The guest-house abuts the sea in a slightly jostling fashion. It isn't the kind of place that Annette would have picked were she on her own, but her travelling companions seem contented, and there isn't anything quite obvious enough that she can put her finger on to explain her unease. She allows herself to be lulled by their reassurances. It's only two days, after all, just long enough to attend the conference, and then they can escape back to the cocoon that is Cambridge. And they don't have to eat here if the food isn't any good; there are any number of restaurants listed in the bumf that came with the conference program (besides, one night will be taken up with the conference dinner) ... suddenly she notices her thoughts have become derailed, unconnected, jerky. Maybe she's trying too hard to convince herself? Maybe, she shudders to herself, her subconscious could even have a point. She makes an effort to form the words in her throat, then coughs as she sees how ridiculous, juvenile, paranoid, her totally unfounded suspicions could be thought to be. Relax. Regroup. Rethink. Yes, maybe that would sound sufficiently anodyne, sane, unobjectionable. Another cough, more a clearing of the throat, really; now she is ready to say her piece.

By some strange coincidence of timing, though, it is at precisely this moment that Jacob takes a step forward and raps smartly on the door. Too late, now: their fate is sealed. Annette gives herself a quick ticking-off for being such a superstitious thing; it's not like her, it's not appropriate, and it's rare that she dares to allow herself to be even half so prejudiced and narrow-minded. It's just a harmless bed-and-breakfast. The dark half-shadows of the past cannot hurt her now, more than a decade after she left. Those she knew must surely long be gone; that underworld of pain and fear and destruction could not possibly still have any further hold on her, control of her. And, besides, those things happened in Gowerton, in Waurnarlwydd, in Treboeth, in Sketty, in Clydach. All of them long, hard, miles from the painfully genteel tourist-loving Mumbles. In attitude, if not as the crow flies.

Still, Annette is aware that she'd rather the faceless modern anonymity of the glass-and-plastic Marriott than anything even superficially steeped in Abertawe traditions. It's not rational, it's not sane, it just is. And is, being, être, is how she's mitigated the pain, explained away what happened, stoically trodden, trudged, in the footsteps of the succeeding decade. She doesn't need the reminders to stir up what she has spent so long trying to bury. But there shouldn't be any of that, here, today. It's not a rational fear, she thinks to herself. But then when was fear ever known for its rationality?

It's a serviceable enough room, if somewhat small. Respectable, clean, neat. Nothing flashy, the furniture tending more to the IKEA or even the MFI mould than heavy antiques. But that's fine by Annette. Fewer skeletons to lurk in modern closets. She crosses to the window and takes in the view. Some might think that she is admiring it, but that would be to reckon without the past, and it is all that Annette can do not to shudder at the sight of the sea. She breathes, slowly, carefully, deeply. Finally, when she believes she has sufficient control on her panic to appear to be an almost normal human being, she turns to the landlady, and says as brightly as she can manage, "It's perfect. I'll take it, thanks."

The registration formalities having been completed, she returns to the room, ostensibly to freshen up before meeting up with Pete, Robert and Jacob to attempt the infamous Mumbles Mile. But freshening up is not at the forefront of her mind at the moment. She sinks slowly down onto the bed, sensing more through the memory of her flesh than of her mind that the mattress is not as hard as that to which she is accustomed. She knows that it would be futile to attempt sleep, for her mind is doing the inevitable racing thing (she has never quite been able to name what manner of thing) that seems always to accompany these flashbacks: the guilt, the shame, the fear, that overcome, overpower, her whenever she permits herself to think about what happened back then. It's not often these days that she does; she has enough modern-day worries to occupy her and she fears the unhinging that could happen if she were to let herself dwell on the past. She still doesn't understand what happened here ten years ago. She doesn't know why she went mad, wild, out-of-control, and with the not knowing comes the dreadful unthinkable horror that it could one day come again.

Today, though, it is a scab that she can't resist picking. There is a telephone directory winking invitingly at her from the bedside table. Surely it couldn't hurt just to see if they are still listed there, see if they are still around? Of course it could, the remnants of reason whisper, you've spent so long trying to escape this, why put it all in jeopardy now? Reason isn't going to win this one though. She's not going to pick up the phone and actually ring any of them even if they are still here; in fact she's hoping that they won't be and then she will be able to breathe easier. This doesn't stop her hands trembling as she picks up the directory, though, nor her fingers fumbling as she leafs through the pages looking for names etched into her memory by horror, hatred, and a need never quite to forget. This is one of those times she wishes that she had become addicted to nicotine, back when she smoked socially. Surprisingly that vice never became more than something she could take or leave, and these days she mostly leaves it. Mostly.

