At the local crem they all assembled and watched the red gold-braided curtains slowly draw apart, saw the coffins bearing the already burnt remains of Charlie and Nula Stone slide away into the waiting furnace. Then with horrible finality the curtains closing again. And that was it. Finished. They were gone.

Belle glanced across and there was Harlan in his black designer suit, his arm around Milly, who was shaking with sobs, her face drowning in tears.

Belle looked at her own father – Charlie’s best friend since childhood – standing there like a rock, grim-faced but not crying because he was old school, he was tough; Terry Barton hardly ever cried. Then her mind went back and she saw it all again – the helicopter whirling out of control and plummeting into the lake at Charlie’s house on what should have been such a great day for the Stones. It sent a chill right through her, every time she allowed her mind to replay it. She tried not to. But somehow she couldn’t seem to make it stop.

Without Charlie Stone, without his huge appetite for life and all that it had to offer, there was a void in all their lives. The vicar had said how Terry had loved to sit with Charlie in Cooks’ Pie and Eel shop in the Cut next door to the Young Vic, watching as Charlie devoured four portions of pie and mash and then finding room for a trip to the boozer. They’d all tried to laugh at that. With Charlie, everything had been excess. Eating, drinking – everything. His lust for life was monumental. And money. He wanted stacks of money – and he wasn’t choosy, Belle now knew, about the way it was earned.

Without Charlie Stone, her dad seemed bereft and troubled. Terry spent hours on the phone, and then there were whispered conversations in the kitchen between him and Mum, conversations that abruptly ceased when Belle came into earshot. Everything seemed tense and unreal. Because now of course Harlan was in control. His new young bloods were ever-so-gently shoving Terry and the older men aside, forcing them out of the business, off the manor.

Since the crash and leading up to the double funeral, Belle had been watching Harlan. She thought that he seemed to have grown, somehow. Following the awful deaths of his adoptive parents, he seemed to blossom, to expand, to relax out into every corner of Charlie’s manor and make it his.

Now she knew about the secret side of the business that the Stones and the Bartons were involved in, she wondered how she could have been so naive for so long. A furniture manufacturer’s, paying for superyachts, million-pound cars and helicopters? If she really thought about it, it was a stretch. But add in a drugs enterprise with the high addiction rate that crack cocaine delivered, and the whole thing started to make sense.

Charlie had been a drugs baron.