I always think you should get the second half of a murder mystery a bit earlier than the full week - if only so we can all remember the plot! And a shoutout to TinaLouise who threw all the narrative spaghetti at the wall with me concocting this one. It was a wild but excellent ride writing it.

On the Monday, Judith went with Faith to investigate the circus grounds and Jem ran Tuesday in the nearby woods. He wasn't actively tryingto use Tuesday to speed up the investigation, but if he happened to own a dachshund with an uncanny knack for discovering evidence, could he really be blamed if…So he rubbed Tuesday's nose with the silk of the trapeze folds, and said cheerfully, 'Go on, find the rabbit.'

He was faintly aware of, but well past caring about, the absurdity of being found talking to his dog. He rubbed the silk under Tuesday's considerable nose again and said, 'Quick. Before Gladys finds out Faith wants to chat with her some more.'

Tuesday snuffled deeply of the silk, which was scarlet and bloodied, barked, and ran off. Jem ran after him. This was awkward because the ground was uneven, the leaves covering it slippy, and the weather causing Jem's leg to play up. Also, Tuesday ran improbably fast for an elderly gentleman. Consequently, it didn't really surprise Jem at all when Tuesday came back to him, his mouth full of what looked like an egg. If an egg was silver and flashed in the sunlight and was pointed at the top.

Jem bent, out of breath, and scooped the dog, prize and all, up into his arms.

'Clever Tuesday,' said Jem. 'Excellent Tuesday. Fabulous Tuesday. Aren't you an excellent evidence dog? You're a marvellous evidence dog. Let's go back and tell the others that you found us a lemon press. See, I know what one is now.' And so they went lazily back, Tuesday snug under Jem's arm, the sun in their eyes, to where the women were waiting.

'How was it?' he asked them as he set Tuesday down. But not before he'd taken the lemon press from him.

'Charming,' said Faith. 'They called me a one of the city girls. Nice to know I fit in. Big Alf married one, apparently. Good head for numbers. Oh, and I've got you blood to run.'

Jem grinned. He fished in his pocket and held up the lemon press.

'Never say I don't get you anything nice,' he said. 'If your blood matches the stuff on Tuesday's new toy, we've got a case. Where was it, by the way?'

'Three guesses,' said Faith.

'Not our favourite lattice-rhyming busybody?' said Jem.

'The very same,' said Judith.

The blood did not match. This confused Jem because he was looking at the murder weapon, and to hear Faith talk, she had upended several floorboards to find the blue luminol traces still in their seams.

'It was a spectacular mess,' Faith's official verdict. So, either there were two bodies, and they had only found Flora's, or something had gone wrong. And then Jem began testing the stuff he was looking at. That was how it came to bear that the substance Faith had cut away was not, in fact, blood. It was horseradish. Possibly it was blood someone had sopped up with horseradish.

'Horseradish?' said Geordie, hearing this. They were stood in his office, the sunlight sloping low towards the ground. It was a warm, October afternoon. Indian summer weather, come late.

'Horseradish,' said Jem.

'Horseradish,' said Geordie.

Jem nodded. For good measure, as if repetition would help it sink in, Geordie said, 'Horseradish.' He appeared stuck on this one, fascinating detail. 'Like the stuff my wife serves with dinner.'

'That's the stuff,' said Jem.

'And you confused them because…'

There was, as it happened, a long and complicated chemical answer to this. Jem didn't particularly think Geordie was interested in it. 'The point is,' he said, 'that even if there was blood there, it's now so contaminated as to be useless. Your best bet is to prove the lemon press belonged in the damn caravan. Which is tricky, since you and I can't get in there, and Gladys won't talk to Faith.'

Geordie groaned. 'Horseradish,' he said.

They spent the next two hours batting around possible strategies. All of them mooted, none of them particularly viable. Exasperated, Teddy said, 'And we can't strong-arm Gladys in here and insist she talk to one of us, because…'

'Because we'd be pilloried for disregarding halting-site rules or something,' said Geordie. 'One of those irritating details I never used to have to worry about. Fancy your old job back, Inspector?'

Teddy raised both eyebrows. 'You fancy having Hassle back?'

There was a pregnant silence of some seconds while this prospect registered. 'Dear Lord, no,' said Geordie with feeling. And that was when the telephone rang.