The names are, in the main, common ones. She remembers reading somewhere that ninety-five percent of the Welsh population are covered by just thirty-nine surnames (strange the inconsequential trivia that can spring unbidden to mind at the most inopportune moments). But couple the names with the addresses she remembers -- vivid violent images crowd her mind, blotting out the innocuous black print of the listings in the telephone directory -- and yes, it seems that most of them have not moved on. Have not moved on physically, at any rate. Annette fervently hopes that they've moved on mentally; it can't be good for anyone to stay like that for a decade or more. She isn't even vaguely tempted to pick up the phone though. She doesn't want to know what might have become of them, and more importantly, she really doesn't want them to know what has become of her.

Distractedly, she looks at her watch. She still has half an hour until she is to meet up with the others, so she really ought to make something more of an effort to freshen herself up. To calm herself down. To ... well, whatever will enable her to feign at least a convincing pretence of the Annette they know throughout an evening's sustained drinking. She rather fears it will be more of a challenge than she is up to just at the moment. She steps into the en-suite, and turns the thermostat on the shower to its highest setting. As the first scalding drops pelt between her shoulder-blades she wonders if she is trying to punish or purify herself. Probably a bit of both. Whatever works.

Despite it being a weekday evening, it's still quite crowded in the pubs as they make their way, quickly enough at first, and later somewhat more slowly and less determinedly, along the stretch of road known as the Mumbles Mile. It's not quite clear which of Jacob and Robert decided they should start at the far end rather than the near -- they've been trying to score points off each other all evening over this one -- but it's clearly proving to be a sensible idea. They're going against the flow, although there was a point a little while earlier when their party crossed over with those going in the more conventional direction, prompting a discussion over whether the numbers of people they've encountered in each pub might resemble something like the normal distribution (the conversation has been getting steadily more geeky, although perhaps somewhat less accurate and well-informed, for the past couple of hours).

Annette wouldn't describe herself as relaxed, exactly, but the booze has certainly taken the edge off her concerns, for the moment at least. She knows that this is only a temporary respite and, like as not, before long the beer that is her friend now will turn on her and her paranoias will return, intensified, with reason even less able to respond to them. She knows this, and yet she continues to drink. Partly because she doesn't want to appear weak in front of the others, all of them men (and this is significant). Partly because she's determined not to relive past disasters. But mostly because she needs the comfort, and the bolstering of her social persona that alcohol provides. And hang the consequences!

The four of them are chatting quite happily, after their usual fashion. They are a strange group of friends: Annette and Pete, in their late twenties, are almost of an age, whilst Robert is looking at retirement in a few months' time. Of the four of them, Jacob alone is of indeterminate age. What draws the four of them together is indefinable, and indeed it is rare that they are together, this disparate group. Annette and Pete are friends, and Annette and Robert and Jacob are friends: Annette is the common link between uncommon people. The conference they are attending is of interest, in different ways, to all of them. This is an evening off, before the serious business gets started. It's an evening of venting frustrations, while keeping most of the underlying causes and unhappinesses safely hidden underneath a doryphoric veneer. Life has taught all of them well, Annette realises, that superficiality is an effective cover story for deep misery. It's not, however, one that she's been particularly good at adopting for a long time, not since she realised what else superficiality can be used to cover.

It's just as they are getting up to move on to the next pub that Annette becomes aware of a pair of glistening coal eyes that appear to be staring at her. That face ... yes, it's the one that has appeared in her nightmares over and over in the past decade. She has a photograph of it somewhere, lest she ever forget. Not that she ever could. Matthew: the self-styled devil incarnate who was the architect of everything that befell her when last she was in this town. Was it unwitting? Even now she isn't totally sure, even now she'd prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt ... but those eyes are not friendly, they are hard, they are pointed, and they exude an air of total evil malevolence. She feels herself shudder, and tries to break the eye contact but somehow it doesn't work. She knows she should try to be braver, try to out-stare him, show that she has grown far beyond him and his games. But she can't: she can only snatch covert glances. She knows that she barely looks to have aged, so she's easily recognisable. The same can't be said of him; he's gained several stone, his once-greasy dark hair is now respectably grayed around the temples, and his tailor has improved beyond measure. She suppresses an assortment of slanderous comments that flit across her mind as to how he might have managed to come up in the world so.

Across from Annette, Robert notices that she has gone silent, distant, pale. He is friend enough of hers, although Jacob is not, to know much of her past history and even to have some vague sketchy awareness of what this town, and Matthew in particular, did to her. He downs the rest of his pint in a swallow, motions to Jacob and Pete to do the same, then takes Annette gently by the arm and leads her out of there.

"It's OK if you don't want to talk about it. But if you do, well...."

Robert, having dispatched Pete and Jacob to the bar to order the next round of drinks, shrugs at Annette in a disarming fashion. Annette feels a surge of affection for this friend who's been there for her for the past year, listening as she has elaborated in great and laborious detail her modern-day woes. An unlikely friend for her, to be sure, although he's one of the few other people who knows Rachel well enough to understand, or at least to accept, Annette's obsession with her. The thirty-year age difference between Annette and Rachel is probably only slightly greater than that between Annette and Robert. By any measure he has more in common with Rachel than Annette, and yet his advice has been an order of magnitude more use to Annette than that she has received from other sources. Even from Pete, who understands totally how she feels, but perhaps lacks the necessary distance and perspective. She decides that it might perhaps be just as well if she gives Robert at least a minimal heads-up as to what might be happening.

