It’s a myth that the body protects itself by turning off our pain receptors when we’re mortally injured. Nature is a sadistic bitch. Just ask any amputee who’s suffered the agony of phantom pain from a limb that’s no longer there.

Felix was in indescribable pain, more pain than you can imagine, and he endured every excruciating minute of it fully conscious. He wasn’t even granted the blessed peace of oblivion. He couldn’t talk: his vocal cords had been destroyed, and he couldn’t even scream his agony. But I’ll never forget the expression in his eyes: he was in hell, suffering the torment of the damned. Any one of you would have killed him in a heartbeat just to put the man out of his misery.

He knew he was doomed, and that there was nothing that could save him. Even if he’d been rushed to hospital, the only thing the doctors could’ve done was dose him up with morphine and speed his end.

And the worst thing was that it was intentional. The person who’d done this to him meant him to suffer before he died.

I told you in the beginning: I’m one of the good ones. I don’t make moral choices, but pragmatic ones: I killed my father because it was necessary, not because I enjoyed it.

But not all of us are like that.

Some of us deserve our Hollywood reputations.

Trust me, I did my best to save Felix. But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill anyone. I was set up by a brilliant, ruthless psychopath.

And when I tell you who that was, it’ll blow your mind.

chapter 49

millie

Tom puts into words what I’ve been thinking for the past two days: If I had a husband I wanted to get rid of, I’d be looking for a fall guy.

I gave Stacey the benefit of the doubt when she didn’t return my phone calls after the first police visit to our house on Wednesday, despite the increasingly urgent messages I left on her phone. I told myself she had a lot on her plate: her husband had disappeared, bankrupt investors were clamouring at the door, and now she was being interrogated by two detectives investigating her missing spouse.

But everything changed the moment DS Mehdi told me Stacey had no recollection of Felix’s nosebleed.

Tom’s right: how plausible is it she’d forget something like that? In fact, she did more than just forget: she denied unequivocally that it’d happened, denied he’d ever had nosebleeds, even though I distinctly remember her saying he was prone to them when he was stressed.

And then there’s Felix’s phone.