Geordie picked it up and grumbled a salutation into the receiver. There was a pause in which Jem presumed the other person spoke and Geordie went from grumbling indignation to rigid attention.

'And she's not with the other gremlins?'

Hearing this, Jem's ears pricked, and Teddy's too. Jem watched the other man straining to catch the other half of the conversation. This was made difficult by Geordie retreating with mouth and earpiece several half paces. They had either to follow him like Big Alf's snarling dogs or observe polite civility at an unenlightened distance. They opted for polite civility.

'Right,' said Geordie, too stiffly. 'And she's not – you've tried Fox Corner. Right. And there isn't anywhere she would – No, no, I know. I'm just doing what they pay me to, Faith.'

Jem leaped for, and missed the phone. 'Not helpful,' said Geordie as he batted him away.

'Geordie,' said Jem warningly. Geordie ignored him with a magnificence worthy of any of the Fox Corner cats.

'Look,' he said, 'they sometimes play with the Blake lot, don't they? Have you – yes, yes of course. I'm not saying you haven't. I'm saying I can't officially act unless I'm certain all avenues have – yes! All right! All avenues covered. Got it.'

He cradled the phone.

'And now,' said Jem, 'will you tell me which of my children is missing?'

Sophy was missing. This shouldn't have surprised Jem, because Faith was not the sort to panic unduly as and when Helen wasn't waiting for the others to walk home. And she was more than old enough to look after herself. Probably, said some far-off corner of Jem's brain, so was Sophy. She was ten and she'd been trained in the ways of wily, independent women by a veritable cadre of such women. In fact, she was so nearly eleven she called herself that. On the other hand, she was only ten, and she was his baby, and it was entirely too easy, now that she wasn't with siblings, friends or considerably extended family, to slip back to that breath-taking winter snowstorm that had witnessed her arrival. Mac, former police surgeon sputtering furious indignation that after snowshoeing back to Larkrise his services were now redundant, the bite of the wind in the space between Jem's scarf and collar, the cacophonous racket of gremlins going increasingly stir-crazy in a bad combination of dominoes and cabin fever. The smell of afterbirth and talc mingling in the upstairs room. All worth it for that tableau at the centre of it, Faith, golden-haired, downy Sophy in her arms, squalling to equal the wind. And Judith and Mara laughing triumphant at the team they had made, the three of them against nature.

And now, Sophy was missing. It did not quite compute. Jem stared unblinking at Geordie, who was speaking what might as well have been another language. Missing. Sophy. That squalling, golden-haired infant. Last seen wearingand other phrases of htat ilk flitted uneasily through Jem's mind. He thought of her the night of the circus, that wild, raucous singing.

Van Amburgh is the man, that goes to all the shows,
He steps right into the lion's den and shows them all he knows…

Jem took it all back. Every grudging, exasperated thought. Sophy could sing the ruddy song into kingdom come if she so wished it. Only let him have her back.

A knock at the door punctured Jem's disorganised musings. Benwick's knuckles on the door, precise and to the point.

'Sir.'

'Benwick,' said Geordie.

'I've been looking into the clowns – er…circus people, like you said.'

Silence. Geordie broke it to prompt their constable. 'And?'

'And,' said Benwick, 'Something came up. It took a bit of doing, see, because they're always moving from place to place, right, and I had to get all the old files from the previous precincts they'd stopped at. But I got to thinking – '

'The point, Benwick,' said Geordie, shortly.

'Right,' said Benwick. 'Yes. The point is, I was digging into that Gladys woman and she doesn't exist.'

'Manifestly,' said Teddy, 'she does.'

'Yeah,' said Benwick, 'yeah, I know, but that's the thing. There's all these descriptions of her, right? But every time she comes up they're calling her something else. She was Clementina at the last place...So anyway, I finally – '

'Benwick,' said Geordie, 'is this point of yours getting any closer or will we be here into next year? I ask because I have a potential kidnapping to investigate.'

Benwick, to his credit, did not flinch. He swallowed visibly, and said, 'I'm getting there, honest, Sir. See, the names were so different that I finally drove out to the place where their last halting site was to show them the photo, and they knew her all right. Their former morality officer – you remember we moved a whole lot over to social work? – well, she'd been in touch about this Gladys person specifically because of an abduction angle. Specifically they were investigating Gladys in connection with the disappearance of a young boy.'

