‘Not good. The strength of the balance sheet is keeping us afloat, and the patents on new drugs are valuable. But we have around six months to stop the haemorrhaging before we start to question our viability. I’m selling subsidiaries like they’re going out of fashion.’

‘That good?’

‘Why did you come here, Charlie?’

She had said it softly. It hadn’t been intended as a threat or a challenge. It mattered to her. Priest’s head was burning. He looked at his hands. It wasn’t that they didn’t look real, they just didn’t look like his. He was ashamed, but there was more to it. He was afraid. Afraid he had blown it. After William’s crimes had been made public, Priest had spent years in an emotional wasteland, tortured by the ceaseless paradox that depersonalisation disorder created: he felt nothing, yet that lack of feeling had driven him to the edge of despair. Now, time had softened the disorder’s debilitating effects but he was still haunted. The ghost of the condition wouldn’t go away. For the first time in years, for over a decade, Charlie Priest had felt something, a possibility. A fleeting chance. This woman could make him happy, and the ghost could be laid to rest.

But he might have squandered the chance.

His stomach churned.

‘I can’t exorcise this overwhelming feeling,’ he said, meeting her gaze. ‘I’ve tried, but it won’t go away.’

She seemed suspicious, defensive. Impenetrable. ‘What feeling?’

‘That there is a bond between us.’

He let that hang in the air. Sensed a chasm opening up in front of him – a black hole, into which all of his energy was being pulled. He was drained. The adrenaline of the trial had been sucked dry. Alexia’s ruined face haunted him. Simeon’s death weighed heavy on his conscience and he had been so close, holding what might have been the answer, Simeon’s phone, only to have it cruelly snatched away by a faceless thief.

‘There is no bond between us,’ he heard her splutter in that deep, melodic rasp of a voice. Anger enveloped him, rising in his chest and spreading outwards.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘There is no—’

He took half a step forward. Without warning, he curled his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her into his embrace, put his mouth to hers and tasted the sweet tang of her lips. Her eyes widened with alarm and there seemed to be a moment when she realised what he was doing and brought her hand hard across his face, breaking the contact with such shock that Priest thought he had blacked out.

‘How dare you!’ she bellowed.

He was about to retreat, the horror of what he had done seeping through his fury. Then she hit him again. The third time she lashed out he caught her wrist, held it, his chest heaving.