‘Robert knew if you were somehow living in England, there was a good chance your uncle Frank had helped your father. He thought speaking to Dee was a good starting point. It was easy for him to check that Emer and Dee had never met. So he suggested I come to London and contact Dee and tell her I was her long-lost cousin.

‘It was obvious she didn’t know anything about Kitty, but when I asked her to help me find you, she said yes immediately. It was the perfect solution. She could do all the hard work. We could sit back and wait for her to tell us if Annie Holden really was who she said she was.’

‘Weren’t you worried she’d find out you were lying?’

‘A little,’ Maeve said. ‘But I kept our face-to-face meetings to a minimum. I even set up a fake Facebook account, calling myself Emer Doran, and sent her a friend request. She had no reason to think I was anyone else. I’d already met up with Emer and found out exactly what had happened on the Underground that afternoon, so I knew what to tell Dee. It worked perfectly.’

‘Until Dee realised you weren’t Emer.’

‘Well, yeah. But by then everything else had pretty much fallen apart as well. There.’ Maeve cut through the last of the ties on Kitty’s ankles. ‘You should feel better now.’

She lifted the bottle of vodka and held it out. ‘Want some of this?’

Kitty took the bottle and drank some. It burned her throat and stomach, warming her body.

‘Thanks.’

‘Keep it,’ Maeve said. ‘I’ve already had too much. I’m sorry, by the way.’

‘It’s okay,’ Kitty said, meaning it. ‘I can’t blame you for hating me.’

‘It’s all so messed up,’ Maeve said. ‘Are you absolutely sure it was Robert driving the car that night?’

‘Positive. Later, he paid my parents to clear up the mess. I think they told Robert I really had drowned.’

‘How did you work it all out?’ Maeve asked.

‘Some of it I pieced together,’ Kitty said. ‘Some of it I found out later.’

Because after Michael was charged with murder, Fiona had told her the truth about her father. The lies he’d told and the lengths he’d gone to so he could line his own pockets.

‘I didn’t come to England to kill you,’ Maeve said. ‘I just wanted answers. But then, when Emer called… when I found out you were still alive, and you knew, you’d known all this time, something snapped. All I could think about was making you pay for the damage you’d caused by never speaking up.