‘I don’t mind at all.’

Clancy fumbled again with her phone, scrolling shakily until, judging by the way she froze, she discovered what she was looking for. After what seemed like a long time she turned the screen so that Aaron could see. ‘Renée looked very pretty.’ She gasped another of those half-hysterical giggles. ‘The last picture I saw of her was … accidental.’

Aaron took her hand, absolutely out of things to say. It seemed indecent to look as happy as Will and Renée did at the expense of the woman quivering beside him. The fair woman in the cream silk dress, beaming as she gazed adoringly at the well-groomed blond man from the WhatsApp message, wasn’t a patch on Clancy, in his opinion. Though conventionally pretty, she was insipid, not striking or vivid, like Clancy. Intelligence didn’t shimmer from speaking eyes; her hair didn’t shine different colours as she moved.

‘When it happened,’ Clancy said drearily, ‘it came as a total shock. I thought we were committed.’

‘Planning to get married does sound like a commitment,’ he observed, tightening his fingers on hers.

‘I suppose I was doing most of the wedding planning. All of it, really. Will must already have been dragging his feet but because I was so certain of the path we were on, I didn’t take it in,’ she admitted. ‘Then one day we’d scheduled a conference call. Monty and I were in a hotel after a meeting in Leicester, two people from the client company were in their offices somewhere and Renée, also from the client company, was with Will in his office at IsVid. She was the client’s in-house creative and they’d been working on video footage over the preceding weeks. I hadn’t met her. He hadn’t told me he’d once loved her from afar.’

When she paused, Aaron could hear only leaves stirring in the breeze and the hiss of waves breaking fifty yards below at the foot of the cliff. ‘He and Renée got close?’

She laughed, a hard, ragged sound. ‘Will somehow didn’t realise – or forgot – that the conferencing software was already streaming from his computer. Monty hooked us all up and there was this extraordinary image on the screen. It was like watching sex through a letter box. You could just see a segment of a man standing up, his trousers sliding down and a wo-woman’s legs over his arms.’ She started rushing her words as if she had to get all this bad stuff out of her head. ‘Monty started shouting at Will. The clients began to laugh, probably thinking some hacker had planted porn footage. But I knew what I was looking at. I’d heard Will’s voice – how could I not know? And the things he said to her were things he’d said to me! The clients laughed harder than ever. Then Renée started saying, “Oh, no! Oh, no!” as she realised they were visible via the conference software. And their laughter stopped like a flick of a switch. They recognised her voice and realised it was live, I suppose.’