“After a while it was like she was just venting. It didn’t seem to be about the money anymore, or my stealing. She seemed furious with life in general. She was driving erratically, not following my directions . . . That was why we ended up heading in the wrong direction when we should’ve been going back to her school. Eventually I persuaded her to let me drive.”

“Did you try to stop her making a scene?”

“I tried to calm her down.”

Ford leaned forward. “How?”

“Not with any force.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“So what happened after you swapped places?”

“She got out of the car.”

Ford wasn’t blinking. “Where was this?”

“Portsmouth Road. Out toward the river. I tried to call after her but she ran off. I assumed she’d make her own way back to school. I . . .” His words caught on the lump in his throat. “I never thought that might be the last I saw of her.”

“Why didn’t you come forward about this before?” Ford’s face had turned thunderous, but Chris couldn’t work out if she believed him and was angry he’d withheld information, or whether she still considered him their prime suspect. Johnson wasn’t bothering to disguise his scorn. Ms. Beaumont had the air of somebody who’d been excluded from a conversation and was silently raging.

“Because I would’ve had to admit the thefts,” Chris said. “And I knew it would look bad—I was the last person to see Freya, she’d been blackmailing me, we argued . . .”

Ford trailed her fingertips across the darkened surface of the iPad. “You’re right,” she said. “It does look bad.”

51.

PAUL

“I should get back inside,” Paul told Yvette as a cold wind blew through the hospital car park, and he felt himself swaying under the crush of too many memories. “Get home.”

Even as he allowed Nathalie back into his head, made her solid again, Steph and Freya gripped hold of him, calling him back to London. He couldn’t even give Nathalie the dubious honor of being the love of his life. She was a wound in the corner of his heart while his wife and daughter had the rest, always would, and what he wanted more than anything was another chance to tell them so.

If Daniel hadn’t taken Freya, who had? In Paul’s mind, by now, his past mistakes and present crisis were utterly entwined. But he had to face the possibility: Might this journey into his former life have been nothing but a devastating waste of time?

Yvette slipped her arm through his and risked accompanying him back across the car park. The buzz of evening visiting time was building around the hospital grounds, a smell of mass-cooked food drifting from the upper wards.