‘Yes. I don’t like him coming here. I told him that, I finally told him that!’ She looked delighted for a moment, then it dropped away. ‘But he doesn’t listen to me.’ She selected a box stacked close to the door. Inside was a laptop that looked well used. It was black originally but the lid was covered in stickers of pink hearts and glittery fairies. ‘This is Emma’s. She had to have one for school but the internet is all disabled. I don’t know how to work them, Nicholas did all that.’ She lifted the lid and the noise of a fan was the first sign of life. It took another few seconds for the screen to light up and even then it was just a spinning icon. There was a slim desk pushed against the wall opposite the bed. A simple, fold-out metal chair was pushed under it. Marilyn put the laptop down on the desk to plunge her hand into her pocket. She lifted something out between her thumb and finger like it was the most precious diamond the world had ever seen.

‘The boxes, it wasn’t for me to move away, it was for us. That was what Nicholas said. He said when this was all finished we would move away and be a family again. I can’t do that, I won’t do that!’ That muttering, terrified fragility of Marilyn Luckhurst was still falling away and steel was revealed behind it. The item in her hand was a pen drive. Marilyn pushed it into the side of the laptop. ‘This is what I was going to give to Hannah. This was going to set us free from him.’

Chapter 58

Richard Maddox just needed to take a moment to sit in the stillness. He was in the driver’s seat, and the dust he had disturbed drifted over the bonnet, catching in the last of the sunlight. It was only just peeking above the houses that were across the clearing in front of him. Soon it would be dark. And that might give him a whole new problem. He took a few deep breaths before turning to peer into the back.