‘Put your phone down now Alice!’ Beth shouted. ‘Right now!’

‘What are you going to do, Mum?’ Alice screamed back. ‘Shoot me? Kill me like you killed Dad?’

Beth stopped for a moment. Turned the shotgun back towards me.

‘No. But I will shoot Joe unless you do what you’re told.’

Beth walked back over to where I was sprawled on the floor, stood over me, the barrels of the shotgun a foot from my head.

Alice lowered the phone, but didn’t put it down.

I stared up at the twin black barrels. This close, they looked huge. The fear was still raw and strong but now there was something else, something more powerful, pushing against it: this had to end, and there was only one way the truth could come out. I had failed Ben, failed an innocent man, but I would not fail my son.

Only one way to make sure William didn’t grow up under a murderer’s roof.

Only one thing to be done.

Protect the boy.

‘Do it, Alice,’ I said. ‘Send it.’

Alice looked from her mum, to me, to her mum again.

‘I don’t want . . .’

Beth pressed the muzzles of the shotgun to my forehead, hard steel biting into the skin.

‘Joe’s death will be on your hands, sweetie.’

‘Mum, don’t hurt him.’

‘I’ll shoot him. I swear it.’

I said: ‘She’s bluffing. Send it.’

‘I’m going to count to three,’ Beth said, ‘if you don’t put the phone down –’

‘Do it for Ben, Alice,’ I said. ‘Do it for your dad.’

Alice thought for a moment, gave a tiny nod of her head, and pressed send just as I grabbed for the shotgun.

Three Months Later

Three Months Later

Chapter 85

85

The post-mortem found that Ben was asphyxiated while unconscious.

Fibres in his mouth and throat indicated that a blanket held over his face was used to kill him that Thursday night. Suffocated as he lay on the concrete floor of the car park. His body was wrapped in the same blanket – from the boot of Beth’s car – when they found it beneath the half-finished foundations of the summer house in his garden. The post-mortem also found that he had suffered a bump on the head sufficient to knock him unconscious for a few minutes, and a ruptured eardrum – but no fractured skull, no fatal injury from my encounter with him.