Her hand was still in the bag. But it was holding a rubberised black handle, as it had been for some minutes. And, in spite of the pain, she put every ounce of her consciousness into that instead of her desperate need for air. She was nothing more than her hand on the handle, and she drew it out and across in the small space between them, and then she drove it up and sideways into the flesh below his armpit.

There was a long second while he did nothing, and then, just as she started trying to pull the knife out, he suddenly let go of her. She fell, gasping desperately for air, but she didn’t lose her grip on the handle, and she could feel it levering downwards as she dropped to her knees.

Charlie let out a howl. And then he started to kick her, his feet connecting hard and painfully with her thighs. Her stomach. She once again thought she might vomit, and wondered if her throat might be too swollen to let it out. But she stayed kneeling there and grabbed on to the handle with her other hand, too.

And then she remembered how Alex had died, and with a strangled roar, she yanked on the handle and felt the blade come clear of his flesh. The feeling was followed by an awful pain in her head. He had hold of her hair and was lifting her up by it.

‘What the hell?’

She heard the voice. Her friend’s voice. April’s voice.

At the sound of it a sudden rush of fear ran through her.

She brought me here. She wanted to set me up with him …

She’d planned all of this. April had planned all of it.

‘No,’ Louise said.

But the pain in her head stopped. Charlie was slumping backwards, and it was April whose arm was round his neck.

‘Get off her! Get off her!’

Charlie spoke, but it wasn’t quite his voice any more. It was a gurgling, cracked sound.

‘She – fucking – stabbed me!’

He stumbled backwards, and April shoved at him until he fell. She looked him over, coldly. And then she met Louise’s eye, for a moment. She gave her the strangest smile.

‘Goddamn right she stabbed you. She’s a stone-cold badass.’

There was little left for Jonah’s team to do except deal with the aftermath. They arrived an hour too late to stop Louise Reakes stabbing someone for real this time. Fifty minutes too late to help Charlie Ruskin, who went into arrest before the two paramedics managed to get him to the ambulance.

And when one of the uniformed constables from Portsmouth City asked if he’d really wanted to save an attempted murderer, Jonah had rounded on him and told him of course he bloody had. That a human life had been lost tonight, and another one probably ruined.