shocked silence greeted Alex's pronouncement. Lindsay stared at him in utter bewilderment, unable to believe her eyes. Then she turned wildly to look at everyone else. Ruth looked as if she would faint, and Claire's mouth fell open. Jim Carstairs had leapt to his feet, while Antonis finally lifted his head out of his hands. Cordelia went white, then scarlet. She broke the silence with a peal of laughter, which echoed round the room.

"Oh Lindsay," she eventually gasped. "You've really done it this time."

Claire found her voice. "This is the last straw," she hissed. "You're fired. You've turned this whole business into a circus." She got to her feet. "Come on, Cordelia. I've heard enough to know that this inquiry is a complete farce from start to finish."

"No, wait a minute," Cordelia protested, a laugh bubbling in her voice. "I want to hear how Lindsay explains all this. Lindsay, come on. Tell me how your surprise witness identifies me as the murderer of a woman I'd never even met. I'm dying to hear this, Claire."

Humiliated, Lindsay somehow found her voice. "I can't explain it. There must be some mistake."

Alex, unaware of the undercurrents in the scene before him, chose that moment to butt in. "It was her, I'm telling you, she's the one I saw coming out of the flat that night. I swear it."

Claire strode across the room and towered over his slight frame. "I don't know who the hell you are, you lying little shit. But if you say that once more, I'll sue you for defamation so fast your feet won't hit the ground." She rounded on Lindsay. "I don't know what you think you're playing at, but it had better stop right now. You've lost her, Lindsay, and no amount of ridiculous grandstanding will make an ounce of difference to that." Lindsay listened in silence, wishing the ground would open up and swallow her. She couldn't understand what had gone wrong. All she knew was that she had made an utter fool of herself. She struggled for words, but before she could find anything suitable to say, Cordelia interjected.

"Calm down, Claire," Cordelia said. "Come on, let's go home."

"I want her to apologise to you," Claire replied obstinately. "She's accused you of murder, for God's sake. Surely you're not going to calmly walk away as if nothing had happened?"

Cordelia shrugged. "We all know how completely stupid Lindsay's accusations are. And we all know why she's making a fool of herself this way. I think we should feel pity rather than anger. Come on, Claire." She crossed the room and took Claire's arm, steering her towards the door. Alex dodged out of her reach in a swift movement. On her way out, Cordelia turned to Sophie and said, "You're a doctor, Sophie. Maybe you should get her some treatment." Then they were gone. In the stunned silence following their departure, Jim Carstairs moved uncertainly towards the door.

"I'm sorry this has turned out so badly," he said. "I honestly don't know what can be salvaged, but I'd be obliged if you'd call at my office tomorrow morning. Perhaps you could bring the original of Alison's diary."

Lindsay nodded dumbly. As Jim left the room, Antonis was suddenly galvanised into action. He jumped to his feet and followed him, calling, "Wait, Mr. Carstairs. I want your advice about these lies we have heard tonight." He slammed the door behind him, and the muffled sound of their voices could be heard. Sophie put her arms round Lindsay and tried to hug her rigid form.

"What a fucking carry-on," Alex complained. "I need a drink." He walked over to the tray and poured himself a brandy and dry ginger.

In her dazed state, Lindsay vaguely registered that Ruth was shaking with silent sobs on the sofa. She pulled away from Sophie and sat down beside Ruth. "I'm really sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

Ruth gulped and stammered, "It... it's all right. I knew... I knew anyway. I've known for months. It's just..."

"Just what?" Lindsay asked gently.

Then it all poured out. "I was so afraid when you brought that boy in. I was sure... I was so sure he'd point to me!" Ruth gasped brokenly.

"But why? Why would he point to you? You were in the gallery, weren't you?" Sophie cut in.

Ruth shook her head. "No. I knew about Alison and Antonis, you see. I kept thinking it would stop, that she'd get rid of him when she'd had her fun. Like she usually did. But it kept on. I wanted to tell her to stop. So I waited till I knew she was on her own. After I heard her and Jackie quarrelling, I waited till I heard the door of her flat slam. Then I ran straight down and let myself in. I had a key, you see. And... I found her. Lying there." A fresh burst of sobbing overtook Ruth.

Lindsay put her arm round her and stroked her back. "She was dead already?"

Ruth nodded. She pulled herself together and carried on with her story. "It must have been the murderer who slammed the door, not Jackie. Anyway, I panicked. I just ran. I didn't even close the door behind me. All I could think of was to get out of there as fast as I could. I knew that the police would think I'd done it. I... I had such a good motive, you see."

"So you ran away? You went to the gallery?" Lindsay asked.