"I think I saw ... well, what would probably be most aptly described as a ghost from the past."

"Matthew?"

Annette nods mutely.

"Well, he'll have to get past us to get to you. And I'm sure we appear a fairly formidable bodyguard presence."

This last he says with twinkling eyes and a broad grin. Annette, even in her current distressed state, is unable to avoid a smile crossing her lips. Two long-haired, lanky geeks, and Robert himself shorter than her, and unthreatening in the extreme: hardly what might be considered an imposing personal `army'. But his confidence rubs off on her somewhat. Last time she faced Matthew, she was on her own; this time she has friends with her who are way beyond his ken of what a friend could possibly be to someone. Maybe things need not be as bad as she fears. As usual Robert has known the right thing to say to calm her down.

It's only after they have returned to the bed-and-breakfast, said their drunken "good night"s to one another, and are staggering back to their separate rooms, that Annette's fears resurface. And with good reason. Even in the dim half-light cast by the recessed night-light on the landing above the staircase leading to her room she can see that there is a person blocking her way. She doesn't see how Matthew could have found out, so soon at any rate, where she is staying. She has always known, vaguely, that he has half the city in his pocket, or elsewhere her treacherous mind insists on extrapolating. She hasn't really allowed herself to dwell on what he might be capable of.

Her relief at discovering that the figure on the stairs is Anwen Morgan, the landlady, is short-lived. Gone is the benevolent, slightly plumpish, middle-aged lady of earlier today. Her undistinguished features are distorted by hatred. Before Annette can make any protest, Mrs Morgan's arm has encircled her right bicep with a firm grasp, her nails digging in between the muscle cells. As if they were talons, shrieks Annette's subconscious, images of dead, plucked, birds -- the aftermath resulting from the breakdown of the plaything of one of Matthew's more psychotic episodes -- playing across the technicolour cinescreens that are her retinas. With the younger woman thus in her grasp, Mrs Morgan rises up onto her tiptoes to whisper, in tones of undisguised contempt, into Annette's ear:

"For ten years past we lie in wait;
Scant hours, these, the forty-eight.
We'll make you rue the days you laughed:
Before you die, you'll feel a draught."

To Annette, many pints the worse for wear, this seems more akin to a prophecy than to a hastily concocted piece of verse. Its iambic nature impresses her more than perhaps it ought, amateur poet that she is. She tries to break free from the demented landlady's grip; fails; half-stumbles; is finally released; and hears the mocking laughter as she falls backwards down the stairs.

She can't have been more than mildly stunned, if that. When she picks herself up, there is no sign of Mrs Morgan: the stairs to her room are now unencumbered. Her ankle hurts -- she must have twisted it when she fell -- but apart from that there doesn't appear to be any lasting damage. Her first inclination is to hobble as fast as she can to her room, and move as much furniture in front of the door as she can muster, to prevent anyone from gaining unauthorised entry. Following immediately on the tail of that thought, however, is the realisation that she really ought to tell someone what has happened tonight and, maybe, dreadfully, what happened before. She stands at the bottom of the stairs for a long minute, a picture of indecision. In the end, drunken weariness (coupled with the thought that she cannot face talking to the police in this state or at this hour, and she is hesitant to disturb any of her friends) wins out and she limps warily back to her room. She shuts the door and bolts it, then with heart hammering leans against it and slumps slowly to the floor. She knows that she will have to talk to the others in the morning, there is no help for it. She doesn't want to have to go into all the details -- and doubts very much that they would wish to hear them -- but she needs ideas and, truth be told, support. It's a state of affairs that she's far from happy with, but it is not she who has engineered the situation. She tries to suppress the tears welling up in her eyes, but they are uncontrollable, and to her chagrin she is soon sobbing her heart out. She doesn't feel like it is at the time, but this outpouring of emotion is good for her. It is softening her up for some of the things she will need to admit over the next couple of days.

Annette descends the stairs to the breakfast room to discover only Jacob there. Of her three friends, he is perhaps the one she feels least like confiding in. It ought to be immediately obvious that there is something wrong, but he doesn't seem to have noticed that she isn't walking as easily as normal. Of course, he didn't notice when Rachel was limping either, says the internal voice, so what do you expect? After a few moments he asks her how she slept, and when she answers that she tossed and turned all night, he merely remarks, "Oh", and returns to buttering his toast. This is not what Annette needs right now.

