“I’m not sure. He makes it his business to know everything when it comes to Sanderson. Constantly terrified of the truth getting out . . .” She paused, drifting into thought. When her gaze returned to him, she scanned his bruised face again. “Did Sanderson do all this?”

Paul nodded, looking down. But I did worse to him. “Do you know if he’s in this hospital?” he asked, ducking the real question: Do you know if he’s alive?

She shook her head. “Was he hurt too?”

Paul nodded again. He could still feel the force of Daniel’s blood as he’d crushed three tea-towels against his shoulder wound. The warmth, and the smell, and the alarm in Daniel’s eyes, which should’ve been satisfying but wasn’t. Help had seemed to take hours to arrive. There’d been no time for explanations or interrogations as the paramedics had sped Daniel away in the ambulance, and Paul had been taken to hospital in their smaller vehicle, without the blue lights wailing. He’d kept expecting the police to turn up at his bedside, asking questions, but there’d been nothing yet, and somehow that was even more unnerving.

“I stabbed him,” he finally answered Yvette, and heard her surprised intake of breath. “And then I tried to save him. But I don’t know if I succeeded. It’s a fucking mess.”

As he’d knelt there trying to prevent Daniel from bleeding out, the adrenaline that had inflamed their confrontation had begun to fade. And Paul had been left with a heavy conviction that this had all been for nothing. Daniel’s reaction to seeing him again had been so strong, Paul could no longer reconcile it with a calculated revenge plan. It had been pure bottled hatred, unexpectedly unleashed by a visitor from the past. If Daniel had taken Freya, wouldn’t he have been prepared for Paul’s arrival?

Slumped against his kitchen cabinets, his skin gray, Daniel had slurred: I haven’t touched your daughter.

And then, I didn’t hurt Billie either. I didn’t.

He’d looked smaller, sadder, his head hanging. It was hard not to believe a man who clearly thought he might die. But if Paul did choose finally to believe him, it meant the whole operation had been pointless. Lives had been ruined on theories that had never been true.

In the aftermath of Nathalie’s death, he used to torture himself by mentally listing his crimes.

He had deceived a woman who was trying to grieve for her missing child, and whose only source of support was the brother Paul had been sent to investigate.