Ruth nodded. "I took the lift to the underground garage. I stopped at the first phone box I came to and called one of my clients. I pretended I had been interrupted and asked him to call me back in ten minutes. Then I drove to the gallery and got there in time to take the call." As she reached the end of her tale, Ruth collapsed in a heap against Lindsay, as if telling the story had drained her of all her strength and energy.

Lindsay desperately wanted to ask Ruth more, but before she could, the door burst open and Antonis stalked in. "Come on, Ruth," he barked. "Let's get out of here." He pulled her to her feet and almost carried her out of the room. "You lying bitch," he called back at Lindsay. "You will hear from my lawyers about this."

Alex carried on leaning against the wall, shaking his head in silent amusement. "You sure know how to lay on a good cabaret," he said.

"Shut up," said Sophie. "You've made her look a complete fool. So just shut up."

Alex looked hurt. "Wait a minute," he protested. "I didn't ask to come here. She brought me here. I was doing her a favour."

"Some favour," Lindsay sighed, getting to her feet. "I thought you said you'd know the woman again, anywhere?"

He nodded vigorously. "It was her. Why would I make it up? Christ, all I had to do was say I didn't see the woman here," he whined. "It was her, I'm telling you. I was nearly shitting myself when I saw her. It's not my fault if you couldn't nail her."

Lindsay walked over to the drinks table, feeling as if she were wading through treacle. She'd never felt worse in her entire life. "Fuck off, Alex," she stated blankly. "Just fuck off."

He shrugged away from the wall. "Please yourself," he muttered. "Where's my money?"

"Give him his bloody money, would you, Sophie? It's in my briefcase under the bed in the spare room."

"I'll be right back," Sophie said, indicating to Alex that he should follow her. They left, and Lindsay slumped into an armchair.

She felt like she'd been hit on the back of the neck with a sandbag. How could she have been stupid enough to trust Alex? He'd assumed that anyone in the room apart from Sophie must be a suspect and saw the prospect of earning himself a few quid by falsely testifying. Unfortunately for him, he'd picked the one person who had no reason at all for killing Alison Maxwell. Lindsay wished she were anywhere in the world but here.

A few minutes later, Sophie returned. She went straight to Lindsay and cradled her head in her arms. "He's gone," she whispered. "Poor Lindsay."

They sat in silence for what felt like an eternity, then Lindsay sighed. "I feel such a complete jerk."

"I know. There was no way you could have predicted that he'd do that. He seemed so plausible."

"I know. I was so sure he was telling the truth. It crossed my mind that he might be blackmailing Harry over the murder, and that he was saying it was a woman so his little racket could carry on. But after I'd seen Harry's performance when he handed over the money, I gave up that idea. Neither of them behaved as if there was a hidden agenda. And I didn't think Alex was a good enough actor to con me like that. How wrong can you get?"

"But I was sure he was telling the truth, just like you. Then when he pointed to Cordelia like that. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," Sophie sympathised.

Lindsay got to her feet and started pacing the floor. "I just can't believe it's all gone so wrong," she said. "I was positive that Alex would give us what we needed. How could I have been such a bloody fool?"

"Stop beating yourself up, Lindsay. You did what you thought was the right thing. It's not your fault that it went wrong."

"Who's fault is it, then? I had to go for the grand gesture, instead of being sensible about it. I should just have taken him along to Jim Carstairs and let him loose on a pile of mug shots. But oh no, I had to be the big shot. And look at me now. Everybody thinks I did it to get even with Cordelia, and they couldn't be more wrong," Lindsay ranted.

"I know that, and you know that. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, does it?" Sophie consoled her.

"In theory, no, but in practice, yes. But you know what pisses me off almost as much as that?"

Sophie shook her head. "Tell me," she said.

"The fact that I won't be able to finish what I started. I desperately wanted to get Jackie off the hook. But you heard Claire. I'm fired. No one's going to give me an ounce of cooperation now, are they? And I was so close, Sophie," Lindsay complained.

"Yes, but it's not all over," Sophie said. "You've got all the information you were ever going to get via official channels like Jim and Claire and Jackie and Mrs. Maxwell. And there's nothing to stop you ferreting away at that. You can still find out the truth if you really want to."

"Oh yes? And who's going to believe a word I say after that fiasco?" Lindsay objected.

"Well, Jim Carstairs seems to think that all is not lost," Sophie replied. "All he's really interested in is his client, you know. I don't think he's too bothered about whose toes you might have stepped on."

"Maybe."

"Look, I've got an idea. You brought all that stuff back from Mrs. Maxwell's yesterday. Why don't you put everything that happened tonight on the back burner for now and go through all Alison's papers? You said yourself that if it hadn't been for the advent of Alex, the final solution might have been there. Why not give it a try? You could go through all the papers, and I'll have a look at what she's got stored on computer disc," Sophie encouraged.