'Christ,' said Teddy.

Jem pulled himself out of the immediate crisis enough to ask, 'Any description of the boy?'

Benwick rattled off the details. Skinny thing, sort of sallow. Dark haired. Looked underfed to the morality officer's eye. Teddy, who had not attended the circus, was nonplussed. But Jem saw Geordie register the particulars too, saw the flicker of recognition as he cast his mind back to the young boy and his monkey. And Jem had thought the most egregious sin had been the treatment of the damn monkey.

'And they said,' Benwick was saying, previous context lost to Jem, 'that when they went digging they connected her with a woman in a halting site before that one, who went off with a wee girl and…'

Jem put his head in his hands. Geordie groaned. Benwick still didn't flinch.

'So I was thinking,' said Benwick, 'she might try it again and that might be a way to link her to the dead woman, because if Flora knew about the abductions…'

'Yeah,' said Teddy, sounding exhausted. 'We've got it, constable. Well done. Send out an alert, will you? All halting sites, anywhere else you can think of. She's done it again and we think she's got Sophy.'

This time Benwick flinched. 'Not our Sophy,' he said, neatly encapsulating Jem's feelings. 'Not the Doc's – Bloody hell. Right, right. I'll tell them.'

'Now, Benwick,' said Teddy. But Benwick didn't need telling. He was already running at a clip down the hall, well away from Geordie's office.

'I'll go with him,' said Jem. 'Help find her. She's only been picked up because I wouldn't give that irritating woman the time of – '

'No,' said Geordie, 'you won't, and no she wasn't. Sophy was picked up by the awful Gladys because she has past form for absconding with other people's children and turning them into a circus act. You, to prove it, are going to stay here and find a way to link that lemon press to Gladys's caravan. Even if we can't check the blood, I'll be damned if we don't get her another way. And no one is better positioned to do the jiggery-pokery stuff you do, Doc.'

It was difficult to argue with. If hellish. But facts were facts and over Jem's dead body, and possibly Tuesday's and almost certainly Faith's, never mind the rest of the Kingsport constabulary, were they going to capture the awful Gladys for kidnapping and unlawful abduction and nothing else.

Jem stuck the lemon press under a microscope. He shut out thoughts of that awful summer afternoon Christopher, Faith and Judith had been at the mercy of a known murderer. He turned the lemon press six ways from Sunday and pried into the many crevices with tweezers. Then he got out the silk of the trapeze and began working on that. It was less personal than an autopsy, and maybe Jem thought, maybe that was better. It forced him to shut out all thoughts of Sophy and simply work mechanically on the task at hand.

He was extracting hair from the silk of the trapeze ribbons when Benwick appeared with clothes from Gladys's caravan.

'Doc,' he said, 'We thought these might help. Found them in Gladys's caravan.'

'Oh thank God,' said Jem. Then, to the obvious bemusement of his colleague, 'Tell me these haven't been washed in horseradish, eh Benwick?'

'Doc?'

Never mind,' said Jem, taking pity on him. The clothes in question were bloodied and stained. It was an amateur mistake, and a funny one, if you'd taken the time to rinse the floor with horseradish. On the other hand…Jem held the clothes up to the light. Said to Benwick's retreating back, 'What size would you say these were?'

Benwick doubled back. He came gingerly into the surgery, which now smelled heavily of chemical tests and faintly of ether and squinted at the clothes in question. 'Not really my remit, Doc,' he said. 'You probably want your wife for this but – aren't those too big for the woman the Super's after?'

Jem cursed. He said, 'I'm not even sure they're women's get-up, Benwick. Which makes sense, thinking about it, because the work involved in rigging up that trapeze…What was it Faith said once? She was all for equal opportunities murder but knew the limits of her own physicality? And she's used to lugging dead people places.'

Benwick nodded. 'Back when Christopher was a baby. I remember. And this Gladys person wouldn't be.'

'No,' said Jem. Then, 'Interesting.'

Benwick came and squinted over Jem's shoulder at the microscope.

'Doc?'

'How many of our lot have you got tracking Soph, Benwick?'

Benwick frowned, obviously not expecting this conversational about-face. He said, uncertain, 'Er…lots? It's Sophy so I sort of…'

'Right,' said Jem, 'fine. But I don't think this is human hair. The colour and texture looks more canine. And it's not Tuesday's. Wrong colour.'

