The hairs on her arms pricked on end at the sound of the deep, gravelly voice that, when she’d first heard it, had sounded so soothing, so calm and assured. So sexy, she had even thought. So honest.

Beside her, Harry’s face was creased into a frown, and his hands fidgeted nervously at his sides.

‘Miles,’ Janie said. She was surprised by how calm she sounded. ‘I didn’t know you were in Lymington.’

‘You didn’t?’ he grinned, his head cocked, his brow furrowed as he nudged Harry. ‘You didn’t tell your wife, when you knew I’d want to see her? Well, no matter – you’re here just in time. I’m taking you both out to lunch.’

‘I can’t,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve got to go, I’m afraid.’

‘Nonsense. Janie Wood, I haven’t seen you in five years. I insist,’ he said. And before she had time to refuse, the lift door was pinging open and Miles was gesturing her into it, with Harry sloping behind.

As Janie would later tell the detective, she had managed to escape lunch with Miles, eventually begging that she really had to get back to the school. She glanced in Harry’s direction as she left the two men, and her husband could barely return her gaze. That she had once loved Harry, she thought as she walked away, was a notion that now seemed impossible. Now his pathetic cowardliness made her feel nothing more than sick, with such a burning anger.

She didn’t see Harry again that day. Her mind was barely on the children as she picked them up from school, swept them home and fed them beans on toast, because it didn’t require headspace.

That night the fire was already ravaging the offices when she saw the other women. It was just past eight p.m. when she noticed Mia first, and then Laura Denning. It had all happened so quickly after that.

Chapter Thirty-Five

At after seven-thirty p.m. on Monday night Laura stepped onto the pavement outside the offices of Morris & Wood. Rage was coursing through her, racing through her veins, feeding her body until the tips of her fingers were tingling and didn’t feel as if they were a part of her any more.

Moments before, she had wanted nothing more than to be back at home with the two people who mattered to her, but now she was out of the office she found she didn’t go straight to her car. Instead she stood on the pavement, her jaw so tense that her whole face throbbed with pain as her mind ticked. Back and forth like a metronome went her thoughts. Miles Morgan. Harry Wood. Despite everything that had happened in the offices over the last two months, it was what had happened in the last half an hour that was tipping her over the edge.