‘Not until you’ve calmed down.’ He shook her so hard her teeth rattled. ‘I need to know you’re not going to do something stupid just because you’re angry and upset. Think about what it will do to me if I lose everything now. I know I lied about my marriage, but I’ve already paid for that. I lost my wife that day. I don’t deserve to lose anything else.’

He pushed his face close to hers as he was speaking. Too close. She could smell the coffee on his breath and feel the heat of his anger on her skin. Again, she tried to pull free but all it did was make him squeeze tighter.

‘You’re hurting me.’

‘I can’t let you leave. Not like this.’

The fear and the anger took over and she opened her mouth to scream. But he clamped a hand over her mouth, blocking out the sound. She tried to wriggle free, but he twisted her around, one hand over her face, the other squeezed tight around her middle. Too tight. There was a baby in there. He could hurt it. Or worse. She should have told him she was pregnant. If he knew, he’d be more careful. But it was too late now, because she couldn’t speak. His hand was still on her face, his fingers digging into her cheeks, the pressure of his palm making it impossible to speak or breathe.

As the blood roared inside her head, and her lungs screamed for air and her heart beat too hard and too fast, all she could think of was the tiny person growing inside her who would never get to see a sunrise or swim in the cool, clear ocean or experience love or sadness or loss or any of the other millions of tiny things that made up a person’s life.

Forty-six

Rachel swivelled her chair around so she was no longer looking at her computer screen.

‘Ade, the day Tara was killed, she called everyone who’d been at the villa the night Nick was killed except Bella. Why not?’

‘Maybe she didn’t think Bella could have had anything to do with Nick’s death?’ Ade said.

‘Maybe.’ Rachel wasn’t convinced. They were missing something. What the hell was it? She ran back over everything she’d learned since the moment she’d stood on the beach at Seaford looking at Nick Gilbert’s dead body. There had been sixteen people at the villa that weekend. Ten guests and six members of staff. Two of the guests were now dead.

Rachel’s mind fast-forwarded through the investigation, trying to identify what she’d missed.

‘Do you remember our meeting with Sharon last Saturday?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ Ade said. ‘What about it?’

‘Sharon said something that I meant to think about later but I never did. And now I can’t remember what it was.’