Jonah gave her a thoughtful look before he asked, ‘Do you feel that you can trust her? She’s explained that she knows Charlie. It’s possible that … well, that she invited you to Portsmouth so he could silence you.’

Louise gave him a smile. ‘I thought that for a minute, too. When she turned up at the scene. And then instead of helping him, she hauled him off me and was in no hurry to stop the bleeding. She cared a lot more about if I was OK than about him. Until I said I didn’t want to be facing a murder charge.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘And I do know that I’m facing one now. I do know.’

Jonah could only nod, feeling inwardly furious that she had avoided one false charge for killing Alex Plaskitt, only to find herself forced into killing Charlie Ruskin. It seemed desperately unfair, and he wondered what going through all this did to a person. Ironically, he now strongly suspected that the Louise of over a week ago would never have reacted violently. They had all, between them, somehow created a new version of her.

The strange thing was that their wrong assumptions had helped her. Without them, she would almost certainly have been dead before April Dumont arrived. It was possible that April would have been killed shortly afterwards, too.

That said, he still wasn’t sure what to make of April Dumont’s involvement. She had insisted that setting up Charlie and Louise had been her own idea, not Charlie’s, and that it had all been the worst coincidence. She said she’d had no clue what Charlie was capable of. She’d thought, like the rest of them, that Alex Plaskitt was the killer.

She’d also insisted that setting Louise up had been a secondary part of the evening. ‘The main thing was to make her feel like she could go out and be herself,’ she’d explained, with her customary firmness. ‘I didn’t want all of this to end up changing her for good.’

They’d also found out that April had known Charlie for longer than she’d known Louise. But a lot less well, she said. He’d run the bar at a conference she’d been to several years running, back when she worked in pharma. They’d got on well and managed not to ruin everything by sleeping together. Jonah had tried not to smile at that. A world where not sleeping with a friend seemed surprising was a very different world from Jonah’s.

‘You really weren’t aware of any of Charlie’s crimes?’ Jonah had asked her, watching her very closely.