She wonders whether she needs to worry that her breakfast might be poisoned. Mrs Morgan is nowhere to be seen this morning but this does little to reassure Annette. She is acutely aware of every slight breath of wind, and her mind insists on dwelling on how and when they might intend to cause her demise. This is not good for the sanity. The cooked breakfast, when it arrives, entices her to eat it, poison or not. If they intend to kill her, she is sure that they, that Matthew, will accomplish it by one means or another. She doesn't know why she is certain about that this morning, when she wasn't the previous evening. She does know that she needs to find Robert and tell him the details of her encounter with Mrs Morgan. He will, as ever, have been up with the lark, so it comes as little surprise to discover that he has already breakfasted.

And then, of course, there is the little matter of the conference they are to attend. Annette realises that she is ill-prepared for it -- at least, thankfully, she does not have to make a presentation, but is here merely on a fact-finding mission and to discover other researchers who might be sympathetic to the project she wishes to work on -- but somehow that is not particularly relevant, or indeed important. Mechanically she scoops food onto her fork, and chews, and scoops, and chews. She tries to force her mind to the academic, the concrete, rather than the paranoic, the bizarre, the underworld. It is, unsurprisingly, a losing battle.

She finds Robert outside, returning from an early morning coastline ramble. He appears to be in good spirits, although he immediately becomes concerned on catching sight of Annette. This is not surprising: agitation is always visible in her physical attitude. Stress has a tendency to cause backaches, shoulder-aches, tremors in her hands and arms. So it is today. She is having difficulty holding steady the cup of coffee she is nursing. Robert motions for her to join him for a walk along the beach. Stuffing memories of previous, solitary, walks along these sands back into the box marked `the past', she acquiesces, but then, feeling her ankle twinge in protest, thinks better of it and suggests instead the more sedate idea of a park bench.

The events of the previous evening take little enough time to recount. Robert is appropriately horrified; Annette is darkly amused to discover that she can remember the ghastly bloodthirsty rhyme word for word. At the end of the tale, Robert appears to be perplexed.

"The thing that I really don't understand about all of this is -- why on earth would they want to kill you? From what you have given me to understand about what happened to you ten years ago, you were the victim?"

Annette laughs, hollowly.

"I was one of the victims. In some ways, things went more tragically wrong for me than they did for many of the others, but in other repects I was the survivor. And," Annette breaks off to bite her lip, "after I'd left, I was already pretty well on the way to the nervous breakdown I had three months later. I decided that he shouldn't be allowed to get away with it, and I tried to get my revenge on him ... and on some of the other people who had abused me, mistreated me, used me whilst I was here. I don't think that it ever came to anything, the News of the World certainly never printed any of the stuff I told them, not that that was about Matthew particularly. But I don't really know, by the time it could have come to anything I was probably certifiable and had fled the country anyway. And by the time I got back, I'm pretty sure that any furore that might have resulted from it would have died down."

Robert still looks confused.

"But if it came to nothing, how would he have found out? And surely what you did was not something that anyone should be considering murdering you over, a decade later, in any case?"

A bitter smile crosses Annette's face, swiftly to be replaced by the return of the blank despair that was there previously.

"You don't know him. Or his ... friends. These local barons have a long reach, and even longer memories. As to why they want me dead, well. I dared to try to fight back, and that's not something they're used to. And, perhaps more simply, because they can."

This is something so far beyond Robert's understanding and experience that he can only stare mutely at Annette for half a minute or more. When he does recover his senses, though, there is a glint of determination in his eye. He reminds Annette that he owns a gun, and knows how to use it. This does little to improve Annette's mental state, for two reasons. The first is that the gun remains safely locked away at Robert's home in Cambridge. The second is more complex, and has to do with the reason that she might need protecting by Robert and a gun. She smiles at the irony of this, before realising that she has been irrational on the subject of his gun in the past and perhaps now he deserves the truth. It is a hard confession, forcing more honest self-examination than she really needs at the moment. She takes a deep breath, and begins at the beginning.

"I was here for six months, working in a factory. The first three months I shared with some of the other students here, but then they left and I found myself needing a place to stay. There was something strange about the letting agents here, I'd already had bad experiences with the previous one, and then I met Matthew. He was just getting started as a letting agent, but I met him socially, and he offered me a room in his girlfriend's house."

A growing look of puzzlement crossing Robert's face tells Annette that the story she is telling is becoming disjointed, out-of-order, bewildering. She tries to become less flustered, and to explain the salient facts.

"Anyway, I moved in with him and his girlfriend. And her son. Things were OK for a bit. But then he started to become irritated that I was at home in the evenings, wanting to watch the television and things, when he didn't want me around. He pretty much ordered me to go out in the evenings. But going out meant buses into town, and taxis back because by the time an acceptable hour for me to return rolled round the buses had stopped. The early part of the evening I'd spend wandering round the supermarket until it shut, or walking along this beach," she gestures expansively with her hand at the sea, "and then later it'd be pubs or clubs, and anaesthetising the emptiness with alcohol and dance music. Home was a foreign concept."

At this, Robert looks at her sharply, and she nods.

