‘What? And go to that bastard’s victory party? I may be all over Falling Guy, but I’m not that bitter.’

Petra might be slow on the uptake, but it clicked eventually. Of course she would, and of course she was. The opportunity was serendipitously presenting itself, just as she knew it would, just as Olivia would arrange it.

* * *

The cheerful green and blue logo of MyHealth on a letter addressed to Helena changed her mind. A bill for her final hospital procedures. As the initial treatment was logged as an outpatient procedure, and the in-patient accommodation and further surgical interventions were not preauthorised, the patient was subject to penalty payments as stipulated in the hospital-only tier of her medical insurance. Please settle immediately and seek reimbursement direct from the Clarendon Hospital.

It wasn’t the money that irked her – though just how the hell she was going to pay this bill was a question she would have to grapple with later – but the fact that the letter had landed on Petra’s doormat.

They knew she was dead. The fuckers knew Helena was dead and yet they’d addressed the bill to her. They also knew that Helena was no longer in her dingy little flat and knew exactly which other tiny flat to come knocking at for their debt.

They knew Helena was dead, and still they’d addressed the letter to her. They would reach out and strangle her, even in her eternal rest.

They being: Directors: Mary Franklin (US), Roberta Johnson, Marc Peterson (US), Gary Schindler. And Curtis Worthing.

The choice was out of her hands, she felt. Any last qualm affecting her dissipated. Besides, she had precisely nothing more to lose.

* * *

The house on Brook Street was glittering when Suki and Petra arrived, golden lights and a gentle thrum emerging through the triple-glazed windows. In the commandeered residents’ parking area of a Regency terrace, a man in a sharp tuxedo and a woman in a navy-blue dress and velvet coat stepped out of a burnished, low-slung car. They hurried across the road, the street lights etching the rain in jagged lines through the plane trees’ bare fingers, and were swallowed into the red door.