He is out smoking and pacing on the deserted beach going over and over what he said and what he should not have said to David.

If only the house really had been empty. If only the child had not caught them. If they had not had a row; if he had not yelled the things he had David might not have tried to get home. He would not have been so furious with Fergus; he might well have laughed the kiss off. Instead he had a burning need to get back to Fleur and punch Fergus on the nose.

David might still be alive if he had kept his mouth shut…

‘Hello,’ a small voice says. Here she is. Oh God. His mouth goes dry and sweat runs down inside his shirt. He feels a sudden terror of exposure. His flying, his army life, his marriage, his reputation…all blown away. He understands what David felt now and he was damn right to feel it.

Is it the same twin? He sees the white dress with the pink roses, the one she had been clutching that afternoon, and he hears Beattie’s voice.

‘So sweet those twins! Even their parents can’t tell them apart. They have to be dressed in different dresses…one wears pink and the other blue…isn’t it killing?’

He will never know how it happens. He tries to get rid of her, tries to shake her off, but she will not leave him alone. She remembers him all right. She remembers it was him with her father. She dances around him as if to taunt him, smiling, and her smile seems to him innocent but knowing. He feels blind anger as he pulls her along, then…

He has to stop her screaming. He puts his hand over her mouth and somehow the thought comes and he leaves it there. She is a small child and he has large hands.

A moment; a moment only. A rush of insanity and it is done. He is safe. His life is safe.

He buries her. He buries her deep; turns and runs and his leg throbs painfully.

It did not happen. It did not happen. It never happened. Not to him. It is someone else’s tragedy. Not his. He never left the beach. He saw nothing. No, no one suspicious.

He helps them search. He even helps them search.

When the detectives are flown out from England he waits for them to come for him. All his life, really, he has waited for the knock on the door. It never came. That life faded. He retired. Terrible things became something that happened to someone else; a different, younger, fiercely ambitious self…but a man who would once have given up all he had for a life with the man he loved.

Yet, from the moment his first daughter is born he thinks about that child every single day of his life.

The child had looked up at him bewildered, suddenly terrified. Little beads of sweat lay on her top lip. Her fear had ignited something in him, something primitive and powerful. A predator sensing blood. One single evil moment that bleeds into the rest of your life, the horror of it dormant but pervasive, preventing happiness, preventing peace.