"Yes, you're right, a lot of my current issues about needing a place I can call home stem from the misery of that time. And it's why I've been so desperate lately: I've known that Gregor is not like Matthew really. Intellectually I've known it, but emotionally I've feared it. It's not been something I've been happy with: this being so dependent on someone else's charity, and always in fear of their deciding suddenly to evict me on a whim. And Gregor's involved in politics, too, just like Matthew was, so he too has the ear of the local barons. It's not rational, of course, but I guess it means that now the other shoe has dropped and he has evicted me, I have less to fear than I did."

She is crying now, tears rolling down her cheeks. Robert doesn't know what to say, and furthermore doesn't know whether saying anything would be likely to help or hinder. But he thinks it might be wise to move the focus away from her modern Cambridge troubles, and back to her former troubles that appear to be threatening to bring an end to her need to worry about the others. As if she can read his mind, she tries to collect herself, and returns to her narrative.

"So, anyway, I was desperately unhappy and spent as little time as possible at the house. But even the little bit of time I did spend at the house became more and more awkward, and Matthew's behavior became more and more bizarre. He'd come home from work, claiming to be exhausted, and pick up an air rifle and point it at my head demanding that I make him a cup of tea or coffee." She looks at Robert apologetically. "It was after that that I became so scared of guns of all sorts. And I wasn't the only one he threatened with the gun. The dog was his other main victim, and she buckled sooner than I did. She murdered a clutch of baby ducklings," again Annette sees the dead and plucked birds in her mind's eye, "and had to be sent away. There were other things, of course, other consequences of all this mess. You know about the rape: that needn't have happened had I been tucked up in bed like I'd have been happier being."

She takes a deep breath.

"Of course, he wasn't the only reason for my misery then. Lots of bad things happened in a very short time. And," her voice drops somewhat, and she seems reluctant to meet Robert's eye, "I made quite a number of rather unwise decisions. I don't know how much I was at fault, I do blame myself quite a bit, but I don't think I deserved even a quarter of what I went through. And Matthew, well ... I can't see that he could have been other than evil, or psychotic, or maybe both. He ... he," and here she falters, knowing that what she must say next will sound both ridiculous and reveal her own naivety and gullibility, "claimed that he had a birthmark that read 666 behind his right ear, and that he really was the Devil. I believed him." Seeing the fear in her eyes, Robert finds it easy to imagine that indeed that might have been the case.

As she falls silent, Robert tries to imagine the extremely sheltered eighteen-year-old Annette trying to deal with such a situation. He finds that he cannot. Other images flash through his mind: his own worst fears as a parent. The silence that hangs between them is a sympathetic one. There is nothing much that needs to be said.

The conference, when they finally get there, is something of a light relief compared to all this emotional outpouring, and these threats and fears. Some of the talks look vaguely relevant, maybe even interesting, but as is usual with such occasions the majority will be, at best, tedious. An ideal occasion to catch up on missed or disturbed sleep.

After the first few talks, Annette is disturbed to note that she seems to have more idea, better discernment, about the concepts of e-learning and online course development than the majority of people here, who seem to be here more to sell their frankly inferior products than to enter into an academic discussion of the best ways to conduct teaching and learning using computers and the internet. This is not what she had hoped for from this conference; while it will allow her to make a useful case for their developing their own offering, it is sad that there is so little that could be described as halfway appropriate already available. And, even worse, had she known how limited the horizons, how closed the minds, would be here there is little to no chance that she would have dreamt of showing her face in this town again. And thus, she reflects, little chance that Matthew would have managed to catch up with her. Ah well, c'est la vie. Everything for a reason.

At coffee time, Annette manages to catch up with Pete. After the great Gregor eviction disaster, Pete offered her his spare room. It's not ideal; as Robert so observantly noted, she is really very much in need of a place she can call home and Pete's house is by definition, well, his. She has been having difficulty sleeping, for a variety of reasons: the mattress is old and she, who is as sensitive as the princess in the fairy tale who can feel a pea under the mattress, doesn't take kindly to springs sticking out in all directions. The house, Victorian as it is, has unfamiliar noises and she has always had difficulty coping with noise. Creaking floorboards, squeaking bedframes, and worst of all -- something that causes Annette to have to stifle a giggle as she recalls the memory -- whenever the wind is strong, the whole house resonates, sounding like an ill-tuned hurdy-gurdy. The once that the house managed to pipe out the opening to the overture to Rossini's Barber of Seville, she had to pinch herself to make sure that she was quite awake.

But even before this, Pete was one of her very closest friends. Some years earlier there had been something of a half-attempt at a relationship which foundered before it ever quite got started. They love each other, but their sexual needs and desires only briefly intersected, and these days they are both coming to the conclusion that maybe sex is rather over-rated. She brings him, briefly, up-to-date with the situation. Like Robert, he is gravely concerned about the situation. Unlike Robert, he thinks to suggest that maybe it might be sensible to move from the guest-house. Annette demurs. She knows Matthew, and she also knows that whatever she might do he will find her. She doesn't want to give him the extra satisfaction of knowing that he has succeeded in scaring her again; enough, surely, that he will manage to kill her. One last defiance, or so she sees it.

