She stroked his face again. ‘No one would ever guess about your vulnerable side.’ Now she wanted to know about his wife, to find out how damaged the marriage was, but he seemed to read her mind.

‘You don’t want to worry about Angie. We’ve been more like friends for nearly two years now. It’s the nature of my work that destroyed our relationship, and I do feel guilty about it. Don’t get me wrong, I do care about her, particularly her being alone so many nights now we got broken into, but we go our own way a lot of the time.’

Kyle talked about his American-born sister, stuck in an expensive Colorado hospital since breaking her spine in a ski-ing accident a year ago. ‘She’d just broken up with her bastard of a husband, a big real estate guy, and wasn’t covered for most of the treatment she needed on his health plan. I’ve been trying to raise the cash she needs for co-payments, but you know how outrageous the sums are that they charge over there. I’ve had to mortgage the house, and I keep hoping we can shift her back here, but the immigration paperwork is terrible, and there are always more bills.’

‘Kyle, that’s so good of you. Looking after her like that.’

He shrugged it off. ‘Someone’s got to do it. She’s the only sister I’ve got.’

To Lynne, the next hour seemed to melt away into a buzz of pleasure with wonderful food and a man who held her gaze throughout, never once reaching for his phone. She had never been made to feel so important. She was seriously reconsidering whether to limit this to a one-night stand. She watched as Kyle joked with the waiter and deprecated his own knowledge of wine, one of many subjects he said he couldn’t pretend to master. Almost every woman that passed the table glanced at him.

With the champagne finished, they were just about to order dessert when she made the whispered suggestion. ‘Kyle, let’s forget about the crème brûlée. I want you now. Let’s go to the room.’

‘You horny little minx,’ he whispered, his hand on her bottom. They tiptoed up the narrow wooden staircase arm-in-arm. Leaning on him she made her tipsy way around the Tudor gallery, past suits of pewter armour and stern paintings of Elizabethan nobleman, and climbed the thickly carpeted steps to the honeymoon suite. In the doorway they embraced, she shamelessly caressing the sizeable bulge in the front of his trousers, her other arm around his neck. Her imagination was running riot. She could not remember ever having been so aroused. She had really fallen for this man, and literally could not wait.

Once inside the room, she took in the king-size four-poster, the mullioned windows, the chintzy curtains, and the gigantic red plastic suitcase he had presumably already brought up when checking in.

‘Ha, it looks like you’re moving in for a year,’ she said.

‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’ he replied. She had no idea that by morning, after he’d had his fill of her, he would squeeze her slender neck while making love to her until she had been utterly deprived of air. That he would ransack her mobile phone for information about the murder inquiry. Her lifeless body would fit snugly inside the suitcase, and after a leisurely breakfast, he would slide her into the back of his Range Rover to be disposed of at a later date.