Lindsay shrugged. "I don't know. I think I just want to forget all about it. I'd rather get pissed out of my brains."

"It'll still be there in the morning," Sophie said persuasively. She knew Lindsay well enough to realise that the best way to get her to forget the disaster of the evening was to give her something demanding to focus on. "And it'll look much worse through the eyes of a hangover. Come on, humour me. Let's give it a go."

"If you insist," Lindsay agreed reluctantly.

Sophie got to her feet and grabbed Lindsay's hand. "Come on, then, let's go." She leaned over to kiss her. "It's not the end of the world, you know. I still think you're very special."

They settled down in the study, Lindsay with Alison's papers and correspondence, Sophie with her computer discs. "Lucky you've got the same computer," Lindsay commented as she watched her lover efficiently working her way through Alison's computer files.

"Not luck, really," Sophie said. "Half the world have got Amstrad PCWs. Cheap, cheerful, and designed for technoilliterates."

After an hour, they stopped for a break. While Sophie defrosted a carton of chili tomato sauce and Lindsay watched over a bubbling pan of tagliatelle, they compared notes.

"Those boxes are full of completely irrelevant shit," Lindsay complained. "Every letter she'd ever been sent from the office, from pay rises to herograms from the editor. Gas bills, electricity bills, deeply boring credit card bills."

"What about the personal papers?" Sophie asked.

Lindsay shrugged. "I'm only just getting to them. There's a couple of scribbled sheets of paper that seem to be the plot of a novel that she never wrote. There's a list of feature ideas that she was obviously planning to work on. Nothing contentious there, as far as I can see. Letters from her mother, letters from an old university friend in Canada. There are a load more letters and cards further down. Maybe they'll help. What about you?"

"Nothing you could describe as illuminating. She seems to have done quite a bit of freelance work on the side, mainly on the kind of arts features that the Clarion would never use. Letters to friends, mainly of the 'yesterday I went to the theatre and saw...' variety. A couple of the discs are virtually empty."

"What about secret files? You know, hidden ones? Judging from her diary, she had a bit of a fetish about secrecy. Would you know if there were any like that?" Lindsay enquired.

"I don't know..." Sophie mused. "I don't see any signs that she was a great computer expert, so if there were any I'd imagine they'd be easy enough to find."

"So how would you hide something you didn't want anyone else to see?" Lindsay demanded, draining the tagliatelle and dividing it into two bowls.

Sophie poured sauce over the pasta while she thought. "I suppose," she started hesitantly. "I suppose I'd make it into a limbo file."

"What on earth is a limbo file?"

"It's a sort of failsafe in the Locoscript word processing programme. Any file you erase goes into limbo - a sort of backup memory. It doesn't appear in your file directory, but you can still get it back. It's supposed to stop you accidentally losing stuff, but it's a handy hiding place," Sophie explained.

"So did you check Alison's discs for limbo files?" Lindsay asked through a mouthful of pasta.

Sophie shook her head. "I didn't think of it. But I will."

After they'd eaten, they headed back eagerly to the study. Lindsay perched on the edge of Sophie's desk and watched her as she called up all the limbo files on Alison's personal correspondence disc. "Bingo," Sophie breathed. There were four files, each identified by a year.

Sophie pressed the keys to restore the 1989 file to the main file directory, then tried to enter it. At once, a box appeared on the screen saying, "Error in: Edit document. Not a Locoscript document. Cancel operation."

"What the hell does that mean?" Lindsay demanded.

Sophie frowned. "Well, it means that the document isn't accessible in this format. In other words, although I've brought it back from limbo, it's not actually a proper Locoscript file. It could have been written with different software, though that wouldn't make sense. Unless she's turned it into... Wait a minute. I think I know how to get into it." Sophie's fingers flashed over the keyboard as she created a new document, then used the 'Insert text' command to feed the inaccessible file into the new document. Lindsay watched with a new respect as text quickly scrolled down the screen.

"Amazing," Lindsay exclaimed. "I had no idea you were a computer boffin."

"I'm not," Sophie said modestly. "I just know my way round this machine. I've lost too many bits and pieces myself not to know how to get things back." She pressed a couple of keys, and the cursor scrolled back to the top of the file.

Lindsay read the first few sentences incredulously. "Good God," she breathed. "This is dynamite."

Sophie nodded, scrolling slowly down the screen. "The woman was poison," she muttered as the full impact of Alison's secret file hit her. It was filled with nuggets of information about a wide variety of people in Alison's circle.

"If she'd been interested in money, she could have been the richest blackmailer in Glasgow," Lindsay said bitterly. "Jesus Christ! How did she find half of this stuff out? I can't believe..."

Whatever Lindsay intended to say disappeared from her mind as Sophie called up the last page of the file. The first name on the screen was Cordelia's.