Lindsay pushed the laptop to one side and put her arm round her partner’s shoulders, hugging her as close as her painful body would allow. “You’re right to feel like that. Penny was special. Most of us, if we make a difference to the lives of the people we care about, we’re doing well. But Penny made a difference in a lot of people’s lives, thousands of them strangers. She’ll go on doing that for a lot of people, but all the books she still had to write won’t get written now, and we’re all poorer for it.”

Sophie leaned against Lindsay and smiled sadly. “I’m really going to miss her. You know how it is with couples you spend a lot of time with—you tend to pair off crosswise as well. I always felt you were closer to Meredith than I was, and I was closer to Penny. I talked about things with Penny that I didn’t discuss with many people.”

Lindsay sighed. “You’re right. I loved Penny, but she could do my head in sometimes. When she got into her New Age meaning of life stuff, it was time for me to go and hug a PC. Or sneak off to Burger King with Meredith.” They sat together in companionable silence for a moment, each busy with their own memories.

Then Sophie remembered what she’d come upstairs for. “You said this was it, the message that explained why Penny had to die. I don’t understand. Are you saying it was a Mafia hit?”

“There’s more than one kind of organized crime,” she said. “Look at all the clues in the text. Who published Penny’s novels? Monarch Press, owned by Danny King. Doesn’t that sound a lot like Sam McQueen?”

“That’s a bit thin,” Sophie protested.

“Is it? Let’s not forget that Danny King is one generation away from the old-fashioned East End, where organized crime flourished. It didn’t die just because they put the Krays behind bars. It’s still going on. The gangland families are just as powerful as they ever were. More so, probably. They’ve spread out into Essex and branched out into drugs, but they’re still basically the same mobs who have run London since Jack the Ripper was pulling the wings off flies. Just say, for the sake of argument, that Danny didn’t use his pools winnings to set up Monarch—what if he used dirty money from friends of the family to get the business up and running and turning a legitimate profit?”

Sophie looked skeptical. “Isn’t this all a bit far-fetched, Lindsay? We’re talking a London publishing house, not a New York casino.”

“You think publishers can’t be crooks too?”

“Not like this, no. It sounds like a bad gangster movie script.”