom, snapping on lights as she passed, humming tunelessly under her breath. She tossed her bag on the desk by her computer terminal and logged on. She executed the commands that took her into the library database, and pressed the key for 'search'. Five options were offered: i. Subject; z. Name; 3. By-line; 4. Date; and 5. Pictures. Penny hit z. At the 'surname' prompt, she typed