‘The stuff about Alex Kolnik,’ I said wearily, ‘what about that?’

‘All nonsense. Never seen the man. Ben was going to get a restraining order to keep him at arm’s length anyway.’

‘But you rented the black Range Rover to give the story a little bit of colour.’

‘That was your idea too – you mentioned early on that you saw one at the hotel on Thursday night, and we thought there might be a chance to throw it into the mix. We rented it for a week and kept it in long-stay parking, then Mel drove it over when I met you at the park yesterday. And it came in handy today as well.’

‘What about the deleted email from Ben saying he was “going home”? I might never have found it.’

‘We knew you would, eventually – you’re a very easy person to read. Although Christ knows it took you bloody long enough to hack Mel’s bogus email account, even though she’d used the most obvious password ever.’

‘How did you know I’d found the email?’

‘A fairly basic piece of gatekeeper software told us which emails you’d opened. And of course you took the bait, you ran away up north just when the police were going to arrest you again. It made you look even guiltier, like you were fleeing the inevitable.’

There had been no messages from Ben in Mel’s email account from before Thursday night. My assumption was that she had deleted anything incriminating that dated back before their liaison at the Premier Inn.

But now I knew the truth: there were no messages before that day. Because there was no relationship with Ben. It had all been a fiction, constructed online, fed by social media and fuelled by good old-fashioned suspicion and jealousy.

And I had eaten up every last word.

Chapter 81

81

I sat up straighter in the chair, swallowing hard on a dry throat.

‘You said was.’

‘What?’ Beth said.

‘Ben was going to get a restraining order.’

‘Yes I did, didn’t I?’

‘Past tense,’ I said, holding her gaze.

‘Click-clock, tick-tock, and finally the penny drops,’ she said.

There was silence for a moment as I weighed my next words carefully.

‘So it was you all along. You did it.’

‘Did what, Joe?’

‘You killed him.’

‘But how do you know it wasn’t you, Joe? My poor darling husband – you hurt him and then you left him, you abandoned him. How do you know you’ve not been walking around as a murderer for the last nine days?’

‘Because then there wouldn’t have been a need for any of this.’ I gestured at her, at Mel, at the mess in the bedroom. ‘All these lies. All this misdirection. I would have gone down for it and that would have been that, justice would have taken its course.’