A coroner’s verdict of suicide has been reached in the case of 19-year-old Bury St Edmunds woman Nadia Freeman whose body was found a fortnight ago on the beach at Dunwich, by dog walkers. Earlier sightings had put Ms Freeman at a known suicide spot, ‘Widow’s Cliff’. She was last seen less than a mile away with her baby daughter, in a distressed state. Extensive searches are being held by police for the body of her three-week-old daughter Lana, but fears are growing that the baby might have been washed out to sea. Nadia had been suffering from poor mental health at the time of her disappearance.

So there it was. I knew what had really happened to Nadia of course, knew what really led to her death. And now, sixteen years later, the truth was about to come out. Why else would Hannah befriend Emily Lawson, if not to punish us all for what we’d done?

23

London, 2017

Mac smiled encouragingly at Clara from the driver’s seat of the battered Ford transit van. ‘Ready?’ he asked. As they turned the corner out of Hoxton Square on to Old Street the boxes of Luke’s belongings – his records, books and clothes that had survived the fire, along with the few pieces of his furniture she’d been able to salvage, slid and bumped heavily against each other in the back. She hadn’t known what else to do with his things. Her landlord, a middle-aged and heavily Botoxed Russian, had been clear he wanted the flat vacated sooner rather than later. ‘Decorators coming tomorrow,’ he’d said, eyeing her disapprovingly when she’d met him at the flat, as though he suspected the damage to his property was more down to carelessness on her part than anything else. She and Mac had packed up her and Luke’s stuff in one grim and depressing afternoon, and while Mac’s had seemed the most sensible place to store her own belongings, Zoe not having the room, they’d been at a loss at first about what to do with Luke’s.

‘How about taking them to Suffolk?’ Mac had suggested. ‘Rose and Oliver could look after them until …’ As his sentence tailed off their eyes had met briefly, then skittered away. The unanswerable question of how and when this nightmare would end hanging in the air between them.

‘I better start looking for somewhere to live,’ Clara had said into the silence, turning back to the box she was packing with books.

‘You know you can stay with me for as long as you need to, don’t you?’ Mac had said.

She’d nodded. ‘I know. Thank you.’

‘Have the police been in touch?’