Well, Callum, here I am in Dan’s study, sitting in his chair. A shudder grips me, chilling, like a malignant ghost walking through me. The last time I was in here, Dan’s body lay slumped over the desk, a knife between his shoulder blades. I’d refused to believe what my eyes had been telling me. Telling me? Screaming at me, more like. But I really had believed it had been one of Dan’s pathetic games. See! I didn’t even trust him to be properly dead.

Even before Nathan’s death, Dan made our lives a misery. You couldn’t run a pub or club or restaurant in this town without some mobster or other demanding a thick slice of a pie they had no hand in making or baking. For them, extortion was a quick way to make a whole heap of money. But for Nathan and me it wasn’t just standing up to the substance of what they were trying to do; it was the principle behind it as well. Giving in to the Owen Dowds and the Dan Jeavons of this world would mean no going back. We’d be the victims of whichever bully boys thought they could employ such tactics.

Nathan stood up to all of them, even though they’d put him in hospital twice. When he died, they then turned their attention to me – both Dowd and Jeavons – each demanding a hefty proportion of my monthly profits. Well, I wasn’t going to take that lying down, sitting up or in any other position, and that’s what I told the beefed-up minions each of them sent, warning them that, if they tried anything, I would sing like a songbird to the police and the press and anyone else who’d listen. Dowd had backed off when I hit him with a fact or five I knew about not just his organization but him personally – courtesy of dinner-table conversations with my lawyer daughter. But not Dan Jeavons. No, he took it to the next level. If he’d threatened just me, I would’ve told him to go to the devil and instructed him on what to do when he got there, but he was shrewd. He wasn’t stupid enough to directly threaten Meggie, Callie and Troy. No, he just insinuated that bad things could happen to my loved ones. What were his exact words? ‘Incidents and accidents happen, Sephy; that would be entirely your fault.’ Loathsome bastard. I could’ve and should’ve killed him for that alone.