They showed me the bone fragments, and the charred diamond, and the twisty little blob supposed to be a slipper heel - but I said to hell with their grisly theory.

Wilma was alive, and I knew it the way you know the sun will rise.

Some time between midnight and six, clad only in a nightdress and slippers, she had walked out into the aching cold Chicago night - and gone up in smoke as ig she'd never been.

But Wilma had been and she still was, and somewhere out there in that huge, frozen monkey puzzle of a city I would find her.

I had to find her, because the newspapers were shouting I had murdered her.