Intervening thoughts scissored across her mind. She had to get to the maisonette, should have gone days ago. She’d been so cowardly leaving it to Emma. Each time she opened her mouth to tell George to send his colleagues there, fear froze her stiff as she thought of everything it would unleash. If only she could slip away from all the people who seemed to be constantly around her . . .

And Paul was still gone. Unreachable, oblivious. She kept thinking she saw him in the street, her heart contracting with hope, but it was just a journalist who looked a little like him, fooling her every few seconds.

“Steph?”

Finally, she looked at what she was being shown. At first she thought it was just a photo of a twenty-pound note, until she spotted the doodle in the top-right corner and all her fractured attention rocketed toward it.

“That’s . . . Freya’s driving-lesson money.” She lurched forward and grabbed the iPad from George. “I always draw a car in the corner of the notes I give her for her lessons. It’s just a”—she stared at her own silly sketch of a Mini Cooper—“a thing I do. It’s an ongoing joke that Freya loves Minis.”

George nodded. “There were several banknotes folded up in her jacket pocket, with this same drawing on each. Amounting to almost three hundred pounds.”

“Three hundred?”

“Do you tend to give Freya the money in advance?”

“No, on the day,” Steph said. “I don’t understand . . . Why did she have so much on her?”

“We were hoping you might be able to tell us.”

Steph had to look away from her doodle, her eyes raw. Chris Watson’s face now leered into her mind. Hadn’t Freya been paying for her lessons? Or hadn’t the lessons been taking place at all?

George moved closer and swiped at the tablet still in her hands. Colors skidded across her vision. “What about this?”

It was a photo of a round silver box, a cluster of jewels decorating its hinged lid.

“What is it?” Steph asked.

“You don’t recognize it?”

“Should I?”

“It’s a solid silver pillbox. It was also in Freya’s coat pocket.”

Steph planted two fingers on the screen and zoomed in until the image was as pixelated as her thoughts. She shook her head, feeling faint.

“Did Freya take any regular medication?”

“No.”

“Could this have been a present?”

“Not that I know of . . .”

She imagined George looking up sharply and saying, Well, perhaps you wouldn’t know. Because perhaps you didn’t know her as well as you thought. And maybe she learned her deceptiveness from you.

43.

KATE

Twenty-five years earlier