She follows me as I go back into the kitchen and put a pod of the despised Nantucket blend into the coffee machine. ‘I want to help,’ she says.

‘Help with what?’

‘Whatever you’re planning. You’ve got a plan, right?’

Of course I have a plan.

‘She tried to kill me,’ Harper says. ‘And Tom says she’s lying to the police about Felix’s nosebleed to screw you over. Whatever you think of me, Millie, we’re on the same side. Let me help.’

‘I’m thinking,’ I say tersely.

What threat could Harper pose that would induce Stacey to take such a monumental risk? She couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t be picked up on CCTV, however careful she was. She’d have had to get a car from somewhere – a rental, maybe – because she could hardly use her own. Harper’s ridiculous crusade to get her vlog followers to boycott banks that won’t sign up to her ‘copper bottom’ pledge has nothing to do with Stacey – it’s a meaningless gesture. And Stacey must know Felix isn’t likely to be found by Harper’s ‘Kyper Nation’ or anyone else. So why the need to silence her?

And the question du jour: who the hell was with Stacey in that car?

chapter 52

stacey

No one knows where Felix is. He’s been missing for more than four weeks now, and the police have no more idea of his whereabouts than they did at the beginning.

The media think he’s done a runner with the funds he embezzled from Copper Beech. The consensus seems to be Argentina, though Rio and Spain’s costa del crime are popular alternatives. But public interest in the story is already waning, and with it the media’s appetite to pursue it. A middle-aged, middle-class white man having a midlife crisis and going AWOL – well, it’s not very sexy. Stacey’s a journalist. She wouldn’t bother with it either.

She reaches into the shower and turns it on, perching on the side of the bath as she waits for the water to run warm. Everyone on the Morning Express Show has been tiptoeing around her for weeks now, pulling their mouths into sad little moues of sympathy whenever they catch her eye. She saw the same expression on their faces when she interviewed a woman whose husband caught Covid and ended up in a life-changing coma: part pity, part there-but-for-the-grace-of-God relief. When she watched the playback of the interview afterwards, she saw the same expression on her own face. No one knows how to respond to a woman who’s not widowed, but bereaved all the same.