An hour after speaking to Graham on the phone, Jenny was standing at the desk of The Windsor Castle, trying to settle her bill. Rob, the wispy hipster owner, frowned and prodded at his iPhone. ‘Can’t get it to connect.’ His smile was whimsical, maddening.

‘I have to leave, now,’ Jenny told him, not for the first time. Her small bag leaned against her leg. ‘I have to. Look, can you just… I don’t know, email me the bill? I’ll pay it, I promise.’

But the hipster looked at her with rehearsed weary cynicism. ‘Where would I be if I let all my guests check out without paying?’ he said.

‘God, I don’t know. The owner of a completely empty hotel? Oh, wait…’

The hipster clenched his jaw, nodded at the bar with professional impatience – another rehearsed-looking gesture. ‘Craig will give you a complimentary latte if you take a seat in the snug.’

‘You don’t understand. I. Have. To. Leave. I’ve got to! Just – look, come with me to a cashpoint? Yeah? Just please.’

‘You can have a complimentary bagel also.’ He smiled like he’d used some magic words. ‘Locally milled organic spelt.’

Half an hour later, Jenny was on her third complimentary latte, poking holes in one hard-as-concrete organic bagel, and trying to jump-start her tired brain into thinking like David’s. She’d never had trouble with that before, but now he had slipped out of her control, gone rogue. God what a stupid phrase, though. There was nothing roguish about David; in his own way he was the most conventional man alive. He wanted his poor urchin girl to turn into a princess; he believed in the Happily Ever After. Crucially, he believed in her. He believed that she was brave, and strong, and true, and this is what she’d been trading on all this time. They hadn’t even had sex, for God’s sake. Girls in David-Land didn’t have sex until they were safely married, and this suited Jenny because she’d privately decided that there was no way she’d let that happen. David might be handsome, rich and in good shape, but he made her skin crawl. Her plan was always to leave him eventually. Perhaps she’d been silly to move in with him when he asked, but it had seemed like a good idea at the time… it was a way to keep him happy and it meant that she wouldn’t have to worry about rent, do any more stupid temping jobs and carry on wearing shit, cheap clothes. Her mistake had been that she got used to it, got too comfortable. It was the same trap she’d fallen into when she moved back in with Sal – convenience and comfort had superseded plain good sense. She’d stayed, even when she knew he was losing it, even when Freddie had started finding things out about David, things, like the psychiatric hospitals, that even she didn’t know about.

But even then she’d been stupid enough to think she could still control things – control David by doing what she always did – withdrawing love, frightening him into obedience. ‘I’ll handle David,’ she’d told Freddie just two days ago; she’d sailed off to do just that. So sure of herself, arriving at the station, pulling out all the stops... a sad disappointed smile that she let wither on her face, no eye contact, monosyllabic replies, until by the time they were back at the house, David was frantic, stammering: what had he done?

She thought she had him then. ‘I don’t know. What have you done?’

He swallowed hard. ‘You were out all night, I was worried.’ He looked at her, pleading. Jenny, her mouth a line, stared at her knees. ‘Where were you?’

‘Freddie’s,’ she admitted finally. She looked up at him then, saw how guilty he looked, decided to go for broke. ‘You really fucked up, David.’

He winced. ‘Don’t swear.’

‘So Ryan’s back, is he?’

‘Freddie started that – he messaged… he wanted to get some dirt on me. He was trying to split us up, Jenny – and anyway, I used an encryption thing for Ryan and it’s all erased now.’ David was babbling.

‘It’s not “all erased” though,’ Jenny said sharply. ‘Freddie had plane times. Why did you keep the plane times? Why? Do you want to… hurt me?’ She said it softly, but kept her eyes hard on his sweating profile.

‘I’d never do that,’ he replied huskily.

‘Because between Ryan and the plane times, Freddie’s started to ask about… that night. The night my mum died.’ She let a few tears into her voice. ‘David, you said you’d help me, and how is this helping me? I asked you to do one, simple thing, and just tell the police you saw me. That’s all I asked.’

‘I’m sorry,’ David mumbled. ‘I shouldn’t have kept those things. I-I have trouble throwing things away… I—’

‘He’s got more than the plane times and the Ryan stuff.’ She kept her face averted. ‘He found some things in your garden too.’

David slowed and swerved. ‘What things?’ He pulled over into a lay-by. ‘What kind of things?’

Jenny frowned, wondering how far she could afford to take this. Pretty far, she thought. David was scared, grovelling, anxious to make things right. Her instinct was to dump everything on him, make him feel as guilty and responsible as possible. Confuse him. Make him the bad guy, the killer, the stalker, the one who causes problems. The more confused David got, the less dangerous he was. And so she took a gamble.

‘A hat, and a knife. He took photos of them too.’ She turned in her seat and stared at him. ‘And a newspaper clipping. Do I have to go on?’

‘I can explain all that. I wanted to tell you earlier—’ David sounded eager.

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘I don’t want to know. It’s just another thing I’ll have to worry about, and you’ve given me enough worry.’ She left a long silence. ‘I don’t know what to do, David, I really don’t.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s why I went to Freddie’s, to try to sort out your mess. I’ve been up all night trying to convince him not to call the police about the things he’s found. I’ve been up all night defending you, David. Because I love you.’ She stopped. He sounded like he was crying. Good. ‘And I did that even though you’ve put me in danger.’

He looked up, voice choked with sobs. ‘How? I would never do that? How?’

‘You know how. If he shows the pictures to the police, they’ll talk to you, and they’ll dig around the plane times; they’ll find out about Ryan, and your alibi won’t stand up any more.’ Her voice rose. ‘I asked you to tell them you saw me, not to keep a fucking paper trail about it!’

‘Don’t swear.’

‘Well I’m pissed off though, David? You said you’d look after me, but you haven’t. You’ve made things worse!’ She looked with satisfaction at the way his face creased with tears, and pressed her advantage. ‘David, because of you they might arrest me. You’re my alibi, but if they don’t trust you, they’ll come after me again. Think about that. They might take me away from you. And it’ll all be your fault.’ Dispassionately, she watched David cry. After a minute she told him to pull himself together, and get them home.

She’d told him off in the same way you would a dog, to get him back on his best behaviour. Then all she had to do was find Sal’s scarf, the plane times, and destroy them along with the photos on Freddie’s phone, and everything would be all right.

And so she told him off, she made him feel stupid and ashamed, and then she blithely went for a nap thinking that now he’d been taught his lesson, things would go smoothly. She never expected David to kill Freddie.