“What’s the significance of these things?” Ford asked.

Ms. Beaumont turned her upper body toward him as though hinged at the waist. “Chris, we need to talk before you answer any further questions.”

“Just tell us why Freya took this picture,” Ford said, ignoring his solicitor. “Why she was blackmailing you. Why you were driving away from Kingston with her on the day she disappeared.”

Chris felt a surge of pure terror. Was he actually going to be charged? Ms. Beaumont tried one more time to convince him to consult, but Chris just wanted to get this over with now. He could only hope they wouldn’t equate his confession with a motive to harm Freya.

“I steal things,” he said dispassionately. “I take little tokens from my learners, whenever I can.”

Johnson was smirking again. Chris had never felt so pathetic. Ford was pushing up her sleeves. “Do you sell them? Is business not exactly booming?”

It won’t be after this. Perhaps it was crazy to think about his livelihood when he was on the verge of being charged with a crime, but he couldn’t help envisaging the kind of future he’d have even if he did get out of there.

“It’s not for the money,” he said. “I s’pose it’s a compulsion. Like I want a piece of their lives.”

They both stared at him. They didn’t get it, and he hadn’t expected them to. Didn’t need them to, really. Only to believe him.

“So . . . you were stealing from your clients, and Freya found out?”

He gave a reluctant nod. “She threatened to tell unless I let her off paying for her lessons. It was a small price to pay to keep my business and my reputation.”

“But soon you got fed up,” Ford said, her voice steely. “Being blackmailed by a teenage girl just galled you a little too much. Maybe Freya started asking for more money, making bigger and bigger threats.”

“That’s not—”

“What happened on March the fifteenth?”

Chris imagined he was looking down a long tunnel, with that afternoon at its end. He had become fed up. And nervous. His lessons with Freya would soon have to end: She couldn’t drag them out indefinitely, and what was to stop her telling people his “little secret” then? It was gossip to everybody else but it could destroy Chris. Worse: It could destroy Vicky, and he couldn’t let that happen, not when she’d struggled so hard to make something of her life.

Chris set his jaw. “I said I couldn’t keep giving her money. And I needed to know she wouldn’t blab about my . . . habit.”

“Did you threaten her?”

“No. But we argued. Anger just seemed to burst out of her and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure it was all aimed at me.”

“What do you mean?”