The rest of the conference day passes in similar tedium. The first half of the evening is devoted to the obligatory conference dinner. Annette tries to summon up something akin to enthusiasm at the thought of dressing up in supposedly `smart' clothes, makeup, and the other conventional female trappings, merely to suffer through an evening of talking to pompous pretentious bores. This is not what she would be doing by preference this evening. Still, it keeps her away from Matthew, Mrs Morgan, and other unsavoury and dangerous characters. They have elected not to return to the guest-house in between the end of the sessions, which naturally ran over time, and the dinner. Instead they are changing somewhat furtively in the toilets prior to repairing to the bar for a fortifying drink. Annette has little doubt what will be the topic of conversation.

And so it is. All three of the men are now eying her with undisguised concern. The situation feels to Annette, and no doubt even more so to the others, as entirely unrealistic, a plot from a soap opera or a Hollywood blockbuster. Oh wait, that's par for the course for your life. The internal voice, sometimes cynical, occasionally satirical, sadly is spot-on with this observation. Her entire past life here was one long tragi-comedy that would no doubt have been fiercely edited on the grounds of its lack of `realism' had anyone ever proposed to film it for the small, or large, screen. Not that the succeeding months had been much better. She knows that she will need to talk more about them to the others if she is to achieve any kind of comfort. Her burning drive at the moment is confession, repentance, absolution. For whilst Abertawe might have made her its victim, the later months of that year were more even on the scales of perpetrator/victim, although she had by then been little short of dangerously insane.

But not now; later. For now the conference dinner is to start. Annette looks at the seating plan, shudders at the horror of her neighbours, and affixes what she hopes to be a plausibly natural-looking smile to her face. You act as if two hours are an insignificant part of your life expectancy, mocks the voice. She ignores it.

Of course it is utterly as dreadful as she has imagined. She is seated between two portly middle-aged men -- one of whom she has noted earlier to be particularly keen on spouting drivel, but who is also entirely assured of his own importance, erudition and general fabulousness -- neither of whom feels inclined to behave in anything other than a benevolently patronising fashion to a young woman who is, at least on the surface, reasonably attractive. Her ideas are of little interest to them. That she might be more well-informed, more `switched-on' -- one of their favourite buzzwords -- than they could ever hope of being is immaterial. She is there to flatter their egos, to assure them of their own worth and, better still, to be easy on the eyes. Their wives, seated approximately opposite, are little better. They have interest only in the brilliance of their husbands and in ensuring that everyone knows it.

Also the food is mediocre, and the wine poor and strictly rationed. You'd think they'd provide us with sufficient, and acceptable, anaesthesia. But no, Annette finds herself having difficulty forcing the food down, and her head remains abominably clear. She wonders quite how her companions manage to utter such fatuous comments under such minimal influence, and has to conclude, regretfully, that this must be their natural state.

If such can be possible, the speeches are even worse than the rest of the occasion. Long, boring, cringeworthy in places, and delivered in a nasal, stumbling, monotone that suggests that somehow the speakers have managed to lay their hands on more alcohol than their poor victims, the audience. Still, every bad thing must come to an end, and so it does. Annette manages to escape from her still-droning neighbour and makes her way across to join Robert, Pete and Jacob. The only question now is where they are going to head to continue their conversation and to drown their sorrows. Annette, of course, knows any number of places that were pleasant -- and less pleasant -- a decade earlier. The Cross Keys is probably safe enough, although it, too, contains some painful memories. But none concerning Matthew directly.

The next hour is even more painful for Annette than any other part of the day. This is when she explains in great and laborious detail all the details of her earlier breakdown. Jacob doesn't want to know. Annette says that she knows it's a whole horrible train-wreck, but that he will be doing her a service if he stays. Robert and Pete have more natural sympathy. Her audience continues to have three members.

"I left Abertawe a broken person, but I had fallen in love with the city. It had a vitality I'd never even glimpsed in any place before."

She smiles wistfully.

"Of course, I'd never been permitted enough freedom before to find anything other than the total sterility of my parents' house. But still. This dratted Welsh city, for all its faults, somehow wormed its way under my skin, worked its way into my heart. I was alive for the first time in my life. In a way that I have rarely been since.

"After a couple of weeks of disconnected misery in Essex I finally found myself a room in a house with two other girls. I hope never again to live with two creatures who are so alien to me, my ambitions, my thoughts. Things ... happened. As I said to Robert earlier, I made mistakes. The most stupid of them was going out for an evening to a nightclub with the on-again-off-again ex-boyfriend of one of my housemates who shared with me a love of techno and trance music. When I tried to go home, the door was locked. When I finally managed to make my way in, the door to my room had been covered in smashed-up cakes, broken eggs, cigarette butts and ash and ... stuff like that. The bastard had rung Sandra to gloat, and the two women took their revenge."

She takes a deep breath and looks at her friends to see how they are taking this confession. Hard to tell.

