He’d rung the previous day to say that he’d bought his godson, Harry, a copy of Curing Souls for his birthday and hoped she’d be kind enough to sign it. She’d said of course she would and he had then wondered in his diffident manner if she might like to do this while having tea with him the following day.So she had all morning to trawl through the Hadda files, and seeing them laid out neatly on her floor, it struck her she was going to need all morning!There was a hell of a lot of material here.More, she guessed, than normal with the majority of her clients.But that was explicable, she reassured herself, by the complexity of the case rather than any special interest in Hadda.She didn’t feel all that reassured.Taking a deep breath, she went back to the beginning.Three hours later she emerged from her second complete review, poured herself a stiff gin, and in search of a temporary distraction checked her messages.All were negligible except one from her mother sounding fraught and asking her to ring as soon as she had a moment.
