She was cleaning up when he came downstairs. A week’s worth of plates and rubbish.

‘I’ll do it,’ he muttered, because his overly pregnant ex-wife cleaning up after him was enough to make him feel like a bastard. ‘Did you drive here?’

‘No, I had to go into the city today. David will be here soon to pick me up.’

Great.

‘Don’t let our daughter see you like this,’ she said quietly. ‘She might seem as if she doesn’t give a shit, but she’s flirting with depression right now and it’s scaring us.’

Bish hated it when Rachel referred to ‘us’.

‘She’s staying with your mother at the moment. Says we’ve suffocated her since she returned from France.’

He could hear the hurt in her voice.

‘She’s being a bitch about the baby. Acts as if I’ve put on fifteen kilos eating Cornish pastries.’

He sipped the coffee. Pretended he wanted to be sipping it. Did a lot of pretending while he watched Rachel, all round-bellied, ready to pop out a son for David Maynard any moment now. Not Bish’s son. Theirs was lying cold in a grave.

Regardless, he wanted nothing more for her than peace. The year before Stevie died she had finally got silk, and she had a great reputation as a human rights barrister. But after his death she became estranged from her world. All she wanted to do was talk about Stevie, and not many people stayed the distance for that. Except for Saffron and the one man Rachel claimed allowed her to grieve in the way she needed to: Stevie’s school principal.

Bish had reacted in the opposite way. He relied on silence. He became a workaholic, falling into bed every night from exhaustion. After Rachel had told him about her affair with Maynard, they called it quits, because she was in love with another man. Perhaps if they’d been younger when everything fell apart, they’d have made a mess handling the divorce, but neither could bear the idea of their daughter’s life being any more miserable. So he let Rachel stay in the house in Ashford and he moved up to London. Bee claimed the Docklands was a soulless place, especially on weekends, when it seemed as if there was no one left in the world to talk to. But it suited Bish. Outside his police work, talking was the last thing he wanted to do.

Rachel handed him a muesli bar from her bag, then retrieved her mobile and started flicking through it.

‘I found photos on Bee’s iPad. They’re not on her Instagram account. These four were hidden in a folder marked “martial arts”.’ She held out her phone.

Bish stumbled to the sink, his stomach churning. He thought of the vulnerable teenage girls he came across at the station, caught up in porn.

He felt Rachel’s hand on his shoulder. ‘They’re not what you think,’ she said.

He splashed his face with cold water and dried it with a tea towel. When he was seated he took the phone.