‘You probably know already,’ Rivka said quietly. ‘But you look like shit.’

Jodie managed a smile at the blunt assessment. She brought everything to the table and sat opposite her friend. ‘You’ll need caffeine to hear this.’ She laughed. ‘Actually, you’ll probably be wishing for a drink, but I guess it’s too early even for us.’

‘That bad?’

‘Let’s say that my life appears to be going from bad to worse.’ Jodie lifted her mug and took a mouthful.

Rivka reached across the table and squeezed her other hand. ‘Now you’re really worrying me. Tell me.’

Jodie took a deep breath and told her friend about her visit to London Medical, her realisation that Flynn had lied to her, the package that had been left the previous morning and the visit by the police. ‘Flynn left the first packages so he could be my white knight. And the last as punishment for my dumping him.’ She picked up her coffee again and sipped as she watched shock and disbelief flicker across her friend’s face. ‘Quite a tale, eh?’

‘I’m stunned.’

‘You can imagine how I felt opening the box, half expecting to find more shoes and finding a mouse instead with its decapitated head resting in a puddle of blood.’

‘Stop,’ Rivka said, holding a hand over her mouth. ‘So, Victor… he wasn’t involved with the packages at all.’ She frowned as she thought of something else. ‘The medication issue in the nursing home… was that Flynn too?’

Jodie played with the handle of her mug. ‘I don’t think so. Possibly it was someone in the home trying to cause problems and I happened to get caught in the crossfire. Or something.’ She held up a hand. ‘Nothing seems to make sense so that does as well as anything else.’

‘Okay. What now?’

‘The police will talk to Flynn. Hopefully, he’ll admit it and will be cautioned and told to leave me alone.’

‘But he was impersonating someone!’

Jodie smiled at her friend’s outrage. ‘It depends, seemingly, on why he was doing the impersonation. If it was simply to impress me, then no crime was committed.’

Rivka’s eyes widened. ‘He left you a decapitated mouse!’

‘Revenge for chopping him out of my life, maybe he thought it was appropriate. Anyway–’ Jodie reached for the coffee pot and topped up both mugs ‘–he’s out of my life.’ She lifted her mug and took a sip. ‘Right, let’s talk about something else. How’s Tasha?’

It was always the perfect question, Rivka switching from the worried friend to the adoring girlfriend in a heartbeat. Jodie answered on cue, asked appropriate questions, and pasted a faint smile in place.

‘You’re not fooling me, you know,’ Rivka said a while later. ‘I don’t think you’ve heard a word I said.’