"Anyway, after that I couldn't stay there. I know now that I was deeply, gravely, mentally ill by this point; I'd ceased doing what work I was supposed to be doing (although I was doing other, more valuable, more urgent, work within the company) and I had lost all care about what happened to me. I moved in with my boyfriend Russell who was, like me, a refugee from sanity. In his case, he had a wife he needed to escape from. It wasn't pretty.

"After that things disintegrated quite fast. There was a colleague of mine and Russell's who decided to be a moral arbiter and caused us certain amounts of trouble. In my broken state -- I think it was my decision rather than Russell's, although it's not clear at this distance in time -- I decided to take revenge on him, and on other people who I judged to be guilty of causing me harm. Joke letters, torrents of junk-mail ...."

Annette's voice trails off. It is clear that this has been hanging heavy on her conscience for a decade or more.

"Before long, this got out. Russell was sacked; I was reprimanded for not doing my job. Being me, and a broken me at that, I didn't fight my corner, I didn't explain how much more worthwhile what I had been doing was than producing glossy marketing drivel. Instead I begged for a week's grace, and suggested that I'd manage to produce three months' work in one week. In retrospect, this probably would have been possible, given what I now know about the way I work. At the time, I said it just to buy my way out of the interview, buy me freedom to kill myself.

"The other thing that's perhaps relevant is that this was the first year I had totally debilitating hayfever. I didn't understand it, I couldn't cope on three hours' sleep a night. I was broken. I'd fallen from the ranks of the brightest and best to being a total wretch in a matter of months, and I had absolutely no idea why.

"I didn't go back the following week. I wrote a letter of resignation, and bought a bottle of gin and a bottle of 100 co-codamol tablets. I think I'd managed to down about 8 before Russell confiscated the bottle and started taking them himself. After he'd had about 20, I had to force him to drive himself to the hospital where he had the whole disgusting charcoal/vomiting experience. He didn't break my cover though; he took the whole burden of the disaster on his own shoulders.

"Over the next week, we started plotting to leave the country. Russell sold his car and bought a van. We contacted the News of the World and tried to sell our story. The reporter was sympathetic, but ultimately decided that it wouldn't make sufficiently good news, even though there were various double standards within the company quite clearly apparent. When my mentors from the company tried to come and find out where I was, I hid in a cupboard and Russell told them I was out. I was so paranoid that I refused to leave the house without a wig on to disguise me. I wouldn't speak to my parents, my friends. The one or two I did trust enough to contact -- co-incidentally including the previous woman I had feelings for similar to those I have for Rachel -- rejected me. It was ... well, it was a mess."

This is, to all of them, easily imaginable. And an understatement.

"We escaped to France, lived in the back of the van for two months, tried to make a living as painters. Obviously," and at this Annette smiles, "we didn't succeed and in the end our meagre savings ran out and we were forced to borrow from our parents to return to England. The other really bad thing we did at that point was to smuggle our cat back to England, evading quarantine restrictions.

"Once we were back in England, I had to go home, tail between legs, to my parents. They forbade me from seeing Russell again. A few weeks before I moved to Cambridge, he came here and moved into the Christian housing shelter. He managed to break into my future college room and carved I love you into the bottom of my desk drawer. By the time I got here, the spell had been broken, I no longer wanted to be with him, and I just found it creepy. I spent paranoid weeks that first term of what ought to have been the best, most carefree, time of my life unable to step outside the door, or to come home, for fear he'd have concealed himself in the kitchen and would leap out at me and force his presence, his body, on me.

"Of course, as ever, I figure it to be partly my fault. I could have been firmer. When things went wrong -- in those other tentative relationships I tried to start, and even with my work when it came to practicalities and technical drawing stuff -- I naturally turned to him, which meant that he felt he still had a conduit to my heart ... and my body. When, at last, serendipitously, he got a job in the USA just after the beginning of the second term of my first undergraduate year, it was such a load lifted from my shoulders. No longer did I need to fear seeing him in every lurking shadow. I could go on my way, happy -- or at least as close a semblance to that as I could ever manage."

Annette smiles weakly.

"When I say it all like that, I do wonder quite how I've managed to make it this far."

The looks on the three faces in front of her offer no answer to this conundrum.

It comes as little surprise to Annette that Pete insists on sleeping in the same room as her that night. All three of them are deeply worried for, about, her, and not just because of the lurking menace of Matthew and Mrs Morgan. That she has just recounted, decanted, all the horrifying events of a decade earlier is writ large in their consciousness. Yes, she coped back then, if in a stumbling, incompetent and inelegant fashion, but it has clearly been weighing heavily on her conscience ever since. Even without this horrible suggested axe hanging over her neck, it might be supposed that the turmoil engendered by stirring all this up again might cause her stress, angst, grief. They are, after all, in their own funny ways, all her friends. They care, even if the ways they show this are not always helpful. It would be difficult (and she is in some hidden nook of her brain aware of this) to find better, more loyal, friends.

