Honor goes on to describe what happened that night. Nevis, so still she is almost fading back into the night, stands listening. Mulholland blinks and shakes his head, saying, ‘No, no.’ When she is done, he says, ‘Nevis, listen to your father. Your blood. There was no rape. Never a scrap of evidence. The police dismissed it. That woman…’ with a shaky hand he points at Honor ‘manipulated Zoe into making a complaint. She was lucky not to have been charged with defamation and wasting police time. If I’d really “raped” Zoe why wouldn’t she have had an abortion?’

Nevis clasps her hands around her head and begins to sob.

Honor swallows, hard, pushing the nausea, the red rage down, down. ‘This is his revenge, Nevis, I hope you can see that. He can’t destroy me so he’s trying to destroy the most precious thing in my life – my connection to my daughter. Zoe wanted you. From the very beginning. She always said you were the best thing that could ever have come out of what had happened.’

‘I loved your mother, Nevis. She was the love of my life. Why else would this woman make these outlandish claims unless it was her intention to keep us divided? It’s what she’s done your whole life. Your mother took her own life, but it was this woman who really killed her. She left Zoe with nowhere to turn and kept you from your father. Well here he is now, and he is telling you, you were born from love.’

Honor gasps at the audacity of it. But how clever he is, to have been able to twist his lies into something that can sound so like the truth. How can she deny her daughter the comfort of his words? How can she insist that there was nothing lovely about Nevis’s conception? The bastard has beaten her. He took Zoe and he will take Nevis if she lets him.

The blue lights have disappeared into the darkness now. If Mulholland is going to die, it will have to be soon. She owes this to Zoe, to Natasha and Satnam and Jessica.

She raises the rifle, sets the stock against the meat of her shoulder, as if she were about to shoot a rat.

She says, ‘Step back, Christopher. End this. If you don’t, I will end it for you.’

‘Go ahead,’ he says, a sharp defiance in his voice.

From somewhere in the trees an owl calls.

She takes a step towards him. The rifle steady against her shoulder, no breath passing through her, absolute focus. I must do this now.

Something on her shoulder, a sudden sharp shock, a feeling of weightlessness as the rifle is ripped from her hands. She freezes, topples, rights herself, cries out in the dark.

The wind whips up, the owl calls again.