Laura:About working too much. Do you have children, Detective?

Marlow:I do.

Laura:Then you might know what I mean. I can’t do anything right. I feel like all the time I’m at work, I should be at home; and whenever I’m there, my workload creeps up to some unmanageable peak. So, yes, maybe I lied to him because I thought he was more likely to accept me meeting the Coopers team.

Marlow:Laura, other than Harry Wood, you were the last member of staff in the building on Monday night, weren’t you?

Laura:As far as I know.

Marlow:And a few hours after you left, that same building was burned to the ground.
     (pauses) Do you know who set fire to the Morris & Wood offices, Laura?

Laura:(pauses) No.

Marlow:Are you sure about that?

Chapter Twenty-Three

Four weeks before the fire

Janie walked back from the fish-and-chip shop to the car park with the girls, down the cobbled lane, their crabbing buckets still swinging in their hands. Both of them were laughing over a joke that Ella had heard at school, heads dipped towards their packets of chips.

This was what happiness felt like.

She looked up briefly. She didn’t know why or what caught her attention, but something made her glance towards the wine bar, tucked almost out of sight on the cobbled street leading down to the quay. Her husband was walking inside.

Janie stopped in her tracks, her heart tapping out a rapid beat. The girls carried on, oblivious, walking a few steps ahead until they too stopped and turned round to see what was keeping her.

‘What are you doing, Mummy?’ Lottie called.

Janie shook her head, gazing at the door, which had now closed behind her husband, and eventually pulled herself away and caught up with her daughters. ‘Nothing,’ she smiled. ‘Just thought I saw someone I knew.’

‘Who?’ Lottie asked.

‘No one,’ she replied at once and pierced her fork into another chip, forcing it into her mouth, past her lack of appetite, resisting the urge to spit it out on the ground in front of them.

He was with a woman. She’d seen her walk in front of Harry, and even though Janie hadn’t got a clear view, she would have sworn it was Laura, from the way she walked, the way she wore her hair, scraped back into a low bun.

As the girls started chattering again, Janie’s mind whirled, her heartbeat still erratic as she tried to reason with herself that what she had seen was nothing. Harry often went for a drink after work; he had always done business in wine bars or pubs, or the directors’ clubs that he belonged to in London. She knew that better than anyone. They were the places he would meet people like Miles Morgan.