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Your soft palate looks very inflamed," Sharon murmured. "Does it hurt?"

"Nugh, nurnh."

"I suspect you're blowing out an abscess, Jackson."

Officially she was "Miss S. Anderson, BDS, LDS," and he'd never been invited to call her by her Christian name, although she was free enough with his own first name. Doctors, bank managers, complete strangers, all used first names now. It was one of Binky Rain's bugbears. "And I said to the man in the bank ["men in the benk"] – a cashier- 'Excuse me, young man, but I don't recall us having been introduced. As far as you're concerned, my name is Mrs. Rain, and I don't give a damn what yours is.'" Binky Rain made "cashier" sound like something you wouldn't want to pick up on the sole of your shoe.

He felt absurdly vulnerable, lying there in the chair, prostrate and helpless, subject to the whims of Sharon and her silent dental nurse. Both Sharon and the dental nurse had dark, enigmatic eyes, and they had a way of looking at him indifferently over their masks as if they were contemplating what they might do to him next, like sadistic belly dancers with surgical instruments.

Jackson tried not to think about this, nor about that scene in Marathon Man, and instead worked on conjuring up a picture of France. He could grow vegetables, he'd never grown a vegetable in his life, Josie had been the gardener, he'd carried out her orders, Dig this, move that, mow the lawn. In France, the vegetables would probably grow themselves anyway. All that warm fertile soil. Tomatoes, peaches. Vines, could he grow vines? Olives, lemons, figs – it sounded biblical. Imagine watching the tendrils creeping, the fruit plumping, oh God, he was getting an erection (at the idea of vegetables, what was wrong with him?). Panic made him swallow and gag on his own saliva. Sharon returned the chair to an upright position and said, "All right?" her head cocked to one side in an affectation of concern while he choked noisily. The silent dental nurse handed him a plastic cup of water.

"Soon be done now," Sharon lied, tilting him backward again, Jackson concentrated on something unpleasant this time. Laura Wyre's body. Felled in her tracks, like an animal, like a deer.

Mr. Wyre, where is he? It was an odd-sounding question – wouldn't it be more normal to say, "Where's Mr. Wyre?" Did the killer actually say that? What if he'd said, "Miss Wyre" or "Ms. Wyre"? Could Moira Tyler (the only person the killer spoke to) have misheard him? In the chaos of the moment – but then the moment wasn't chaotic at that point. He was just a guy in a yellow golfing sweater asking the whereabouts of one of the solicitors.

And Laura's own private life, was it as transparent as it appeared to be? A sacrificial virgin. Was she a virgin? Jackson couldn't remember reading that in the autopsy report. Theo believed she was, of course. Jackson could imagine that Marlee could be married and divorced three times and have ten children and he would still believe that she was a virgin.

The press had loved Laura's blamelessness. It was always so much better when it was a nice middle-class girl with sound habits and educational aspirations who got topped rather than some prostitute or tarty unemployed teenager (the Kerry-Anne Brockleys of this world). But who was to say that Laura Wyre didn't have secrets? An affair with a married man that she didn't want to hurt her father with, perhaps. Or had she innocently acquired a stalker, some shitty little pervert who'd become fixated on her? Maybe she was pleasant to him (sometimes that was all it took) and he'd become deluded, imagining that she was in love with him, that they had some cosmic thing going on between them. There was a word for that but Jackson couldn't remember it, some syndrome, not Munchausen. There were only four options. The guy either knew Theo personally or was a stranger to him. He either knew Laura personally or was a stranger to her. Erotomania – that was it. It sounded like a bad Dutch porn movie.