She had two options: tell the truth, and expose herself, or refuse to go along with James’s plan, and lose her fiancé – and then the truth would have had to come out anyway. Either way, she would be destroyed, and the image she had built up so carefully over so many years – the image of a good friend, a loving girlfriend, and a caring, honourable person – would be shattered.

I know how hard it is to walk away from your past and start again – and Clare’s life is happy and glittering and successful. She must have looked at all she’d done, and built and won, and balanced that against a lie.

She could come out of this destroyed – or she could kill James and walk away a tragic and inspiringly brave widow, ready to start again.

James had to die – his execution was regretful but necessary.

But mine – mine is a punishment. It was not enough that James die. Someone must carry the can for his death. It cannot possibly be Clare’s fault, even as an accident.

No, someone else must be to blame. And this time, that someone is me.

Why me? I almost say. But I don’t. Because I know.

I stole her man. Ten years ago I came between Clare Cavendish and her rightful property, stealing him out from under her nose while she was too ill to fight for what was hers, and now I have done it again, rising up from the past like a hand from the grave, to come between her and James one last time.

I will not leave this house now, I know that.

Clare cannot afford to let me leave.

My heart is beating very, very hard in my chest, so hard that I feel strange and light-headed, as if I might fall. I stand up, unsteadily, holding my cup, and I stagger and drop it. Clare reaches for it, trying to grab it before it spills, but her gloved fingers fumble on the china, and the cup slips from between her fingers and skitters across the coffee table.

And as the dregs spill out across the glass top I see … I see the white residue at the bottom of the cup. Not sugar – that had all dissolved. But something else. Something that made the tea taste even worse than usual.

I understand now. I understand my light-headedness. I understand why Clare has said so much, has allowed me to get this far. And I understand, oh God, I understand the gloves.

She looks down at the cup, and then up at me.

‘Oops,’ she says. And then she smiles.

33

FOR A MOMENT I do nothing. I just stand there staring stupidly at the cup, feeling the lethargy in my arms and legs, and the swirling confusion in my head that prevented me from noticing the effects of the drug before. What are they? Painkillers? Sleeping pills?

I stand there, swaying, trying to get myself together. Trying to balance.

And then I stumble towards the door.

I am not quick. I am slow – nightmarishly slow.

But as Clare leaps towards me, her battered limbs don’t quite obey. Her foot catches in the rug and she comes crashing down, her hip smacking into the wickedly sharp edge of the coffee table. She gives a scream that sets the echoes in the hallway ringing, and makes my already spinning head feel even stranger – and I stagger into the hallway.

I am struggling with the lock of the front door – the lock that seemed so simple and straightforward just a couple of hours ago. My fingers are slipping – the lock won’t turn – and then I have done it, and I am out, snapping through the flimsy police tape into the blessedly cold, fresh air.

My limbs feel like rubber and my head is sick and dizzy.

But this is what I do. I run. I can do this.

I take a step. And then another. And another and another. And then the forest swallows me up.

It is incredibly, indescribably dark. But I cannot stop.

The air is cold in my face and the shapes of the trees are black against black. They rear out of the chilly dark and I dodge and weave, ducking under branches, my hands held out to protect my face.

Bracken and brambles catch at my shins, ripping at the skin, but my legs are numb and cold and I hardly feel the slashes, only the tearing thorns holding me back.

It is my nightmare. Only this time it’s not James I’m trying to save – it’s myself.

Behind me I hear the slam of a car door, and an engine revving. Full-beam headlights glimmer through the tree trunks, sweeping round in a great curve as the car does a slow U-turn and then begins to bump down the rutted drive.

The drive goes round in long curves, so as not to climb the hill too steeply. The woodland footpath is direct. If I run fast, I can do this. I can get to the road before Clare. And then what?

But I cannot think about that. My breath sobs between my gritted teeth and I force my shaking muscles to work harder, faster.

I just want to live.

I’m gaining speed. The path runs downhill more steeply here, and my muscles aren’t forcing me on now, but trying to check my headlong rush. I leap a fallen branch, and a badger’s sett, a dark hole in the pale scattered snow – and then, with a suddenness that punches the breath out of me, I smack into a tree.

I fall onto my hands and knees in the snow, my head ringing in agony. My nose is streaming blood – I can see it dripping into the snow as I pant and pant, and when I touch Nina’s cardigan, the front is dark and soaked with gore. I shake my head, trying to clear the shards and sparks shooting across my vision, and the blood spatters across the clearing.

I can’t stop. My only chance is to get to the road before Clare can cut me off. I steady myself, one hand on the tree trunk, trying to overcome the sick dizziness, and then I begin to run again.

As I run, pictures shoot through my head, sudden flashes, like a landscape illuminated by lightning.

Clare, in her wellies, slipping quietly out of the house in the early morning to send those texts from my phone, from the point in the forest where reception kicked in, leaving her footsteps in the snow for me to find.

Clare – waiting until Nina was safely gone, and then driving off into the dark – to what? To park quietly in a lay-by, and wait for James to bleed to death?

Clare – her face white in the moonlight, stiff with shock, as I burst out of the forest in front of the car, screaming at her to stop, let me in.

She stamped reflexively on the brakes, I scrambled into the passenger side. As I slammed the door, she glanced at me and James, both without seatbelts, and then, without trying to explain, gunned the engine and stamped on the accelerator.

For a second I didn’t understand. She was steering towards the tree that loomed out of the darkness.

And then I realised.

I grabbed for the steering wheel, my nails in her skin, wrestling for control of the car – and there it goes blank.

Oh God, I have to get to the road before she does. If she parks across the foot of the track and cuts me off, I’m lost.

Everything hurts. Jesus – everything hurts so much. But the pills that Clare gave me have one silver lining: they’ve taken the edge off enough to allow me to keep going, combined with my own fear and adrenaline.

I want to live. I never knew how much until now.

Oh Christ, I want to live.

And then suddenly, almost without realising it, I’m at the road. The forest path spews me out onto the tarmac, so fast that I stumble, trying to slow down enough to stop myself shooting into the path of a car. I stand there, hands on my knees, gasping and panting, and trying to work out which way to go.

Where is Clare?

I can hear a noise, I realise, the growl of an engine as it shoots over potholes and around bends. It’s not far off. She’s almost at the foot of the drive. And I can’t do it – I can’t run any more. I’ve pushed my body beyond what it can do.

I have to run, or I will die.

And I can’t. I can’t. I can barely stand – let alone put one foot in front of another.

Run, I scream inside my own head. Run, you fucking waste of space. Do you want to die?

Clare’s car is at the road. I see the blaze of her headlights just round the bend, lighting up the night.

And then there’s a horrendous, screaming squeal of tyres, and a bang like nothing I’ve ever heard. There’s shrieking rubber, and the screech of metal, car on car; a sound that seems to echo for ever in the forest tunnel, shrill in my ears. I stand, my eyes wide with horror, staring towards the sound of the collision.

And then silence – just the hiss of a radiator venting into the night air.