Of even less surprise is that there is no move in the night. Matthew is far too subtle for that, and while Annette has no doubt that he would have little compunction in murdering an innocent stranger as well as the to-him culpable Annette, she knows that this is a crime he would prefer to be perfect. And extraneous bodies would mar the perfection. He knows that he will manage to get her without her ardent protectors. Is she perhaps thereby culpable in her own destruction?

The second day of the conference provides only one surprise, one shock. Somehow, Rachel is present. No-one seems quite to know why -- including Rachel -- although there is, on the surface at least, every reason for her to be there. Annette wonders whether it might perhaps be her own enthusiasm for the subject, her long focussed discourses, that have excited Rachel's interest. Unlikely as that perhaps seems, it is a more compelling explanation than that Rachel might have entirely independently discovered and become interested in this conference. More likely she is here to sniff out incompetence, malpractice, waste of money. And nothing wrong with that, is Annette's retort to her internal commentator.

For once Annette appears to be in her element when Rachel is around. Normally Rachel's presence is enough to make her clam up, go quiet, so unlike the vital brilliant self she longs to project. But today things go exactly as Annette would have them; Annette manages to elaborate her ideas in just the fashion to convince people that it is, indeed, the excellent plan she has herself always believed.

The conference closing ceremony has finally wound up. Somehow, Annette has managed to dispatch Robert, Pete and Jacob off in another direction. She isn't quite sure how she managed that; it certainly wasn't a conscious manipulation. But she finds herself alone with Rachel. Both of them know that this is a conversation that cannot last more than five minutes; after all, she's just walking Rachel to her car.

Rachel is smiling animatedly, as is her wont, and chattering nineteen to the dozen. Annette is one of the few people who doesn't find herself suffering information overload after a discussion with Rachel. Most people find Rachel scary, dangerous, threatening. Annette finds herself constantly bemused how they can misinterpret this wonderful, vivacious, brilliant, woman so badly. Rachel is asking Annette questions about the mechanics of tag-along bicycle extensions for children and what the best thing to protect the passenger in an accident would be. Annette confesses both to not knowing, and to having worried about exactly the same question. Rachel smiles in silent complicity, and offers up as a nugget of information that her great-niece will be coming to stay with her for a week. They trudge along the gravelled path.

The inconsequential, the trivial, occupy Annette as they walk along the path. To be with Rachel is so much more happiness than she experiences in the rest of life. It is of minor import to her that Rachel will not ever, cannot ever, be involved in the kind of relationship that Annette would prefer. The happiness -- utter, unalloyed, unmitigated happiness -- that she experiences even from the meagre constrained contact she can have with Rachel is so far greater than any she has ever known (except perhaps the glee she feels on solving mathematical problems).

The teenage boys batting what appears to be a sootened football on a string backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, register somewhere, vaguely, in the periphery of her vision. They are an unimportant concern, engrossed as she is in every word that Rachel is saying to her. The two women walk on.

Robert will later wonder whether there is anything that he could have done to prevent what is to happen next. Jacob and Pete will tell him that it is not his, not any of their, fault. But he will still wonder, in the dark of the night. Rationally he will know that his actions gave Annette the gift of her last minutes being happy ones. But he will always wish that those minutes had not been her last. He will feel that this is a sin of omission rather than commission, but a sin none the less. In vain will the others try to convince him that if that is to be the case they should share the responsibility. In some ways he will feel that he had been more, perhaps uniquely, aware of Annette's feelings for Rachel, and therefore it must have been his decision, his responsibility, that left the two of them alone and thus unprotected. What he will not, can not, know is the detail of how Annette died. It will be as well.

Annette's name will never again cross Rachel's lips.

Annette and Rachel are now walking close by where the boys are batting what is now obviously a bird, dead presumably, about. Annette is unavoidably reminded of Matthew and the disturbed dog. The backwards and forwards, pendulum-like, motion is in some ways hypnotic. Annette doesn't quite know why she feels such a chill in her heart. Swish, and swoosh, swish, and swoosh. She feels a draught, remission, a draught, remission. No, she is with Rachel, nothing bad could happen now. As they walk directly past the boys and their game, she feels the bird swoosh back behind her. She waits for, anticipates, the return of it rippling almost through her hair.

But instead its trajectory changes, abruptly. She senses an instant before it happens the impact of the beak into her neck. She stumbles, she falls. Her mouth forms an imploring Help me!, directed towards Rachel, whom she trusts instinctively, implicitly, to help her. Rachel walks on, unseeing, unhearing, chattering. After a few seconds she turns, having noticed that Annette is no longer keeping step with her. Annette's eyes bore into her, beseeching. The smile falls, abruptly, from Rachel's face, to be replaced by a blank, bland, mask. She turns away, and keeps on walking down the path.

In the moment of ultimate reckoning, Annette realises, weakly, bleakly, blearily, wearily, that everything she has clung to, everything she has tried to live for, and by, has been a fiction.