‘When he got me out of that hatch, I fought like hell,’ she said quietly, her fork clinking against the tin of the can. ‘He kept telling me, “Don’t fight me, don’t fight me, I’ve got a plan,” but what was I supposed to think? This was the same guy who’d picked me up at the airport; the same guy who’d talked to me over the phone, pretending to be Kevin Quinn, and who told me he’d show me the Beatrix Steards case.’ A flicker of torment in her eyes. ‘Twenty years ago, even fifteen, I’m not sure I would have fallen for that crap. But I’m sixty-seven. I’m retired. Before this, I spent two and a half years having lunches, going to Pilates classes, meeting for coffee and playing golf. I spent two years having holidays with my son and his family. And before any of that, I was teaching for twelve years. I’d lost my edge. That drive, that obsession, that sense of debt, it never leaves you, but when you’re not doing it every day, you do lose something. I don’t know if it’s focus. It’s more like a loss of altitude.’

‘The bigger picture.’

She nodded.

‘So you injured yourself fighting Mills?’

She looked at her bandaged wrist. ‘Yeah. Like I said, I fought like it was my last breath. I fought him so hard. Eventually, he got me in the face.’ She gestured to a bruise on her cheek. ‘Hell, he hit me so hard, it almost knocked my teeth out, and then he walked me into the forest, staying behind me with a gun to the back of my head, and told me he had a plan and I needed to play along.’

Mills’s plan was to use me.

He couldn’t release himself from Vale’s grip because the moment he did, Vale would ruin him. Whether Vale really had kept a record of everything that Mills had done for him – as he’d claimed to Mills – was debatable, as it would be a huge risk to keep that sort of information lying around, but what was undeniable was that Adrian Vale had the money and power to leak, expose and manipulate the narrative when it came to Isaac Mills. And actually going as far as killing Vale himself represented no sort of escape either: his death would invite the police in, and the police would find Mills.

With me, though, maybe he’d thought he had a chance.