‘So why didn’t you ditch the husband and run off with this Beatrice?’

She looked at me as though I’d spat in her eye. ‘Because it was 1955. And I was married with two children by then. You didn’t just leave. You didn’t do whatever you wanted and fuck the consequences.’

‘I’d have fucked those consequences till the cows came home,’ I scoffed.

‘Yes well, different times. We quickly became best friends, then lovers, then soulmates. But I went home with Geoffrey and that was that.’

‘You never saw her again?’

‘No.’

‘Are you seeing her when we go to Naples? There’s a Capri excursion, I think.’

‘No,’ she repeated, picking up her drink. And she left it at that.

‘Is she the reason you drink piña coladas for breakfast?’

She didn’t dignify that. I went back to the book. It was only when her glass clinked against her ring I realised she’d fallen asleep. The page had fallen open on one of the hot bits, the horny housekeeper talking about the Countess being ‘the most sumptuous oyster she’d ever cracked open.’

… she was naked with herself when she was with the Countess. Shame had fallen from her shoulders like a silken robe… a gorgeous new thrill rippled inside her, a hot, molten feeling of utter serenity.

Ooh.

… like her body was a dolphin shooting into the sky. The excitement. That silver thrill of knowing one had that power: to have conquered oneself. In finding the Countess, she had conquered the living death that was life.

That’s how it feels, I thought. To kill someone. I know it wasn’t the point of the plot – to put a serial killer in touch with her murderous lust – but that’s the effect it had. It was describing how I felt when I took someone’s life. When I sensed their last breath leave them. Caro telling me about her first love had inadvertently brought me back to mine. Killing was my The One. It was how I’d felt after suffocating Derek Scudd. After knifing Gavin White. After mounting Troy Shearer and stabbing him through the heart in that alleyway. After slicing Sandra Huggins to bloody bits.

… she was a better person with her love beside her. With her skin on hers. When she was her own true self. Happier. Settled. And her rage and her fretfulness quelled to a calm, undulating sea.

‘Fucking hell,’ I said. I’d missed that feeling. I wanted it again. I didn’t want to be numb anymore. Treading water. Scared. When I was Rhiannon, nothing scared me. Nothing could. I wanted that back.