The Risk of Darkness by Susan Hill Page A

watch another wife die, a wife who had come to him like a miracle and been loved greedily, desperately.
    He looked up. There was a teapot on the table, a plate with food.
    Inside him was a simmering anger and hatred which terrified him, a strength of emotion he hadnever known before. It was pure, uncontaminated by anything other than the need for retribution.
    She was wiping her hands on a towel. Her red hair was like a halo round her face, her robe topped by the ludicrous white collar, a symbol of everything that he had to destroy. He did not believe any of the things she believed, and yet they had a dreadful power.
    “Who do you have?” he asked. She started at the sound of his voice.
    He was pleased that he had frightened her.
    “You have a mother … who else? Brother, sister, lover?”
    “I’m an only child. My father died ten years ago.”
    “And did he suffer?”
    “I … I’m not sure. He had a stroke … Why?”
    “I want you to have felt it. Why shouldn’t you?”
    “What makes you think I haven’t? There are people suffering like Lizzie every day, people left behind feeling as you’re feeling.”
    Max got up and went towards her. He saw her creamy skin and the red hair, her slim throat beneath the white collar, and raised his hands. Up.
    She said: “I know what you want to do to me. But, would Lizzie want me to be dead?”
    “Don’t talk about Lizzie.”
    “Why not? This is all about her. I can’t believe she would be happy that, because she died, you killed me.” She moved. “Let me pass.”
    He hesitated. He wanted to kill her for something other than hatred now, he wanted to know how it would feel. How it would feel to hold his hands roundher throat. He had always been a man quick to anger, had terrified people with his sudden, violent rages—Nina had always fled the house. Only Lizzie had not cared. Lizzie had simply laughed. But he had never been angry with her, only with things around her, things to do with himself. And her laughter had been enough.
    He let Jane Fitzroy pass him. He did not touch her. She sat down at the kitchen table. She looked small and very young, he thought. A child. Only a child would be so naive. What could she possibly know?
    “I’d like a cup of tea,” he said.
    She reached for the pot. “Then home?”
    “No.”
    Abruptly, she began to cry.

Fifteen
    Edwina Sleightholme had said nothing when charged with the abduction of Amy Sudden. She had not spoken apart from confirming her name.
    Once they had left the helicopter, Serrailler had barely set eyes on her. He wanted to. He wanted to interview her, to drag the truth out of her about David Angus. He was not allowed to speak to her, of course. This wasn’t his patch or his case. All he could do was put in the formal request to interview her at a later date, when the Yorkshire cases were under way.
    “Wish you’d stay another night,” Jim Chapman said. They were eating bacon sandwiches, brought up to his room by a willing DC. The entire HQ was on a high, amazed at what had happened, buzzing about the arrest of a woman.
    Simon shook his head, mumbling through his bacon. “I’m fine. Hospital said so.”
    “Sufficiently fine to drive two hundred miles?”
    “Yep.”
    “Great, isn’t it?”
    They looked at one another in understanding.
    “Nothing to beat it,” Serrailler said, “even on a ledge halfway up a cliff face in a storm. But I have to get back. I want my hands on the David Angus file again.”
    “It’s her.” Jim Chapman took a huge mouthful. The whole room smelled savoury.
    “I know. Got to prove it though. She’s not going to cooperate.”
    Chapman wiped his mouth and took a swig of tea. “It’ll have the shrinks on the hop.”
    “I can’t get my own head round it. It goes against everything we know.”
    “Not quite. Remember Rose West. Remember Myra Hindley”
    “Hindley wasn’t on her own, she was drawn into it by Ian Brady. OK, she was corruptible, but would she have done it