He looked as nervous and uncertain as he had all those years ago, Holly thought. Somewhere, in this very grown-up man, were the vestiges of the boy she’d met; the boy with the smiling eyes. She turned away from him and prepared to let him in on the secret she’d been keeping to herself.

Charlie felt distinctly unsettled. He’d had a long week, and he still felt befuddled by the low candlelight and the rather odd expression Holly had had on her face before she’d turned away and headed to the bedroom of her flat. Charlie prided himself on his efficiency, on his ability to put all aspects of his life into the correct mental pigeonholes and deal with everything in the most effective way possible. And now, here was Holly Renton suggesting that he’d made an error; an error that he should have remembered.

‘You really don’t remember, do you?’ Holly’s voice was teasing as it floated through from the other room.

‘Remember what?’ he asked. His voice was a little more brittle than it should have been. ‘Did I do something stupid after you gave me that first massage? Did I leave here stark bollock naked or something?’

Holly laughed. ‘Don’t you think that would have been all over the local paper if you had? “Willowbury MP in flashing scandal”?’

‘Round here, I doubt it would have been much of a scandal,’ Charlie replied, remembering the notes about the nude sunbathing shop owners that he’d found in one of Hugo Fitzgerald’s box files.

Still none the wiser, he heard what sounded like the flip of a briefcase catch and the rustle of some papers. Taking a sip of his wine, he willed the chilled, bone-dry liquid to calm him down. There were too many mixed signals here, standing in this house, with this woman, waiting for the big reveal. Charlie was about as risk-averse as he could be, even more so now he was an MP, and being here made his stomach flutter and his hands shake in a way they hadn’t for years. In fact, the last time he could remember feeling so unnerved was… was… He reached for the memory, for the tantalising truth that had been eluding him since his arrival in Willowbury, but once again it danced from his fingertips, away from his mind. And then, before he could try to grasp it fully, Holly returned, clutching a couple of what looked like photographs to her chest.

‘Christ,’ Charlie muttered, heart beating faster. This was worse than he’d thought. ‘What are those?’ It was a politician’s worst nightmare, he thought; photographs were more likely to be digital and pop up all over Instagram these days, but the thought of being caught on camera doing something that looked incriminating was an unnerving one.