‘What was the point?’ Hannah asked. ‘This.’ She gestured towards Rose and Oliver, broken and desperate before her. ‘This was the point.’

‘You said you’d leave us alone,’ Oliver said. ‘We paid you thousands to stay away from Tom, to stay away from all of us. You said that would be the end of it!’

‘Yeah, well. That was until I saw Luke again.’

‘Saw him where?’ asked Tom.

She shrugged belligerently. ‘I’d just come out of rehab, some bullshit thing the courts sent me on last time I got arrested, and I was begging outside Leicester Square station. There he was, like a gift. I recognized him instantly.’ Her face lit up as though she was revisiting a favourite memory. ‘So I followed him to work, and later I followed him home, and it all came back to me.’ She glanced at Oliver. ‘What you did, how you gave me away. There I was, scrabbling about for money, fucking strangers to get by, no place to live, and I thought, I wonder how my dear old dad’s doing.’

She paused, fixing Oliver in her gaze. ‘I got into the habit of keeping tabs on him, and I discovered something.’ She glanced at Clara and laughed. ‘Turned out lovely Luke isn’t such a nice boy after all, is he? Turned out he was fucking the office slapper. And I thought, wow, the old apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?’ She turned her hard gaze on Oliver again. ‘I saw that he was just like you, pretending he was such a decent, stand-up guy while all the time he was a disgusting, sleazy bastard. A dirty fucking user.’ She smiled. ‘Like father, like son.’

There was absolute silence. All the amusement drained from Hannah’s face as she continued to stare at her father. ‘And that really fucked me off,’ she said softly. ‘Brought it all back. So I started sending him the emails, messing with him, showing I was watching him, that I knew what sort of man he was, and after a while I realized I could kill three birds with one stone: give Luke what he deserved, get some more money out of you, Daddy, but most of all,’ she turned her gaze on Rose now, and the expression on her face, the icy hatred in her eyes, made Clara shudder. ‘Most of all, I’d give you, you murdering bitch, a taste of your own medicine.’

Rose paled. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I might have left you alone for a few years, but that doesn’t mean I ever forgot what you did. You killed my mother, you took her from me – why shouldn’t I take something from you? Why shouldn’t Luke die, it’s only what you deserved.’

‘You were going to kill him,’ Clara whispered, the cold realization seeping into her, how close they’d been to losing him.