Jake has been trying to find out all evening. Using a virtual private network in an attempt to remain anonymous on Bex’s computer, he logged into Facebook as Kate and searched through the list of Rob’s twenty-five other friends – not many for a leading techpreneur, but that was Rob’s personal account not his public one. Jake was unable to find matches in the real world for any of them, apart from Kirby, which suggests they might all be fake accounts.

‘It makes no sense,’ Jake continues. ‘If Kirby’s dead, the whole story, what happened in Thailand, could be fake.’

There’s something about the story though that Jake can’t ignore. His newspaper boss used to hold up an old wine glass and flick it whenever he was presented with a story that bordered on the fanciful. ‘Does it have the ring of truth?’ he’d ask as the glass resonated around his office. Jake can hear the ring now.

‘Maybe it was Rob you were chatting to?’ Bex says, her voice quieter.

The thought has crossed Jake’s mind too. ‘He’s not the sort to play games,’ he says. ‘To make things up.’

The irony of defending Rob isn’t lost on him. ‘Unless, of course, he wanted to deliberately frighten Kate,’ he adds, unable to resist a dig.

‘He’d never do anything like that,’ Bex flashes back. ‘He loves her, Jake. I know you don’t want to hear it, but he truly loves her.’

‘I’m sure he does.’ Cherishes her. Jake has heard it all before.

He glances up at a flock of Canada geese circling late and low over the canal. Something must have disturbed them.

There’s another explanation for the chat he had with ‘Kirby’, one that would change everything. ‘Or perhaps I was chatting with Gil himself, the double on the beach,’ he suggests.

‘Gil?’ Bex says, surprised. ‘I thought you were Mr Sceptical about all that doppelgänger stuff.’

He is. Just not quite as sceptical as he was.

‘All we can be sure of at the moment,’ he says, ‘is that someone who isn’t Kirby wanted Kate to hear about Thailand.’

‘But how would they have known Kate would message Kirby out of the blue? It was Kate – you – who contacted them.’

That’s what’s troubling Jake too. He walks out across Bex’s lawn in the moonlight, peering down at the well-kept flowerbeds, feeling the wet grass beneath his bare feet. Kate used to keep an allotment in the village.