features. She felt sure these changes had occurred since she had been on her latest regime of medication. Yes, the malaise Steve had detected was partly existential, but she could see in her own reflection that it was partly physical too. The pills had been a useful support at her low points, they'd staved off the melancholy and anxiety which forced their way in when her mind wasn't absorbed with work, but they'd blunted her edge, diluted her passion.
Steve was right: part of her had died, the part that wasn't afraid to feel the rush of life.
It was time for a new strategy; to cut loose. The deadening drugs must go. Across the wet grass and into the dark stream with Dr Allen's poisons. She'd rather live raw and true, be like McAvoy - a force of nature, a raging gale or a barely moving breeze depending on how the spirit moved her.
And if she faltered, a glass of something nice or a tranquillizer or two couldn't do any harm.
She checked in the bottom drawer of the oak chest where she kept her special things - silk underwear, white cotton gloves with delicate pearl buttons, a pair of stockings she had worn only once - and dug down to the bubble-wrapped package she'd stashed there months before, when she'd vowed that the single container was for life-saving purposes only. She slit the sticky tape with nail scissors and released the small brown bottle. Xanax 2mg. Contents 60. A reassuring rattle. She unscrewed the lid and pulled out the plug of cotton wool just to make sure.
She had her parachute. Now she could jump.
The phone woke her shortly before seven a.m. on Sunday morning. Jenny went downstairs, turned the ringer to mute and had breakfast in peace. She had no intention of answering any calls today. She had nothing to say to anyone until she had some more answers. Two cups of strong coffee took away her sluggishness. She felt more exposed without Dr Allen's pills; a small hard kernel of fear sat stubbornly between her throat and diaphragm, but there was also an energy she wasn't accustomed to. A sense of excitement, of unleashed emotion. The day felt fresh and full of possibility.
She arrived outside the Crosbys' home in Cheltenham shortly after nine. It stood in a terrace of identical regency townhouses, distinguished from one another only by the varying designs of their intricate wrought-iron porches and balconies. Built with the first flush of serious colonial money to reach the hands of the merchant classes, these stuccoed streets in the heart of the town were an idealized vision of what it was to be English and civilized. Even on a dull February morning the buildings seemed to shine.
It was Mrs Crosby who answered the door, her hair still slightly rumpled, though she'd had time since Jenny's call half an hour before to dress and, judging from the smell, burn some toast. She took her through to an elegant, unfussy drawing room that matched tasteful contemporary sofas with an antique chandelier. The paintings were modern abstract, the huge decorative mirror above the white marble fireplace was tarnished with age. Eight-feet- high windows looked out over a mini Italianate garden.
Jenny said, 'It's lovely. So light.'
Mrs Crosby offered a sad smile and glanced up at the door as her husband entered, hair still wet from the shower, his irritation at being stirred so early on a Sunday morning written across his unsmiling face.
'Found a body, have you?' he said, taking a seat next to his wife.
'No. There's no body, nothing to suggest she's dead.'
Husband and wife exchanged a look of relief tinged with a sense of anti-climax.
'This may sound odd,' Jenny said, 'but the reason I need to speak to you is that a small trace of radioactive material was found on the body of woman connected to another case I'm investigating. You might have read about it - Nazim Jamal.'
Mrs Crosby looked puzzled.
'I've read reports,' her husband said, abruptly. 'What's this got to do with Anna Rose?'
'Maybe nothing. I don't know. Let me explain.' She gave them the bare bones: a brief history of Nazim and Rafi's disappearance, Mrs Jamal's campaign, her bizarre death and the traces of caesium 137 that could only have originated in a nuclear power plant. She told them that, from what she'd managed to find on the internet, the main source of black market radioactive material was the former Eastern bloc, but Anna Rose's job at Maybury presented her with a coincidence that needed at least to be discounted.
Mr and Mrs Crosby listened in silence, exchanging the occasional fretful glance. Jenny sensed she had touched on something, but finished her exposition before asking if it brought anything to mind.
There was a pregnant pause. Mrs Crosby spoke first. 'You didn't know that Anna Rose studied physics at Bristol?'
'No—'
'She graduated last summer,' Mr Crosby said.
'I see . . .'
The three of them sat in silence for a long moment.
Jenny said, 'When did she go missing, exactly?'
Mr Crosby said, 'We spoke to her on the phone on the night of Monday, 11 January. She was at work on the Tuesday, but didn't arrive on the Wednesday.'
'Where was she on the Tuesday night?'
'In her flat, we think. The bed looked slept in. Her boyfriend called her mid-evening. Everything seemed fine.'
'Did she take anything with her?'
Mrs Crosby said, 'It looked like she'd packed a bag. Her wallet and passport were gone. She took five hundred pounds from an ATM near her flat at seven-thirty on the Wednesday morning.'
'Has there been any activity on the account since?'
'No,' Mr Crosby said definitely. 'And no record of her leaving the country that we can find.'
Jenny said, 'Was there any indication that anything was wrong?'
'It was a complete bolt from the blue,' Mrs Crosby said. 'She seemed perfectly happy. She had a good job, a new boyfriend—' She stopped mid-sentence and glanced at her husband, who seemed to have been struck by the same thought. She let him take over.
'We think she might have been seeing an Asian chap last year,' he said, as if it was a source of great shame. 'My wife was visiting one day last October and saw him leaving her flat. She said he was just a friend, but . . . you know. One has an instinct.'
'Do you know who he was?'
'Salim something, I think. She never mentioned a surname.'
'What did he look like?'
Mr Crosby turned to his wife, who said, 'Mid-twenties, a little older than Anna Rose. Perfectly respectable,' adding apologetically, 'quite good-looking, really.'
Mr Crosby said, 'Christ, I knew we should have said something. What the hell has she got herself mixed up in?'
Mrs Crosby put a calming hand on her husband's back. 'I don't think it was still going on. She was really taken with Mike. They met at work.'
'At Maybury?'
'Yes . . . He was her first line manager, her boss, I suppose. She started a two-year training programme last September - the graduate programme.'
'This Asian friend, do you know anything more? Was he involved politically in any way?'
'I've no idea,' Mr Crosby said. 'I've never heard Anna Rose talk politics in her life.'
'What are her interests?'
'Having a good time, as far as I could make out,' he said. 'Stunned us both completely when she went straight into a job. She only took physics because she thought there would be less competition getting onto the course.'
'Did she do well?'
'Not particularly,' Mrs Crosby said. 'A z:z. She was lucky to get on the graduate scheme at all. She'd always talked about going off travelling for a year.'
'Her looks probably helped,' her husband said. 'Men would do anything for her.'
Jenny glanced at the few tasteful black and white family photographs arranged on a polished walnut bureau. Anna Rose in her late teens had shoulder-length blonde hair and a twinkling, mischievous smile that spelled trouble.
