More capable than you are, he didn’t have to say.

Ignoring the implication, she shook her head. ‘I don’t like it.’

But Ivan simply stood, laughing dismissively. ‘Well, I’m afraid it’s not up to you, Gabriela. You can’t have it both ways. Either you’re here or you’re not.’

She watched him as he moved out of the room, trying to discern the real meaning rattling through his words.

Chapter 69

Isobel

I stop at the office on my way home and write up the story of the discovery of the body on the Heath, today, leaving out any of the details of my own involvement, mentioning only the victim and the twenty-four-year-old woman taken into custody while a murder investigation is underway. I write with detachment, trying not to picture Eva in her prison cell, the mother I put behind bars for a crime I couldn’t condemn, the baby destined to a life in care.

Ben thanks me with a raised arm above his computer screen before I walk out of the door and towards the flat, the darkness no longer threatening as I make my way through the entrance and up the stairs.

Whoever it was who had been watching me has now been caught, thanks to DNA, and besides, he was never the figure I’d thought him to be. The person I’d imagined had had his own life snuffed out with a single blow from a rock – an act of self-defence by a young woman who had trusted him, and whose life he had ruined.

I had been wrong. Time and again, I had made myself believe something that simply wasn’t true. Oscar was right, they were all right: I was a mess. I am a mess. But there was one thing he would always be wrong about – it was my choice, and I made the right one. In that instance, at least.

Before I have time to change my mind, I move to the cupboard in the kitchen and pull out any booze I can find – whisky, the dregs of an old bottle of vodka, the limoncello Si had brought back, ill-advisedly, from a trip to Sorrento, that had barely been touched. Ceremoniously gathering the bottles on the kitchen table, together with my cigarettes and the bag of Xanax from the drawer in my bedroom, I pause for a moment before reaching for the packet of cigarettes and returning them to my pocket.

Pulling my hair back into a bun before removing the lids from each bottle, I pour the pills into the sink and wash them away with the remainder of the alcohol.

When I’ve finished, I stack the bottles by the front door and reach into the cupboard under the counter, pulling out a cloth and a bottle of antibacterial spray.