‘So you arranged for George to pay somebody local, who wouldn’t get caught, to sabotage your father’s helicopter?’ she asked.

‘No! What? No, wait, you have that totally wrong,’ Fabian said to her. ‘I didn’t pay him.’

She could hear the desperation in his voice and didn’t know if to believe him or not, but at the moment it was irrelevant because all she wanted was those two girls out of there.

‘I believe you, Fabian. And I believe that George only took the girls because of the awful things your father did,’ she said. She was going out on a limb because she had no time to call in a professional negotiating team. She was relying on the experience she had as an officer who’d dealt with hundreds of criminal minds, and innocent victims, and hoping she could tell the difference. She was out of her depth, but she had no other option. Her conversation was private, and, until she could get Fabian on a police radio frequency, then she was on her own.

‘He had no choice,’ Fabian said. It was almost a whisper, but it was an admission.

‘Why doesn’t he come in and talk about it?’ she asked.

‘He knows it’s over,’ Fabian said. ‘Donald wasn’t supposed to be on the helicopter.’

‘Was that the plan?’ she asked. ‘Just your father was supposed to be on it?’

‘We all know that he would have got away with it, too,’ Fabian said.

She listened carefully. He was ranting, and she had to let him, but there was also a resigned melancholy she could hear in his voice. It sounded as though he was crying, and she worried for his stability. Was he about to admit that he had killed his own father?

‘Got away with it?’ she asked.

‘If Donald hadn’t been on the helicopter, then everybody would have just said that another rich guy was dead, and no one would have bothered investigating,’ he said.

‘That’s not true, Fabian; investigations into crashes are serious, every time it happens, no matter who is on board,’ she said, only half believing it herself, and mulling over the distinctly convincing possibility that he was speaking the truth.

‘She almost got away with it,’ he said.

‘Wait, Fabian – she?’

‘My mother,’ he said.

‘Your mother is behind this?’ she asked.

She heard him wipe his nose as well as the build-up of intense pain in his throat.

‘I need to go now,’ he said.