You just got on with life. You climbed back on your horse, your bike or whatever the hell it was you had fallen off and you got on with it. Until another death of someone you loved felled you again.

Who was it – Max Planck – who said, ‘Science moves forward one funeral at a time’?

As life does, too.

But maybe not cats.

There were some days when Daphne sounded like she had been to cats’ choir practice. Even before Meg had reached the front door, she could hear the creature meowing on the other side.

She had been sick with anxiety but trying to pull herself together on her journey home as she mulled over the evidence they’d heard. Sure, that forensic podiatrist had been convincing in the details he had given that it was, beyond doubt, Michael Starr who had entered the premises of TG Law on that November day last year.

But Gready’s diary clearly showed him to have been out of the office at the exact time Starr was supposed to have been in his office. If that evidence was upheld, then despite the forensic gait expert’s evidence, there was no certainty Gready and Starr had met. She was anxious to see how that played out tomorrow, because it seemed to be the first possible chink in the prosecution case. Along with Cork trying to force the point to the jurors that there had been a clandestine meeting between Gready and Starr, which was why it was not in the diary and why no one in the office had been aware of it.

Checking her phone, she was worried there was still no message from Laura. She unlocked the front door and entered, glad to see there were only a couple of flyers on the floor, no post, no bills. Daphne stared up at her, meowing like some tortured creature.

‘Hey, cool it!’ She scooped the cat up into her arms and cuddled her. ‘What’s your problem, little one?’

Daphne began purring as she stroked her head then chest. After a short while she started to wriggle and Meg set her back down, gently.

She dutifully fed all of Laura’s pets and headed back down to the kitchen, hoping a glass of wine would numb some of her fears. She would bung something from the freezer into the oven then have an early night and try to get some sleep. She again checked her phone. Just gone 6 p.m. That would make it 1 p.m. in Ecuador. Laura said they were doing the zip wire in the morning. This morning. And that she would text her straight after. So why hadn’t she?

Meg was about to message her when there was a ping, indicating a new WhatsApp message, on the phone that bastard had left for her.

Check this out, Meg!