I thought of Danny. I hadn’t even felt guilty about him, I realised now. I’d felt a lot of things, but guilt wasn’t one of them.

‘Thank you,’ I said quietly. ‘Of course I can forgive you. I guess – I guess we haven’t been good for each other for a long time now.’

‘You must have been so pleased, the day I got banged up.’

‘Are you joking?’ I shook my head at him. ‘It was hideous.’

‘I didn’t do it, you know.’

‘Didn’t you?’ We stared at each other. I felt like I was slipping back into the yawning black hole. I had been so unsure of the truth for so long, I wasn’t sure I could bear it now.

‘Did you honestly think I had become a drug baron?’

This man I knew so well and yet didn’t know at all. I gazed at him in silence. Behind him on the wall a print of Lautrec’s cancan dancers kicked out their delicately heeled feet, faces mischievous, their skirts primrose-yellow froth. So much history - and yet …

‘Come on, Rose. Don’t act dumb. I thought …’ He trailed off.

‘What?’

‘I thought it was you that shopped me.’

‘James!’

‘I thought you were so angry, you wanted to shock me.’

‘Christ, James. Why would I want that?’ I felt wearied, a thousand years old. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

But I saw myself tearing round his studio the day that I’d caught Liam there. I had doubted James severely, that was true. I’d pulled things down, I’d opened drawers, files, I’d gone through his emails. I’d sat numb and dazed, knowing my life no longer stacked up, and had assumed he was up to no good.

‘I thought about it, you know.’ He read my mind. ‘When they offered to cut me in on the deal; when they asked if I wanted to take over running one of their operations.’

I saw the vortex now; I saw my chance to climb back before I was sucked through for ever. This was the chance to scramble out. ‘So you were tempted?’

‘I was desperate.’

I put all the books down and sat on the sofa next to him. ‘Desperate?’

He put his head in his hands, staring at his feet. At the new carpet. ‘I’d fucked up so badly, financially. I was terrified. I panicked. For a moment I saw it as a quick fix.’

‘A quick fix?’

‘Do you have to keep bloody repeating me?’ James snapped. He stood and walked to the drinks cupboard, pulled a bottle of whiskey from the shelf.

‘Is that why you tried to blackmail Higham?’ I asked him drily.

He put the bottle down with a bang and swung to face me.

‘That wasn’t me.’ His forehead wrinkled into a deep frown. ‘That was Kate’s idea. Kate and Charlie. I swear.’

‘Did you know Dalziel was alive?’