Benwick frowned. 'We're after a murderous dog?'

'No, Benwick,' said Jem with more patience than he felt he had available. 'We're after a manwith dogs. Fighting dogs. Send whatever cavalry we have for Big Alf.'

'Doc?'

'Benwick,' said Jem, 'Trust me, will you?'

Right you are, Doc,' said Benwick, and went for the phone.

Afterwards, secure in the Larkrise sitting room with its strawberry thief dappled wallpaper, Helen said, 'But how did you know?'

Sophy, snug against Jem's chest, nodded into his sternum and mumbled incoherent curiosity. She appeared otherwise unfazed by her time as Gladys' hostage. Jem on the other hand, was sure his hair had greyed significantly since that telephone call to the station house.

But now the crisis was over and Jem was prepared to indulge them with whys and hows. Anything for Sophy, for all of them. Geordie obviously felt the same. He eased himself out of the lionsback chair he favoured and gestured at the girls' dollhouse.

'May we?' he asked. Sophy twisted around and grinned.

'Always!' she said. 'Murder dollhouses are the best kind.'

There was probably, Jem reflected as he followed Geordie across the room, child and all, something not entirely normal about his daughter's apostrophising of crime scene re-enactments. On the other hand, he got the distinct impression from outsiders that they were not altogether a normal family.

'That hack,' said Geordie, 'told Judith there were mistresses.' He picked up a doll arbitrarily to indicate the maligned inheritor of Kitty's patch. Jem nodded.

'Which suggests, obviously, more than one person. And Benwick's list showed Flora of the trapeze was one of them.'

'So it was a love affair that went wrong?' asked Helen.

'No,' said Geordie. 'Sort of.'

'Well, that's very helpful,' said Helen and rolled her eyes.

'The thing no one had time to ask,' said Jem, 'was who the wife was. But we were busy taking witness statements from an entire circus audience and the actors involved.'

A derisory noise in the vicinity of Mara Blythe suggested Jem's choice of words was the wrong one.

'Performers,' he said. 'Whichever. But even if we had, it wouldn't have done any good, probably, because they were a close-lipped bunch about one another.'

'Well, and they would be,' said Mara, still mildly exasperated. 'You get to be like family.'

'See,' said Jem, 'now that's not helpful. So what we missed was that Call-Me-Gladys was in fact married to Big Alf of the dog collection.'

He picked up two dolls and proceeded to gesticulate with them. Sophy said sleepily, 'But Dad, don't married people have to live together?'

'Hadn't done in years, according to Benwick,' said Geordie. 'Some falling out over a son that went off to – doesn't matter. What does is that the disappearing son act was the genesis of the abduction stunt.'

'Hang on,' said Faith, 'They'd fallen out but not so completely as to preclude working together?'

'On highly illegal schemes,' said Jem. 'Dog fighting turns out to be the least of it. Business before all else, apparently.'

Mara muttered something darkly Gaelic that Jem did not try to parse. But he strongly suspected that the ghost of Susan Baker would have approved of what he was tolerably sure was a condemnation of this loose attitude towards church doctrine.

'Are we telling this story or not?' he asked. Shirley held up a conciliatory hand.

'Go on then,' he said.

'Right, so. The son went off to raise horses or what have you. Probably didn't believe in dog fights and caged elephants. I like the idea of the son. Not the point. He goes and the parents fall out but they can't afford to stop the business partnership, because, as it happens, Gladys is that city girl Faith was being told about. You remember, she had a head for numbers? So she says in spite of the son, but lives on her own, and keeps the circus afloat. But Call-Me-Gladys and Big Alf are now short of a monkey manager. That's a problem, because they both enjoy the circus work and anyway need the money.'

'So one of them,' Geordie gestured at the dolls in Jem's hands, 'came up with a scheme to replace him.'

'Big Alf says it was Gladys, Gladys says it was Big Alf,' said Jem. 'This whole thing is about as clear as bloody mud from start to finish.'

'Doc!' said Teddy.

Jem nobly forbore to point out that after an afternoon held hostage to the whims of Not-Gladys, Sophy had contented with considerably worse.

