Frank peered at her face before she turned away from him, and said, ‘I’m sorry, love,’ when he noticed tears glistening in her eyes.

‘You should go to your room,’ she replied, taking a sheet of kitchen paper off the roll and dabbing at her eyes, her back still turned. ‘You do not need to see what happen when they come back.’

‘I don’t want to leave you on your own,’ Frank argued.

‘I do not need company,’ she insisted. ‘Please, just go.’

Aware that she was struggling to contain her emotions, Frank stood up.

‘If you need me, you know where I am,’ he said.

Her reply was a curt nod, so Frank left her and went upstairs. Viktorya had locked herself in the bathroom, and he could hear water running into the bath as he passed the door. In his bedroom, he sat on the chair by the boarded-up window and stared at the wall separating his and Evan’s rooms. Behind those bricks a young girl was lying dead on the bed that he, in a different life, had bought for his young son. He didn’t know which girl it was, because he’d barely recognized the skeletal creatures Nick had herded out through the front door a few minutes earlier. But, whichever one it was, she hadn’t deserved to die like that, and Frank couldn’t stop thinking about her poor parents. They must have been so happy when they’d waved her off at the airport, he imagined; so grateful to the man who had paid her fare and promised her a wonderful new life in England, where the streets were paved with gold. They had probably waited patiently for her to contact them and tell them all the amazing things she had done since arriving: the visit to Buckingham Palace, the shopping trips, the meetings with the agents who were going to propel her into stardom. And what were they thinking now? he wondered; all these weeks later, and not even a phone call to tell them that she’d landed safely. Would they be thinking she was too busy to contact them, or would they be tearing their hair out with worry; trying desperately to contact somebody in authority who could help them to trace their beautiful daughter and send her home?

That was exactly what Frank would have done if Jo hadn’t contacted him as soon as she’d landed in Australia. And she wasn’t young, vulnerable, and alone, like that poor girl in the next room had been; she was a married woman with a sensible head on her shoulders and a husband to protect her.