There are few things in life as stomach-tugging as the ringing of a telephone at an unusual or unexpected hour.
Professor Sarah Grace Skinner lived with the phone in a state of watchful neutrality. For years, in medical practice in New York and in Britain, and more recently as a policeman's wife, it had been her constant companion.
Yet, even in the few weeks since she had taken up her new post at Edinburgh University, she had come to regard her small study in the old building as an island of peace. No one bothered her there. In all that time she had received precisely three telephone calls; one, internally, from the Principal to wish her luck with her first lecture, and the others from her husband, warning her that he would be late for dinner.
Now, when the phone rang in the second that she hung her overcoat on the tall stand in the corner of the room, she jumped involuntarily. She glanced at her Giorgio watch. It was 8.17 a.m., on the last Friday in October.
She stared at the flat cream instrument in surprise, and in apprehension. As she took the three paces from the coatstand to her desk, fingers of fear ran through her. The baby had been asleep when she had left him, twenty minutes earlier, in the nanny's care, lying in the recommended position, the one which was credited with such success in the reduction of cot deaths.
Her husband had left home half-an-hour before her, bound for a snap and unannounced inspection of the CID office in Hawick, where there had been a consistent decline in detection rates over the previous six months. He would still be driving, down the fast, sometimes difficult A7.
Her step-daughter, only ten years younger than her, at twenty-one, had been back at university in Glasgow since mid-October, pining for the recently discovered love of her life. He, in his turn, was at an anti-drugs liaison meeting in Cambridge.
Her father? He had just turned seventy-two, and his health was far from robust, although he had declared himself hale and hearty when she had called him the weekend before.
She steeled herself and picked up the phone.
None of her personal-disaster scenarios had come true, but as she listened to the shocked voice on the other end of the line, she felt her hand shake, and the blood drained from her face.
Of course,' she said, very quietly. 'I'll cancel today's lectures and tutorials. I'll be there within the hour.'