'Whichever of them it is, they start this child-snatching racket. She charms the men to get close to the children, and when they're distracted she snatches them. It didn't work out quite that way because the Doc hasn't spared a thought for anyone not Faith since I don't know when.'

'1906,' said several people simultaneously. Geordie snorted. 'Well, this will teach you. Anyway, she had to get creative about Sophy.'

'Well, you told me not to go with strangers!' she protested.

'Quite right, too,' said Faith.

'Forcing Gladys to chloroform her,' said Geordie. 'Hardly ideal circumstances, either.'

'Geordie,' said Faith. ' How to say this gently? There is no circumstances in which the kidnap of any of my children is ideal. So we're clear.'

Geordie acquiesed hastily and graciously. 'Anyway,' said Faith, 'Gladys already had a boy minding the monkey. He seemed devoted, too.'

'Yeah,' said Teddy, 'funny thing, that. Turns out children are sort of a valuable commodity, because when they go missing, everyone bar everyone goes looking for them. Well, you saw that today. So they can't keep them very long.'

'Ah,' said Faith. And Jem saw from the look of her that she did understand. Helen did not.

'But once they're away from wherever…'she said.

'They keep looking,' said Teddy.

'People like Benwick, anyway, whose job it is to get stuck into the files. So they worked the thing by snatching the children, taking them to the next halting site and swapping them there. But since none of the children were paid, they didn't have the fare to get home and they just went on being missing and stranded wherever they got left.'

Jem shuddered. He hugged Sophy tighter, breathed the smell of her, outdoorsy and schoolroom grit, scabbed knees and lemon-rinse in her hair.

'It worked fine,' said Geordie.

'Until Benwick found out?' asked Helen.

'Until Flying Flora found out,' amended Geordie and brandished doll Flora. 'Though Benwick gave them a nasty scare, all that chatting with former morality officers.'

'No, see, Flora found out, I guess because she was one of the women Big Alf had taken up with. And as it turns out, carry on at the circus type stuff – '

'Really, Sir!' said a horrified Teddy.

'Oh all right, Inspector, have it your way. Sex – '

Spluttering indignation from Teddy. Geordie ignored him. 'Sex,' he said, 'was fine with Flora, but child abduction was her hard line in the sand. She was going to go to us with the information.'

'So,' said Jem, brandishing Big Alf's doll-sized stand in, 'Alf here persuades Gladys to invite the wonderous Flying Flora to her caravan. Whereat one of them –'

'And again,' said Geordie, 'Big Alf says Gladys and Gladys says it was him – '

'Clobbers her with the lemon press. It's got to be Gladys because we now know the thing happened during the first act of the circus, when Alf was calling all the stunts for the crowds. So Gladys commits murder via lemon press and then has the job of disposing of the evidence and taking horseradish to the floor. Not sure how the devil she knew it would hold us up like that or even if she did. But it does.'

Jem set Gladys in the dollhouse's kitchen and positioned the hapless Flora at her feet.

'Meanwhile,' said Teddy, plucking Alf from Jem's other hand, 'Alf here trots off with the Formerly Flying Flora – '

'Really Teddy.'

'Sorry, Doc. Anyway, it's definitely Alf that rigs Flora here,' and he held up Flora the doll, 'for her next act. He has to do it, because Gladys is the financial brains of the enterprise, not part of the performance, so she hasn't got the strength you need to manipulate a dead body into the ribbons.'

Helen frowned. She said, 'Wasn't she all painted up when we saw her?'

'You've got a faster way of covering up blood spatter, have you?' asked Geordie. And when Helen only blinked dazedly, 'Change of clothes to lessen the amount of blood, touch of war paint over the rest, bit of hysterical weeping, and we were none the wiser. Guess she hadn't banked on your mum realising as fast as she did that the murder hadn't happened the way it looked.'

'Or on my identifying the sodding lemon press,' said Jem and grinned at Mara. 'Wouldn't have done, either, without expert advice.'

'One day,' said Geordie, wistfully, 'one day we're going to get a nice, straightforward murder. One where the victim's been stabbed by the person with blood on their clothes who happens to be standing over the body with the knife.'

Gentle laughter signified the chances the assembled persons gave this scenario of happening.

'But until then,' said Jem, 'there's a moratorium on circuses. Gremlins got that? Theatre always and fairs are fine, but circuses – never.'