‘Between us we can lift him over the fence, roll him to the edge of the quarry and just let him fall. It’s a fair drop, isn’t it?’

Melissa’s carefree, upbeat tone shocked Louisa. She’d killed a man, and here she was calmly stating how she was going to dispose of him in the disused quarry.

‘Yes, it’s a four-hundred-metre drop if I remember rightly. But, no, that’s not an option. He would be found easily, and it’s clearly murder as he has a stab wound!’

‘I thought you said it was disused? And it’s fenced off, so no one—’

‘People climb it. From the other side – there’s another way to get to it from the bottom; he’d be found within a week, easily.’

‘So, what do you suggest?’ Melissa swung the phone light around, right into Louisa’s face.

‘Jesus, lower that, will you?’ Louisa shielded her eyes from the glaring white light. ‘I don’t know, Melissa. It’s not like I knew you were going to kill him, is it? I didn’t come with a plan.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t come here with the sole intention of killing him, you know.’

‘Oh right. So that’s why you brought a kitchen knife with you?’

‘That was for protection. He tried to kill me before, remember? I wasn’t going to come here unarmed. I didn’t want him to hurt me or you. He’s caused enough pain.’

‘I wish there’d been another way.’ Louisa sunk down to the ground again, her head hanging down. ‘My brain won’t work. I can’t think what to do.’ Her eyes prickled with tears. She rocked back and forth, her head in her hands. ‘I can’t believe this has happened. I can’t believe any of it has. I want to go back to before I was forty. Before Tiff hacked into my Facebook, before Oliver turned up and turned my life upside down, before Tiff went and bloody died. Shit. It’s her funeral tomorrow and here I am the night before trying to figure out what to do with a dead body.’

‘I’m really sorry about Tiff. I was wrong about her; I don’t think she did know anything about Helen’s disappearance. It was just a massive coincidence that she was your friend and you were the one who hit my sister. You can see how that looks, right?’

‘Yes, of course I see how that looks. But until you went “missing”, Tiff had never mentioned Helen. It was only then she happened to say in passing that she’d known someone who disappeared years ago, someone she’d worked with.’

‘I know. I can only blame Oliver. Well, and you.’