“At Luton. I’m going to see someone. Listen, did you ever call that number? The one you said Peter phoned a bunch of times before he stopped using his mobile?” There was a moment’s silence in which I thought we’d been cut off. “Hello? Mr. Hutchinson? Are you still there?”

“Sorry. No. I mean, yes, I called it, but nothing doing. A dead end. Who are you going to see? Is it about Peter?”

I was nearing the front of the queue. “I have to go.”

“Where are you going? Please—”

But the lady in the uniform wanted to see my boarding card and passport, so I said I’d call him when I was back and cut him off.

It was the last flight of the day. The earth dropped away and with it came a feeling of unrealness, of unreality. We flew into evening and evening embraced us, the light fading gently, the clouds flowing over the wings like a movie signal for a dream sequence. I turned the little reading light on while around me my fellow passengers napped or read or fingered coins in anticipation of the snack trolley.

I liked people this way, and experienced a shadowy feeling of fellowship with them; like this, I was surprised by how much I suddenly loved them and wished them well, and yet if my neighbor had turned to me and attempted conversation, I would have shrunk from it. I loved my neighbor, but I feared him too.

My thoughts drifted, my gaze resting on the soft, white backs of the clouds. Something had been playing on my mind ever since my visit to the Cotswolds.

The game that weekend had not been fixed. If Alice was right and Em had not hidden the necklace in the temple but somewhere else, then where had the ones David found come from? I took out my notebook and under the reading light’s beam, I wrote DIAMONDS REAL? Then I stuffed my notebook in the seat pocket in disgust at my childishness, before once again hauling it out.

If the diamonds had been real, it would have given someone a reason, a reason to hurt Em. Who would’ve known? Em, because she hid the fake ones? David, because he’d held them in his hands and discerned a difference?

How far was David prepared to go to get what he wanted? Not just with the diamonds, but with everything? It was a question I was determined to have answered.

I had chosen to believe Em’s death was an accident. If, at certain unguarded moments, other possibilities had occurred to me, it was not David I fought to keep myself from imagining in the scenario in which someone walked with Em, or followed Em, or was followed by Em, out of the manor and down the snowy drive on the night she died.