She isn’t sad her sister is dead. Far from it. Amy was nuts. Her sister always had the air of respectability – the good job, the nice husband, the big house – while she was the black sheep. She was the alcoholic, the stripper, the hooker. But even now Amy is dead, the insanity still haunts her.

Liv holds the black memory stick in her hand. Amy had given it to her the day she died. ‘For safekeeping,’ Amy had said.

But that night Liv fired up her laptop and plugged the memory stick in the side.

There was one file. A grainy black and white video – looked like a shop. A petrol station, she realised after a moment. Two people on the far side, talking to each other. Liv instantly recognised the older man, Trevor Stevens, from her AA group, and then…

Robin.

Liv didn’t know what it meant. Not fully. She read the newspaper articles about Trevor’s death, looking for something that would say for definite what Amy had found. But she knew that Robin being there couldn’t be good.

‘Livvy?’ One of the strippers calls to her from the doorway. ‘You’re up.’

Things need to change, she thinks. She looks down at her bare stomach, and gently runs her hand across her smooth skin. Toned, flat, perfect. But not for long. She knows that soon the baby will grow and people will notice. There’ll be no way she’ll be able to do this job when that happens.

It was unplanned, of course, but not unwelcome. Already Liv feels the attachment to the tiny person inside. She’ll do anything to protect it, anything to keep it safe. And she knows that keeping Amy away was part of that.

She went back to Amy’s house that night. She rang the doorbell and received no answer, but the lights were on – she knew her sister was inside. And they needed to talk about this video. What did it mean? What was Amy planning on doing with it?

She let herself into the house with the spare key, calling her sister’s name as she shut the front door behind her. The house seemed normal. Clean, stinking of bleach, perfect Amy to the last. Then, in the doorway to the kitchen, Olivia stopped. Her sister was lying on the tiled kitchen floor, her body collapsed into an unnatural position, a halo of blood growing around her head.

Liv’s first thought was to call 999, and she even took her phone out of her bag. But then she paused. She looked at her sister’s face, and all she could feel was disgust. This was the solution. She would be free of her sister, and not only that, but everything Amy owned would go to her. Her next of kin.