I’ve probably got a few hours at most before the police arrest me. The video I have of Stacey attacking her husband is suggestive, but it’s nowhere near enough to get me off the hook. I need more ammunition if I’m to persuade the police to take Stacey seriously as a suspect. And Harper’s ridiculous Kyper Nation may just have secured it for me.

The girl has more than two million followers. That’s two million pairs of eyes looking for Felix Porter; Stacey Porter’s name on two million lips. Stacey’s kept her secrets hidden for nearly twenty years, but even she couldn’t bury them deep enough to survive that kind of scrutiny.

It takes Harper and me more than an hour just to drive out of London. We don’t reach the sleepy West Sussex village Harper entered into the sat-nav until mid-morning. We follow the directions until we turn onto a quiet road and find ourselves outside a small bungalow opposite the weathered lychgate of a beautiful medieval church.

‘Number 59,’ Harper says, pointing as I pull into the kerb a few houses down from the church. ‘It’s that one, there, with the blue door.’

‘A car’s in the drive,’ I say. ‘Fingers crossed that means she’s in.’

We get out of the car: I’d rather Harper stayed behind but I know better than to ask. The door of Number 59 is surrounded by a trellis of ivy reddening in the weak autumn sunshine, and the small handkerchief of lawn is lush and just the right side of overgrown. Dense bushes of heather spill from the flowerbed and over the low brick wall fronting the road. Snatches of Radio Three and the smell of bacon waft through the open kitchen window as we walk up the short drive.

Susan Temple was Stacey’s foster mother for four years after her parents died in a car crash when she was fifteen. The accident is a matter of public record, but Stacey’s never mentioned the woman who took her in afterwards: her version of events has her brother as her legal guardian until his own death from an overdose four years later. Susan Temple’s been struck from the record.

I want to know why.

chapter 55

tom

The footage my wife leaked online this morning has gone viral. The nation’s morning sofa sweetheart caught on video slapping and punching and kicking her husband, her missing husband: it’s a tabloid wet dream.