The killer would assume a new identity in the morning.

But tonight she was no one.

She refueled the van and drove for twenty minutes. The village of Alderton, like Beatrice Pymm, had been carefully chosen-a place where a van burning at the roadside in the middle of the night would not be noticed immediately.

She pulled the motorbike out of the van along a heavy plank of wood, difficult work even for a strong man. She struggled with the bike and gave up when it was three feet from the road. It crashed down with a loud bang, the one mistake she had made all night.

She lifted the bike and rolled it, engine dead, fifty yards down the road. Then she returned to the van. One of the jerry cans still contained some petrol. She doused the inside of the van, dumping most of the fuel on Beatrice Pymm's blood-soaked clothing.

By the time the van went up in a fireball she had kicked the bike into life. She watched the van burn for a few seconds, the orange light dancing on the barren field and the line of trees beyond.

Then she turned the bike south and headed for London.

2

OYSTER BAY, NEW YORK: AUGUST 1939

Dorothy Lauterbach considered her stately fieldstone mansion the most beautiful on the North Shore. Most of her friends agreed, because she was richer and they wanted invitations to the two parties the Lauterbachs threw each summer-a raucous, drunken affair in June and a more reflective occasion in late August, when the summer season ground to a melancholy conclusion.

The back of the house looked out over the Sound. There was a pleasant beach of white sand brought by truck from Massachusetts. From the beach a well-fertilized lawn raced toward the back of the house, pausing now and again to skirt the exquisite gardens, the red clay tennis court, the royal blue swimming pool.