“I’d put money on it. Remember that curious incident the day before she died? When she came to Monarch supposedly for a meeting with Baz, only Baz was out having lunch with somebody else and Penny kicked off? It wasn’t like Penny to stand on her dignity like that. I reckon she was engineering an opportunity to get Danny on his own. And knowing Penny, she probably laid it out for him over the starters.” Lindsay slipped into a Californian accent. “‘I know what you’re doing here, Danny Boy. I know about the ghost jobs. I know so much about it, I’m going to put it at the heart of my next novel. And then people will ask where I got the idea from. They’ll especially wonder if I change publishers at around the same time. Time you cleaned up your act, pal. Exorcise the ghosts or lose me.’”

Sophie looked wide-eyed at Lindsay, rocked by the accuracy of her impersonation. “Jesus! You gave me gooseflesh!”

Lindsay slid out of the chair and gave Sophie a hug. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Sophie smudged a kiss across the top of Lindsay’s ear. “It was just a bit creepy. As if there aren’t enough ghosts in here already,” she added with a nervous laugh, brandishing the files she’d extracted. “We should photocopy these, so we can take them to the police, right?”

“Wrong.”

The voice came from behind the door. Deep, tight and angry. The two women swung round in time to see Danny King step out into the office. Lindsay’s eyes swept over him, then swung irresistibly back to his right hand. Dull blue steel, just like in the movies. She didn’t know what kind it was, but staring down the business end, the gun looked bigger than anything Clint Eastwood had ever relied on to make his day. The shock of it hurt her stomach and made her bladder burn. Years of journalism and messing with murder investigations had never taken her quite so close to her own mortality. It wasn’t a place she liked. Instinctively, she moved closer to Sophie.

“Get away from each other,” Danny said. His cold control was almost more frightening than the black hole of the gun barrel. Without even considering the alternative, Lindsay obeyed, moving away from Sophie at the same moment as Sophie separated herself with a sidestep. That left Sophie in the inside corner of the L of the desks, with Lindsay a foot beyond the empty executive expanse that had stood between her and Danny.