‘No police.’ Kate glances at her watch. ‘Tom, you need to get going. You’ve got another session in five minutes. I’ll wait with Jenna for the doctor to arrive.’

Jenna raises her hands in objection. ‘You don’t have to. I’ll be fine alone.’

‘If you’re sure …’ She hears the relief in Kate’s voice. ‘Come on then, Tom, let’s go.’

‘I heard you.’ He doesn’t move from Jenna’s side. ‘Next session in five minutes.’

Kate raises her eyebrows. ‘Tom?’

‘I do own a watch.’

‘Of course you do.’ She flashes a tight smile at Jenna, then stalks out of reception, her heels clacking on the tiles like a stopwatch counting down.

‘Can we go outside for a bit?’ Jenna asks Tom as the manager and the receptionist head back behind the counter.

He frowns. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I think you should sit down until the doctor gets here.’

‘I want to talk to you, in private.’

‘Okay.’ He reaches out a hand to help her up and continues to hold it as they make their way out through the double doors and into the courtyard where two huge palms guard the archway and prickly pears and shrubs are crowded into the raised stone beds. When Tom pauses Jenna lets go of his hand.

‘This way.’ She gestures for him to follow her out towards the road then stops, her back against the wall that surrounds the hotel complex. Beyond the road, rough eggshell-coloured scrubland is edged by a patchwork of brown furrowed fields and lush green stretches of grass.

‘You all right?’ Tom stands beside her. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Who’s Kate?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Kate. She’s not just your assistant, is she?’

‘What … why … what makes you think that?’

‘Just tell me, Tom.’

He slumps against the wall, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance.

‘Tom?’ she says again. ‘Is Kate your girlfriend?’

His lips tighten and he frowns. He looks torn. ‘No.’

‘But you’re in love with her?’

This time he glances at her. ‘No. Jenna, why are we having this conversation?’

She looks at him steadily. ‘You tell me.’

Chapter 29

Now

KATE

Geraldine’s a bloody good actress, Kate concedes as she clicks stop on Geraldine’s recording, closes the program and removes the SSD card from her laptop. All that stuff about being bullied as a child would have been quite moving if it had been true. It obviously wasn’t. No undercover journalist would have shared her darkest secrets with the man she was investigating. She must have lifted it from some poor sod whose story she’d covered. If Kate had been counselling her, rather than Tom, she’d have pushed Geraldine to say more and exposed the holes in her story. But, Tom being Tom, he’d lapped up every word.