“The police will speak to her, though, won’t they?” Carolina says. “If we show them the pictures of me all over her wall. We should have sent the rat in for analysis. Fingerprints and the like.”

In retrospect, I should have, but the poor animal had no collar or identifying marks, and I wanted it out of her way as quickly as possible.

“Was it a dog?” She’s staring at me now, and her gaze is like a laser.

I can’t lie to her. By omission to save her heartache, maybe, but not when she’s directly asking me.

I nod.

“Oh God.” Her moan is awful and goes straight to my stomach.

“Where is it?”

“In the bin,” I say.

“What?” Her shriek is piercing.

“Carolina, I can assure you. It was dead; nothing could be done for it.”

“That’s not the point. If Brutus went missing, I’d lose my mind. He’s so important to me. The dog might be micro-chipped. We could give its owners some peace.”

I hadn’t even thought about that at the time; I simply wanted to dispose of it safely without alerting her to what was really on her doorstep.

“It might also lead us to who did it,” Marcus adds.

Shit. I’m starting to realize I fucked up. All I thought about in that moment was not letting her see the poor thing, and it hits me. Even then, right at the start, I wasn’t thinking clearly because if you’d have asked me a week before what I’d have done in that situation, I would have said called the police and handed the dog over. Instead, I cleared up all the evidence of anything so that Carolina wouldn’t have to face it.

“The trash hasn’t been taken yet.” Carolina looks out the window. “The poor thing will still be in there.” Her eyes turn glassy as tears well.

This is why I didn’t want her to know.

“Let me deal with it, if you’re okay with that?” Marcus asks me, and I nod. “If the dog has a microchip, we can inform the owners of its death, but it might also help us put a timeline together of when the dog went missing and where.”

“I can’t believe Lexy would kill a dog, if it is her. I thought I knew her. A little at least.” Carolina takes a big sip of her wine, and for once I don’t have the urge to tell her off. I think I’d be day drinking too if I was her.

“I think it was her,” I say. It all adds up. The dog being so like Brutus is fucked up. Cold if it was the gang as originally suspected, but much more in line with the white-hot hatred of obsession.

People think stalkers are all male, but they aren’t.