Saskia hesitates for a moment, then reaches across to her coat and pulls a small phone out of the large pocket. ‘There are audio recordings of you,’ she explains. ‘But it’s the photos you’ll want to see.’ Saskia puts the phone on the coffee table and gives Beth the code. With the screen unlocked, Beth takes a deep breath, taps into the photos and scrolls through the images.

‘I would say it’s lucky you’re so photogenic, but I don’t suppose that’s appropriate under the circumstances.’ Saskia has never liked silence, but Beth isn’t in the mood for pandering to her wishes right now. She’s too busy trying to make sense of what she’s looking at. Dozens of photos of her on Kat’s phone. Taken in secret, Kat spying on her. Beth looks towards the window; the voile curtain that she once loved now seems so inadequate. Kat’s phone dropped just metres from here. Would she come back for it? Is she out there now?

Panic rises in Beth’s gut, and she concentrates on breathing. Kat is clearly obsessed with her, so much more of a stalker than Mark ever was. But why? And who is she? Kat told Saskia she knew Beth eighteen years ago, which was when Eddie died. Is her fixation related to his death? Or what came after? Beth can’t go to the police, not after everything that’s happened with Mark. So what can she do? Tears prick at her eyes, but she can’t let them fall; she needs to hide her fear from Saskia.

Why did she let Kat into her life? She never trusts anyone, not wholly, so why did she let her guard down with a scruffy dog walker? Perhaps that’s why. In Beth’s world, where wealth and beauty are the only currency worth trading in, Kat just wasn’t an adversary. But could it have been more than that? She thinks about her mum hanging the washing out in her tiny garden yesterday, how she reminded Beth of Kat. The community Beth grew up in always leaned on each other because managing alone wasn’t an option. She found it repellent at the time, the neediness of it, but perhaps a dormant part of her was drawn to the familiarity of Kat’s selfless urge to help.

She should have known better.

‘Have you seen the last picture yet?’

Saskia’s voice is loaded with meaning and Beth steels herself before scrolling to the end. A gasp escapes from her lips, and she rams her lips together to ride the swell of nausea rising up.