The baby cradled in one arm, Verity pressed her fingertips on Pippa’s wrist, searching for a pulse.

‘What?’ he yelled. ‘What?’

‘I’m so sorry, Hugh.’ She looked up at him.

‘No!’ He fell across his wife’s motionless body, sobbing. ‘But that can’t be right. Oh God no. No!’

‘You need to concentrate on your baby, Hugh.’ He hadn’t even looked at the child. Asked anything about the little thing.

‘No. No. Pippa would still be here if …’ He got to his feet, his sobs loud and desperate.

‘Hugh. Your baby needs you.’ She held out the child wrapped in the towel.

‘I can’t. I can’t, Verity.’ He stumbled towards the house, zigzagging across the lawn until he got to the open front door. ‘I can’t do this,’ he said, stepping inside, and slamming the door behind him.

Chapter 24

Halloween Weekend 2019

Alice

Alice buries her face in her hands, her tear-soaked fingers locked against her skin, nausea churning through her body. She knows she will have to look up eventually. See them again: Dane and Savannah Winslow. She can’t sit here forever hiding her eyes like a child playing peekaboo. She can’t escape this room without seeing them again: the lifeless bodies of the popular influencers.

Memories flood her head of Savannah’s nasty jibes, the way she laughed as she said her father’s death would save the world from more of his books, Dane with his perfect body, his cock-sure attitude, pulling her father apart so soon after his death like a corpse being torn limb from limb by wild beasts. It had been personal. The words ‘good thing he’s dead’ had hurt Alice like hell.

‘It goes with the territory,’ she could almost hear her dad saying. ‘If you dance the polka, Alice, there will always be someone who prefers the foxtrot.’

Alice peels her hands from her damp face. ‘No, no, no,’ she whispers as her eyes land on their bodies once more. Their backs are upright against the headboard, arms by their sides. Both have red spots on their cheeks, giving them a fake glow, Dane wearing a red bow tie.

Puppets – someone’s turned them into puppets.

Her eyes swoop the half-eaten canapés, the glasses of half-drunk champagne on the table by the window, the pools of vomit on the floor. ‘They’ve been poisoned,’ Alice whispers. How could someone do this? She looks at Christine. ‘Who prepared their food?’

Christine doesn’t seem to hear through her own sobs as she frantically searches the room. Opening drawers, bags and holdalls.

‘Should you be doing that?’ Leon says, seeming to jolt to life. ‘I’ve seen enough TV crime to know you’re messing with forensics.’

‘We need to find a phone, Leon, call the police,’ Christine cries, slamming closed a drawer. She stops searching and stares at the victims.