‘I don’t know. Give it to charity probably. He still doesn’t know what happened with the fire and, even though I’m sure he’ll have the insurance, it doesn’t feel right taking the bloke’s money.’ Andrew caught Jessica’s eye. ‘Sorry about mentioning the, er, fire.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Do you know anything yet?’

‘No, we’re looking into things.’

Andrew stood and walked to the window. ‘You should quit and do this.’

Jessica spun around in her chair and snorted. ‘What, follow people around for a living? I’m all right.’

‘The money’s better and I’d bet it’s far less hassle.’

‘It’s not about the money.’

‘What’s it about? Putting yourself in danger?’

Jessica realised Andrew was being serious. She thought of the people she had come across over the years and the number of times she had been in trouble. ‘It’s about mates,’ she said. ‘I get to go to work with my friends every day and, even when they’re being dicks, they’re still my mates.’

‘You could come to work with me? I’ll pay you well. We’ll set up our own joint agency.’

Jessica grinned at him. ‘It’s a really nice offer but I’m all right, thanks.’

‘You’ve got my number if you change your mind.’

‘I won’t.’

Andrew went back to his desk and hunted through the top drawer, before picking out a newspaper and placing it on the table between them. ‘What do you think is going to happen?’

Jessica picked it up and scanned the front page before turning to the inside and laying it flat. ‘I have no idea but I did hear that Aidan Barlow resigned last night.’

‘Do you think he’ll sue?’

Jessica shrugged. ‘Who cares? I spoke to the guy I know at the paper. He says that if the guy does try legal action, they would be able to produce all the diaries in court. Because it’s a civil case, it’s on the balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt. He might still win but more and more details would be revealed each day. The papers only printed that he had an affair with a student who later killed herself. If it got to court, everything else would be released about his threats to the second student.’

‘Sneaky.’

‘Yeah, it wasn’t entirely my idea. I would have leaked the whole lot.’

‘Are they going to know the information came from your station?’

Jessica shrugged again. ‘Probably. But again, if they complain, they risk the rest of the information coming out. I reckon Aidan will keep his head down and hope his wife forgives him. He’s got off lightly.’

‘He’ll have to watch out for Harley too.’ Jessica didn’t want to comment, thinking that Aidan deserved everything he got but not wanting to condone anything else that might happen. ‘I bet sales of the Herald are up today,’ Andrew said, flipping over to the next page of the paper. ‘They got five pages out of it and it’s been on the news all morning.’

‘Yeah, my mate Garry will be happy.’

‘I didn’t think you were supposed to be friends with journalists?’

‘We’re not really but they can be helpful sometimes. I said I’d take him out for a beer but he’ll be buying after this.’

Andrew laughed but stopped himself when he realised Jessica wasn’t joining in. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked.

Jessica jumped up from the chair and took her phone out of her pocket. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to make a call. Are you going to be free later?’

‘I guess.’

‘Good, because I might have one final job for you.’

Jessica sat staring across the rippling water. The gentle waves were illuminated by rows of lamps along the water’s edge, the bright white moon reflecting from the surface. The evening was cool but Jessica left the flat’s balcony door open, her feet resting on the handrail.

She knew something had changed. She didn’t know if it was down to her, perhaps a natural progression as she got older, or if her relationship with Adam had matured her. She wanted to feel angry but instead she felt calm. The fact that she recognised her attitude had altered made her all the more certain that things weren’t quite right.

It didn’t matter how much she thought about the fires – and the fact someone had tried to kill her and Adam; she couldn’t raise the fury in her that she knew would have come so easily barely months before.

Instead, she couldn’t forget Rowlands’s words. ‘Why is it always you?’ Over the course of her conversation with Ryan and the way she had uncomfortably begun to realise that they were very similar people, she thought she had stumbled across the answer. It was always her because she couldn’t stop herself. Everything about her personality was act first and think later. If she had thought first, she wouldn’t have lost Adam originally. If she had thought first, she would never have ended up alone in her flat with a mass murderer. If she had listened to Izzy, her flat would never have burned down.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Caroline’s doorbell. Adam had been saying that perhaps they could think about buying the flat – but Jessica knew she could never stay there long-term. The house they had been living in felt like Adam’s and this place felt like Caroline’s. She wanted somewhere of her own to call home.

Jessica closed the balcony door just as her phone begun to ring. She checked the caller and smiled, walking to the front door. The man standing there was cradling his phone to his ear with his shoulder, holding onto a stack of newspapers under each arm.

‘You’re late,’ Jessica said.

He tried to enter but bounced off the doorframe, spilling one of the piles onto the floor. As he wobbled and tried to stop the first few falling, he accidentally released everything from under his other arm, leaving a mound of papers covering the area in between the hallway and the flat. He crouched down, swearing under his breath and trying to pick everything up.

Although he had come to see her for a serious reason, Jessica couldn’t stop herself from laughing. ‘I thought the sign downstairs said no free papers?’

Garry Ashford looked up from the floor as he tried to re-stack what he’d dropped. ‘Ha ha, you’re very funny. Are you going to help?’

‘If by “help”, you mean take pictures and laugh, then yeah.’ Jessica stooped and began to pick up some of the papers herself before they eventually moved everything onto the floor inside the flat.

‘Nice place,’ Garry said, wandering to the window and peering over the water.

‘It’s nicer when the sun’s out.’

‘How’s Adam? I heard he was out of hospital.’

‘He’s all right. I asked him to go out for the evening so we could work.’

Jessica sat on the floor next to the stacked papers and opened the lid of the laptop she had borrowed from Andrew.

Garry sat on the sofa. ‘Do you know what I had to go through to get those out of the office?’

‘I dunno. You left with them under your arm and managed not to drop them? How hard can it be?’

‘I had to sign them out because they’re part of our archive. It was only because I said I was working on a story that they let them go.’

Jessica shunted the laptop to one side and picked up the first paper. ‘Do you remember the last time we did this in my old flat?’

Garry clearly did. It had taken the combination of the two of them both to figure out who had been killing seemingly unconnected people in their own locked homes.

‘Is that why I’m here this time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who started those fires?’

‘Probably.’

‘Then why aren’t you out . . . I don’t know . . . getting them?’

Jessica shrugged and looked away, unable to admit that it was because she wasn’t sure if she trusted her own judgement any longer. ‘I want to know what you think first.’

‘Why me?’

Jessica beckoned the journalist over, so he was sitting next to her on the floor. She put the paper down and pointed to the page she had loaded from the Herald’s website. ‘What do you think?’