‘I just spoke to Ruth Cullen. They think it was murder.’

Keller stared into the shower steam for a long minute, before eventually turning back to Foster and fixing him with a resolute stare.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Maria Rosario was a fighter. Now nobody will be able to call her a coward. She would have hated that.’

Foster nodded, and they sat in silence for a minute, listening to the sound of the water falling onto the tiles.

‘I’ll wait for you while you shower,’ he said eventually. ‘If you want me to?’

Keller said that was exactly what she wanted, and she stood up and took a deep breath.

‘Maria used to coach Basilia before she joined my team. Could she be behind all this?’

Foster looked unsure.

‘Switching teams is hardly a motive for murder,’ he said.

Keller blushed, because she realised that she should have told him something a long time ago.

‘You don’t know, do you?’

Foster’s face told her that he didn’t.

‘Maria was much more than Basilia’s coach. They were lovers.’

CHAPTER 16

KELLER ASKED FOSTER to grab a couple of coffees, telling him she needed something to pick up her mood. The truth was that she wanted five minutes alone to process everything in her head, and she stood naked in the shower, hoping the hot water would wash away the dread that had clung to her since the 4 a.m. phone call. But the water did nothing to numb the pain. She turned it from hot to cold, hoping the icy water would blast all thoughts of Maria Rosario from her mind, but it didn’t.

Under the pin-sharp jet of cold water, Keller remembered the day she and Maria had decided to work together. Rosario said that working with Marta Basilia was killing their personal relationship and they’d mutually agreed to the working split, but Keller got the feeling Basilia had resented the deal right from the start. Either way, before long the two of them separated in a horribly public break-up. The reporters had loved every minute of that, and Rosario had never been quite the same afterwards. The inevitable destination for all of these thoughts was the image of Basilia standing over Maria Rosario, and Rosario dead at her feet. Keller chastised herself. It was a dreadful accusation and she had no proof. But something rang true enough to make her feel nauseous.

She stumbled from the shower and pulled on a T-shirt and jeans, struggling to breathe. She felt as if she were suffocating, the thoughts and images knocking her off-balance and intuition twisting in the pit of her stomach. She needed air and headed for a battleship-grey fire exit, which she shoved through.