As they pulled into the entrance of the industrial estate, Alex and Chloe could see the flashing blue light of the police car up ahead, stopped in front of a closed-up garage. There was only one other car in the car park: Jamie’s. He was standing by the boot, an officer just a few metres away from him. Jamie was holding a petrol can in one hand, brandishing it in front of him like a sword.

‘Shit.’ Alex cut the engine and approached the other officer. ‘Is backup on the way?’

The man nodded. ‘He’s covered the car in petrol. We can hear the girl in the boot.’

‘Stay there,’ Alex warned Chloe, gesturing to the waiting officer. She approached the second officer, who was trying to talk Jamie into stepping away from the car. Isobel’s cries could be heard from inside the boot. Intermittent bangs against the metal frame signalled her desperate attempts at escape.

‘Jamie,’ Alex said softly. ‘You don’t want to do this.’

She raised a hand to him, palm opened, showing him she was unarmed. As she took a step towards him, she saw the lighter in his other hand, gripped tightly between his fingers.

‘I know why you’re doing this,’ she said, ‘but I know that if you go through with it, you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting it. This isn’t the way, Jamie.’

‘What is the way then?’ he challenged. ‘You just let her go. If you won’t do anything, who will?’

‘You know when I gave you a lift home from Keira’s funeral?’ Alex said, taking another tentative step towards him. She reached an arm behind her, the palm of her hand stretched flat to ward back the other officers. ‘Know what I was thinking?’

The boy shook his head. His eyes were raw with old tears and wet with fresh ones. It was the sadness that Alex feared the most at that moment. In the midst of his grief, this young man could destroy someone else’s life and ruin the rest of his own.

‘I was thinking what a nice young man you are. What a shame it is that there aren’t more people like you about. Gentle. Kind. The world is full of bad men, Jamie. And bad women … there are plenty of them, too. But it’s the people like you that keep the place afloat, isn’t it? The honest people – the ones who try their best and don’t tell lies and don’t cause harm to others. Not knowingly, anyway. Not intentionally. Not like this.’

She stood her ground, not stepping any closer. She looked at the lighter gripped between Jamie’s thumb and finger, his hand shaking with the possibility of what it might be capable of.

‘Don’t be one of the bad guys, Jamie.’

‘Why not?’ he said, his voice shaking on further tears. ‘What do the good guys get? Shitty jobs in glorified call centres. So-called mates who sleep with the girls you like. Kids you never get to meet.’

His voice cracked, his tears now allowed to fall freely. Alex saw his grip around the lighter tighten. The sounds of Isobel Matthews fighting to get the boot of the car open pierced the unnerving silence that had fallen over the car park.

‘You let her walk away,’ Jamie said, his voice trembling across every syllable. ‘She killed Keira and she murdered my baby and you let her walk away. So that’s what the bad guys get. That’s justice, is it?’

Alex shook her head. Where had he got this from? Who had he spoken to? Someone must have told him that Isobel was suspected of pushing Keira from the window.

Leah. She’d already mentioned Isobel in connection with Keira. Whatever else the girl might have been, she was far from stupid. Even from her hospital bed, she was continuing to wreak mayhem.

‘We need time, Jamie, that’s all. We’ll find the evidence we need, I promise you we will.’

She hated the sound of her own words: lies, all of them. Any evidence that might have been retrieved from the house had been lost; she would never forgive the first attending officers for that. She would never forgive herself. Too many mistakes had been made; too many of them were now culpable for the repercussions. They would need a confession, and there was no reason to believe Isobel would offer them that.

Jamie was shaking his head; he wasn’t fooled. ‘You won’t,’ he said. ‘If you could, you’d have already done it.’

He raised his hand and thrust the lighter towards the car.

‘Jamie,’ Alex said, taking another step forward. ‘Listen to me. David North lost a daughter too. He could be here now, the same as you – don’t you think he feels exactly the way you do? But that’s not what Keira would want. She wouldn’t want her father to end up in prison because of something someone else was responsible for. And neither would your child.’

Jamie met her eye, his arm still outstretched towards the car; his hand still shaking around the lighter.

‘Do the right thing, Jamie, please. This isn’t you … you know it’s not.’

The lighter fell from his hand and the young man dropped against the car before sinking to the ground, his body weighted down by his grief.

As the other officers rushed to handcuff him and retrieve the lighter, Alex hurried to the boot of the car. She released the lid and looked down at Isobel, curled into a foetal position and poised to kick out her legs again. Her black eye make-up ran in thick smears down her bruised cheeks and there was blood at her temple where Jamie had hit her.

Chloe’s words echoed, and for the briefest of moments – so fleeting it might have been easy to miss it – Alex felt pity for the girl. Then she remembered everything she’d done, and the moment passed, lost to the sudden stillness of the night air.