Actually, there is one way, but only we would know it. There was an old man in Turkey who covered the dots our father tattooed on us with a pretty flower design. There are a different number of stamens used to conceal the dots. You’d have to look pretty darn close though. And you’d have to know who has which number. Chris knows Leah has one more than Megan to denote her being the elder. But will he remember if Megan had nine and Leah ten, or if it was ten and eleven? I very much doubt he will, and it was really very easy to add an extra two little dots using a broken biro and one of the pins from the noticeboard we would pin takeaway menus to in the kitchen.

I don’t know how well you know Chris by now. Has he bragged yet about how he doesn’t need to sleep much? How he’s super productive because he only has a few hours each night? It’s all true, but damn! He sleeps the sleep of the eternal dead for those hours. You would need to drive a steamroller through the house to wake him up. Never have I seen anything like it. Although it did give me the ultimate window of opportunity to devise my own plan and find the chinks in his armor. There was always one thing that Chris was terrible at: seeing his own vulnerabilities and faults. There is no way he ever dreamed I would find a way to outsmart him. That it would be him in a little cell and not me or Tom.

My biggest problem had been finding a way to physically overpower him. I’d debated using the Nytol to knock him out, but you can really taste it if you take more than a little sip, so I needed something else. Yasmin—the neighbor who Chris plays knight in shining armor for—has a well-stocked medicine cabinet from which I was able to pilfer some interesting things when I popped round with a cake I’d baked. Chris had said her husband wasn’t a well man and, judging by the veritable pharmacy in her bathroom, he hadn’t been kidding. Amazing that the cure for one can be poison to another.

There is a long journey ahead of me. This is all far from over. But it will all work out in the end. Because there is something about Chris that when you finally get to know him you see, something that marks him out as one of God’s fuck-ups. When this goes to trial—and of course it will, he’s hardly going to plead guilty and take the life sentence without a fight—any juror worth their salt will gradually see his true colors being revealed, and then they will decide that yes, this is a man who could do the things I’ve accused him of.

Chapter Twenty

“Where is Megan? Have you found her?” I have asked these questions over a hundred times since the police found me, and they have yet to actually give me an answer. I keep my eye on their reactions though, to make sure it is not me they suspect. There is no chance that they haven’t found the body. I mean, it was right there in the room. It’s not like they wouldn’t have had a peek inside the freezer. I’d made sure that the thin layer of frozen goods—bags of peas and sweetcorn and the like—covering her had been moved aside just enough that even a cursory glance would reveal her.