Safe now.

Lori rows, strong and steady, the oars splitting the still water. She hasn’t spoken since they left Flynn House – nobody has.

Christine is curled in the base of the boat, covered to her neck with an old, grey blanket. Lori found a pulse when she and Leon discovered her at the foot of the stairs, but it’s only faint – Christine will need to be taken straight to hospital when they reach the mainland.

Alice leans against Leon, his arm around her shoulders. She’s still woozy, and her ankle throbs, wrapped tightly in a towel. She will need stitches.

Gabriela sits on the other side of her. Alice isn’t scared. Gabriela isn’t a threat to them. She killed Faith because of what she did to her father.

The thought of what the police will find at Flynn Hotel doesn’t bear thinking about. A twisted, desperate woman who was stabbed, after wreaking revenge on the people she believed ruined her mother’s life – her life.

She glances back towards Flynn Hotel, blinks, adjusting her eyes to the Victorian Gothic building standing on the cliff edge, grand and imposing, with its steep, high roof rising to a point, and its arched windows. A shudder runs down her spine. She swiftly moves her gaze back towards the coastline, towards safety, towards home, towards the future.

Chapter 44

November 2019

Detective Sergeant Short isn’t one for letting things get to him – a hefty bloke in his late forties, he worked in Kansas City in the US for thirty years after growing up there. He thought he’d seen pretty much everything by the time he moved to Suffolk with his English wife in 2014. ‘It’ll be a chance to wind down,’ she said. ‘You don’t get any less stressful than Suffolk,’ she said. And now look what he is faced with: two bodies propped up like life-sized dolls in one of the bedrooms, another victim – a middle-aged man – in another room, and a creepy attic room. The whole scenario is off-the-scale weird.

The body of Faith Flynn had been taken from the attic. The odd, footless puppets have been bagged, along with a saw, a knife, and the remains of an apparently drugged fairy cake.

‘It looks as if there’s a grave in the wood, boss,’ Detective Constable Martin says, and the DS startles and looks over his shoulder at the young officer framed in the doorway. She’s red-faced and wheezing a little from climbing the stairs. She takes out an inhaler. Takes two puffs. ‘Just a small wooden cross with a “P” on it.’ She shrugs, pushes her ginger hair from her face. ‘Could be a pet. Could be nothing. Could be something.’

‘You should be a detective,’ Short says, trying for humour, but not feeling it. ‘Right, get the area cordoned off.’