And now, Tilly Ostergard was on location somewhere in eastern Europe, shooting a period drama about Lucy Hobbs Taylor, America’s first female dentist, entitled Smiling Through. Mercy Williams was flying to London to shoot a music video and do a show at the O2 – not bad for a woman who, only a year ago, was lucky to get lipsynching gigs in gay clubs. And so Isabelle was following her. She didn’t know what else to do.

She’d booked herself into the Soho Hotel for three nights; another luxury, but Cissé could stand it. Besides, where else could she stay? She’d let the flat go, and the house in Chelsea wasn’t even hers yet, the solicitors were dragging their feet so much. She’d have to put a rocket under Will for that. He should be out there every day, cracking the whip. What else did he have to do?

She slept for a few hours, and woke up as the plane hit turbulence over the east coast. Nothing to worry about, said the captain, but Isabelle felt her stomach plummeting down into the ocean, the air in the cabin suddenly several degrees hotter.

She wanted a hand to hold, someone to laugh at her, to take the piss out of her fears, but she was travelling alone. There was so much space in first class that her nearest neighbour wasn’t even in grabbing distance. A stewardess smiled at her; that would have to do. There would be plenty of people in London. She wouldn’t be alone. All the old faces, all the old places . . . Will . . . Dan . . . Her stomach lurched again. Bloody turbulence, she muttered, and closed her eyes.

Victoria lay in a hospital bed, her left arm and shoulder in a cast, bandages on her head, her eyes swollen shut. A drip went into her right arm. She was still unconscious; apart from a brief moment of lucidity just after they got her on to the ward, she had been out cold.

Victoria was lucky. Leanne Miller was dead.

The press went mad. An internationally famous artist, a known lesbian, struck down by a hit-and-run driver on a remote road in the south of France, where she was holidaying with her girlfriend. Her pregnant girlfriend. Her pregnant girlfriend who was hovering between life and death, the fate of her baby hanging in the balance.

But Victoria was a sentimental sideshow to the main event – the murder, for so it seemed, of a famous person. The police were still looking for the vehicle that had struck them, tipping the Renault over the cliff edge, striking Leanne a glancing blow that sent her soaring through the air to crack her skull on the rocks at the roadside. When a passing motorist found her, the puddle of sticky black blood was already thick with flies.