Sam glanced over at Olly, snoring slightly on the floor. ‘You don’t think Olly would mind?’

‘Sam,’ said Mikey. ‘When will you realize that we all bloody well like you?’

Sam looked over at Dan again. He was saying nothing. But he was smiling.

In her luxurious home in Eaton Place, Alison frowned as she looked at the evidence. She should be feeling ecstatic: she was home from the holiday from hell, and her evil stepchildren had at long last gone back to boarding school. But even though she should be feeling happy that the little fuckers were incarcerated once more, she couldn’t. The case she was working on was just too disgusting. Could she really defend these bastards, when what they were doing – and seemed to have been doing for years – was quite so despicable? Tales of the imprisonment, rape and torture of underage girls, year after year, going back for decades, leapt off the screen at her.

She couldn’t ask Philip: he was too much a professional lawyer, and also a man. He would tell her that everybody was entitled to a legal defence, and she couldn’t let her emotions get in the way. She had always thought that her professionalism was second to none, but now she found that her emotions were getting in the way. She couldn’t understand what was wrong with her.

She sighed, and put her face in her hands, completely at a loss for the first time in her life. Then something occurred to her: she could ask Andy. He would know what to do. They had hardly been in friendly contact since he had discovered she was cheating on him in the run-up to their wedding the previous year, but he was one of the only truly decent men she knew. What was more, he had worked on similar cases for his newspaper; if nothing else, it would be good to unburden herself to somebody who understood the depths of filth to which she now found herself exposed.

With a deep breath, she picked up her phone and dialled his number.

Chapter 16

Bella pottered about her kitchen, chopping onions and garlic, picking rosemary and thyme from her window box and pouring herself a glass of the red wine that she was going to use in the boeuf bourguignon. Andy had worked late every night that week – the bloody people trafficking story seemed to be taking over his life – but he’d promised he’d be home in time for dinner tonight.

Once she’d browned the meat in a separate pan and added it, with some stock, the herbs and the rest of the bottle of wine, to the casserole, she put the whole lot in the oven, which she had preheated to 140°C: for maximum tenderness, the beef needed to be cooked slowly.

It was dark already and pissing down outside, and Bella felt sad that summer really did seem to be over. They’d only had a few weeks’ sunshine in London, and she and Andy hadn’t been on holiday since Poppy’s wedding, right at the beginning of May. Andy had told her, apologetically, that he couldn’t go anywhere until he’d got to the bottom of his bloody story. She tried cheering herself up by thinking of all the yummy things she could cook – wild mushrooms, and game, and celeriac – and of how cosy the autumn nights drawing in could be (if only there was somebody to share them with).