Now Chris avoided his solicitor’s bewildered gaze, the expectant eyes of the detectives. He stared down at his own hands on the desk. His veins seemed bluer than usual, as though his skin was thinning as he sat there.

“Freya hasn’t paid for any driving lessons since December,” he said.

Ford’s eyes narrowed. Johnson’s fingers twitched as if she was ready to slap handcuffs on Chris.

“Why?” Ford asked.

Chris said nothing for a moment. Her one-word question hovered.

“Are you—or were you—having a relationship with her?”

“No.”

“Then why wasn’t she paying you?”

Chris swallowed. “She . . . Well, I suppose you’d call it blackmail.”

“Blackmailing you?”

The scorn in Johnson’s tone made Chris stiffen. A grown man let himself be blackmailed by a seventeen-year-old girl? Chris kept his gaze on Ford: She clearly didn’t like him, but at least she never seemed to be laughing at him from behind her hand.

“She had something over me,” Chris said, praying they’d somehow let him skirt around the details. “She threatened to give me away unless I let her keep her lesson money. She said she needed it to buy her own car. I was sure her parents would buy her one, but she acted so urgent about it.”

“Do you think she wanted to go somewhere? Did she ever mention a trip, or a plan to run away?”

He shook his head.

“Do you think the money might actually have been for something else?”

Chris jerked his shoulders. “I just know she went to some lengths to get it.”

He thought of the little comments she would throw in as they drove the streets, reminding him of what she knew, how she could ruin him. The folded notes she’d leave on his windshield. Picked up anything nice lately? . . . Still got the photos. Sometimes she’d acted like a vigilante, doing a public service by keeping him in check. But really she was just a child who’d stumbled across an adult’s secret and realized she could wield it like a weapon.

Up until the day she’d flipped open his glove box and its contents had spilled into her lap, he’d actually liked her, despite her overconfidence in the driver’s seat, despite his innate mistrust of glossy people. She had an edge, sure: She wasn’t meek or straitlaced, but she was funny and interesting. And maybe the change had begun before she’d made her discovery about him. He recalled a distracted sullenness that had developed over a matter of weeks. Then, as she’d sifted through the items, it was as if something had clicked and she’d understood she could turn knowledge into power.

Chris shot a glance at Ford’s iPad, his gaze lingering on the pillbox. It was the one thing Freya had managed to smuggle from his car after that day. Her leverage, she’d called it.