Phillipa pursed her lips, forming a tight seal. She had decided the interview was over, but Leanne wasn’t done with her yet. ‘Is that it, Mrs Montgomery?’ she asked, her voice not quite loud enough for others to hear, but her inflection was a warning. Her name would be shouted through the treetops if necessary.

With her face deep in shadow, the reflected light from the stage gave Phillipa’s features a ghoulish countenance. On closer inspection, her year in exile had not been kind to her. Her shoulders were hunched and she looked older than Leanne recalled from their last encounter a week before the Empress’s grand opening. Phillipa had been perfectly preened back then, with shoulders pulled back and her chest puffed out like a bird of paradise. Claudia’s comment onstage about them all changing was true, and Leanne was glad to see that Phillipa had withered out of the spotlight. If her frailty was meant to engender sympathy, it didn’t. The reporter, like the town, was spent in that regard.

‘What do you expect me to say?’ Phillipa asked, with a note of resignation that Leanne hadn’t anticipated.

Her face twisted into a snarl. ‘You might want to start with an apology.’

‘I have apologised, and I’ll keep saying it until my dying day. I am sorry, so very sorry.’

‘You should have been in that fire.’

‘Do you think I don’t wish that too?’ Phillipa’s chin wobbled. ‘I’d give my life for any one of those victims if I could.’

‘Any of them? Or is there one person in particular? Was there someone you were closer to than you should have been?’

Leanne’s last conversation with Claudia had been a gift. Phillipa and Declan. It was all beginning to make sense now. According to Frankie, Declan’s workmates had mentioned he had a habit of letting them down at the last minute whenever he had a better offer. Unfortunately, he had refused to breathe a word about the woman who could demand his attention at will and, without firm evidence, it was pointless running the story past Mal. He wouldn’t print salacious gossip, but that didn’t stop Leanne wielding the threat as a weapon.

Phillipa flinched at the accusation, but she wasn’t completely disarmed. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Do you know what Declan Gallagher was up to that night?’

‘Should I?’

‘He was your right-hand man,’ Leanne said with a smirk that was deliberately engineered to unsettle.

‘He was employed by the contractor, not me.’

‘But he took orders from you, pandered to your every whim,’ challenged Leanne. ‘He died for the sake of your vanity project, and took eleven innocent souls with him. How does that make you feel, to know every person here tonight has suffered because of you?’