Equinox

'OK, OK. I'm sorry. I would have apologised -1 didn't get a chance.'

'You're lucky that Monroe was preoccupied.'

They fell silent for a moment.

'So, what do you make of it?'

'I'm not at liberty to talk about it, Laura.'

'Oh, come on, Philip — it's me, remember?'

He stared at the road and Laura could see the tension in his jawline.

'So that's it, ha? You're clamming up on me, just because I broke the rules?'

He continued to ignore her.

'Typical,' she huffed.

Suddenly Philip hit the brake and pulled the car off the road onto the verge. Leaving the engine to idle, he turned in his seat to face Laura.

'Look,' he said, unable to keep the anger from his voice. 'Laura, as much as I love you, sometimes you can be the most annoying, arrogant bitch.'

She made to protest.

'No, you listen to me for once.' Philip raised his voice a notch. 'This is my life here. You can swan off to New York tomorrow and get back to your books and your own private little world. I have to work with these people several days a week. It's my bread and butter. But you know, you never were big on respect, were you?'

'What?' Laura snapped.

'You've always done just what you pleased. You've come and gone as you liked.' He stopped, suddenly regretting that he had said so much and knowing that a part of his anger had nothing to do with Laura's performance this evening and a lot to do with the past. There was a long silence.

'I don't really think that's fair,' Laura said finally.

'You make it sound like a one-way street, Philip. If you're talking about Jo, about what we've chosen to do, you were every bit as involved in those decisions.'

'Was I?' Philip replied, his voice a little calmer. 'Was I really? Would you have stayed in England with her if I had asked you to? I don't think so.'

Laura didn't know how to respond. They had been kids, it was as simple as that. She had come from a broken home — her parents divorced, Jane, her B-movie actress mother, then living post-rehab in a commune in San Luis Obispo, her father a top-notch lawyer in LA. Laura had won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford to read history of art at Magdalen. She had been ambitious, a high-flyer.

Then she had fallen pregnant: morning sickness just before her Finals. While the others had been swigging champagne from the bottle after the last exam, she had gone back to her room to cry and vomit some more. Her parents had come over for Laura's graduation and she had managed to tell her mother. Jane Niven had taken it stoically and had never tried to push her daughter in any one direction. She had struggled with her own demons for years and a daughter pregnant at twenty-one was no big deal. Laura wondered now if it would have been better if she had been guided into a decision.

Philip had tried to be grown-up about it, but he had been little more than a child himself. He had graduated a year earlier, but he was living in digs, scratching a living photographing weddings and babies and dreaming of his own exhibitions that in reality lay more than a decade ahead. He was broke, immature and had no idea what to do. After the birth, Laura had contemplated staying in England and getting a job somewhere. Maybe she and Philip could have worked something out, shared their lives, but something had told her that it couldn't possibly succeed. Before their baby daughter was six months old Laura had taken the decision to move back to America with her.

Laura and Philip had remained friends, though, and Philip had come over to the States whenever he could. When Laura landed a job at the New York Post as a crime reporter she began to earn a little, and she was able to make a few trips over to England with Jo. Three years later she had married. Her husband, Rod Newcombe, had been a determined and ambitious documentary-maker and they had forged great plans to work together on a true-life crime series. Rod had been.good for Jo, who had grown to adore him, and for a short time it was happy families. But then, in 1994, Rod had headed for Rwanda and had come home in a body bag. Jo had been seven and could not understand what had happened to her stepfather, and how all that remained of him now was an image on a videotape.

It had also come at a crucial time for Laura. She had just moved into crime reporting and hadn't yet learned to cope with the squalor and the agonies that she was forced to witness each day. After being sent to cover a murder in which a prostitute had bitten off a customer's penis before shooting herself in the face, Laura had resorted to antidepressants and weekly therapy sessions.

That phase had passed and Laura had become hardened to the grim realities of what she did to pay the bills. But so many times she regretted the choices she had made; and whenever she met up with Philip again she realised how things could have gone in other directions, how much she really loved him and how different her life might have been. But each time she did this she was also conscious that their lives were moving apart, that it was getting harder, not easier to ever consider an alternative reality in which the three of them — Jo, Philip, herself — could be together.

For an instant, what she had said and done tonight seemed strangely symptomatic. Laura felt overwhelmingly sad and it was all she could do to stop the tears. She didn't know the answer to Philip's question. Would she have done anything different?

Taking a deep breath, she said. 'I'm sorry, Philip. I was being unreasonable.'

Philip looked at her for a few seconds. She hadn't been able to answer his question, but he could understand that. He had no answers either. He suspected that sometimes Laura wished that things had been different. He knew he did, more often than he cared to admit, even to himself. And when he did dwell on the subject, an insistent voice would end the internal conversation with the logical announcement that it was all too late now and what had happened had happened.

He smiled suddenly. 'Oh well, I'm sure Monroe will get over it. He's a good cop but a jumped-up bastard.'

Laura leaned over and kissed him on the cheek as he put the car into gear and pulled back onto the road.

'So, you going to tell me what you know?'

Philip let out a heavy sigh, but the anger had evaporated. 'God, woman, you don't give up, do you?'

'Nope,' Laura replied, with a smile. 'Not usually.'

'Well, to be honest, I don't know much more than you do. She was a young kid about twenty, driving back from a friend's house. Died sometime between seven and eight-thirty this evening. Discovered by a guy walking his dog. Nearest house a couple of hundred yards away. No one heard anything or saw anything.'

'But the wounds. .' Laura began, her voice trailing off. 'Nearly fifteen years of crime reporting back home and I never saw anything like that.' 'No, not nice.'

'I'm used to 'not nice': tricks cutting the tongues out of hookers, heads blown apart by semi-automatics — that kind of thing. But that girl had her heart taken out, for Christ's sake. Surgically removed, carefully done.'

'I know, I photographed it.'

'Strikes me as way beyond the range of your average murder, Philip. More … I don't know. . ritualistic, I guess.'

'Yes, maybe,' Philip replied, staring at the road ahead. 'I'm not a cop.'

They fell silent for a while, then Laura said. 'And that coin. What the hell was that about?'

'Why such interest?' Philip retorted impatiently.

'Search me. I guess I'm still an old crime hack at heart.'

Chapter 4

The wind rattled the windows in Laura's room in Philip's house and she drifted in and out of a disturbed sleep, dreaming the same thing she always dreamed on nights like this one: a dream that was not a dream, more a