She knew how to handle difficult questions, how to avoid getting into a debate, but sometimes she would still get drawn in. Janie knew her friends were interested in what she really thought, how she could possibly detach herself. The truth was that she’d learned early on to stop caring about the victims, because if she did care, she wouldn’t be doing her job properly. She’d observed how to look at her cases as if they were pieces of fiction.

Only that case, which her friends had questioned her about relentlessly, had caught her in the end. When there was no way of escaping the fact it wasn’t fiction – it was reality – that was the point when Janie had to face the question that had begun searing into her every waking moment. How could she carry on doing her job?

Janie drove on, heading towards Lymington, her mind full of the thought that she still dreaded the day she switched on the TV or opened a newspaper and read about the case again. In the last five years thoughts of her career, which had once triggered excitement, had shrivelled away to disgust – and, if she ever allowed the thought in, an element of self-loathing.

It was an unconscious decision to pull into the car park at the quay on her way to golf, and for a few seconds Janie didn’t know how she had turned off the main road and headed in this direction. But now she was here and looking across the river to her husband’s office.

At the edge of the quay she got a direct view of the shiny offices, though she could only imagine what was happening on the other side of the glass. They could see out, but she couldn’t see in – the way the building had so cleverly been designed.

The office looked beautiful. The way the light reflected off the water and hit the glass – all as it was supposed to. That office had been her lifesaver five years ago. Her chance to start again. And yet some days she would look at it and feel hatred bubbling beneath her skin. A hatred that was potentially misplaced, but which also stood for everything she had lost, and for everything Harry still had.

She wondered what was going on inside its four walls right now; how her husband felt, making decisions, giving orders, pulling in another big client or congratulating his staff on a job well done. On the whole, Harry was amazing at what he did – he always had been. His ambition was part of what Janie had fallen in love with. There was something so sexy about success, and Harry had been nothing but successful.