Harlan left the Tower Bridge apartment and drove the Porsche out to the Essex place, passing the empty gatehouse where once she had lived, but like everyone else in his life she hadn’t seen fit to be nice to him. He thundered up the drive, screeching to a halt outside the main house. He’d half expected to find it all gone up in flames, just like everything else, but there it was – solid, enduring. His house. Not Charlie’s. His. Deep breaths, deep breaths. It was all going to iron out, he knew it. Javier would come to meet him, they would talk, it would all be OK.

Yeah.

It would.

Harlan got out of the car and looked around at his kingdom. His. Not Charlie’s.

You’re not the man your father was . . .

Those words had tapped straight into all his insecurities. Because he wasn’t Charlie’s son, it was true; he was the son of some random idiot who had screwed his drugged-up mother for a couple of quid – and he had been the result.

He stared around at the grounds. Empty now, the grass getting a bit long. Nobody about. No gardeners, nobody on the gate. Nobody on the door of the house. Everyone had scarpered. Bad news travelled fast, and the bad news was, Harlan was ready to kill the next bastard who said a word to him about anything. He wondered about Nipper, about Ludo. They’d been his closest, his best. Now where the fuck were they? Nobody knew. Others had searched for any sign of them; they hadn’t been found.

They’d let him down. Just like everyone did.

He went into the house and closed the door behind him.

Inside, it was dead silent.

No Charlie.

No Nula.

No Milly.

Only him. He liked it like that. And when he met Javier at the hotel, he would put everything right. Start to rebuild. Yes. He could do it. He was confident that all would be well.

150

Jack was out on the farm with his ex-army mates, working on the barn roof. Tank was on the farmhouse door, keeping watch over Belle while she sat at the kitchen table, the Louis Vuitton bag on the floor beside her, steadily going through Nula’s journals.

As she opened one of the seventies editions, she was surprised to see a picture of her and Milly as girls, tucked inside it. They were grinning up at the camera. Belle could see that the picture was taken behind the main house, beside the swimming pool. The can-do girls. They’d been happy once, cocooned from the world. Now reality had bitten hard, and tragedy had worn them down.

She started reading and suddenly she was sitting up, eyes widening as Nula’s writing told of something awful, something Belle could scarcely take in.