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‘ O K.’ Emily pressed R ECORD on the voice-recorder. ‘So. The night of the fire.’

Jack was in his usual spot on the couch, directly opposite her.

‘I don’t know where to start,’ he said, shifting in his seat.

‘Why don’t you tell me what that day was like?’ she said. ‘What were you doing in the hours leading up to … Up to when you left?’

‘OK.’ He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. ‘Well … Kate hadn’t slept very well. She’d been awake all night the night before, tossing and turning. That never happened. I was always the one who had trouble sleeping. I’d even say to her, I’m so jealous of how deeply you sleep. But that night, she didn’t seem to get a wink. And I wasn’t imagining it – she said as much when she got up. And she was up really early too, well before me. Which was also unusual. I was nearly always the first one out of bed.’

‘Why couldn’t she sleep? Did she say?’

‘She said she’d just had too much coffee, but there was no way it was that. Something … I don’t know, but I felt like something was eating at her. Worrying her. And she’d been awake all night thinking about it. And, also, there’d been the thing the day before.’ He bit his lip. ‘This feels bad, talking about her like this. You know, insinuating things.’

‘You can take anything out afterwards,’ Emily reminded him – although after her Zoom with Beth and Carolyn, she wasn’t certain she was in a position to make guarantees. ‘There’s plenty of time to decide on the wording. Let’s just focus on getting the facts out for now, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘So what thing the day before?’ Emily checked for the reassurance of the flashing red light. ‘What had happened?’

‘I have no proof of this,’ Jack said, ‘and I absolutely accept that it could just be a case of me starting to think about things differently after the fire. Interpreting things differently. Giving them too much significance or whatever. So I have to be honest here: I don’t know if I actually had these thoughts at the time, or if I’ve mixed up my memories with things that have occurred to me since.’

Emily thought of the police interview that was ahead of him, and how well a line like that would go down in front of Garda detectives.

‘Just tell me what you think you remember. Where your memories stand as of the here and now.’

‘OK, well …’ He took a deep breath, let it out. ‘The day before the fire, in the morning, Kate went out. She was gone a while. A few hours. I don’t remember talking to her before she left. I think maybe I’d been out for a run and when I got back she’d already gone, but I’m not sure. But when she did come back, she told me she’d driven to this beach – one a good, like, hour’s drive away – to go for a walk. For the second time that week, in freezing cold weather. And I don’t know why, but I just got this vibe off her that maybe that wasn’t the whole truth. She said she’d driven there, walked for an hour, then driven back, but she was gone way longer than that. And she put up a photo of the beach, on Instagram, before she even came home, which was also a bit odd. It was like … It was almost like she was trying to prove to me that she’d been there.’

‘Did you question her?’ Emily asked. ‘Tell her that you didn’t believe her?’

‘No.’

‘Where do you think she was?’

‘Don’t get me wrong: I think she was at that beach. There was sand in the car, in the driver’s footwell.’ That struck Emily as a weird thing to know. Had he gone checking for that, specifically, or just happened to notice? ‘But I think maybe she went somewhere else too, that morning, that she didn’t tell me about. Or maybe she was … She could’ve been meeting someone there.’

‘Who?’

Jack shook his head. ‘I’ve absolutely no clue.’

‘For what purpose?’

Another shake. ‘No idea.’

‘Are you sure she wasn’t having an affair?’

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Absolutely not.’

Emily tried to figure out how best to word the extremely awkward question she wanted to ask, but before she could, Jack offered an answer.

‘Our relationship was better than ever,’ he said. ‘Stronger than ever. We were good. We weren’t even married two years, we still felt like newlyweds. And leaving Dublin meant that most of the time it was just us two, on our own. It felt like we were in a bubble. In a good way. A great way. And honestly, I know this sounds a bit stupid, but we spent so much time together, she just wouldn’t have been able to start seeing someone else. Logistically, I mean. I know that sounds daft, but it’s true. It just … No, I really don’t think that was it.’

But twice now, Jack had alluded to Kate meeting someone he didn’t know about while he himself wasn’t there.

If he wasn’t hinting at an affair, what was he hinting at?

‘Did you check her phone?’ Emily asked. ‘Emails? Try to find out what was going on?’

Was his extreme confidence coming from the fact that he had done that, and found nothing?

‘No,’ Jack said, glancing at the flashing red light on the voice-recorder. ‘It crossed my mind, I’ll admit it. But I didn’t check. And then I couldn’t, because her phone was destroyed in the fire … Look, I really don’t think Kate was having an affair. I know how that sounds, but I really, objectively don’t. I think a much more likely scenario is that something bad was happening and she was either trying to keep it from me, or sort it out herself before she told me about it. I was under a lot of stress at the time, with Exis. Things were about as dire as they’d ever been. We were trying to get someone to buy us out, or partner up. And, actually, earlier in the week, Kate had suggested we sell up everything and move to, like, France or Spain or somewhere and live on the cheap. Like we used to, back when we first met.’

‘Was she serious?’

A shrug. ‘I don’t know. But I think so.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told her I’d think about it,’ Jack said.

‘When you say something bad was happening …?’

‘I don’t know. But things had happened before. Things she’d kept from me, so as not to worry me, that I only found out about later.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well … There was the thing with the messages. I told you that when she was on Sunrise , she used to get all these horrible comments and stuff, right? For a while there, things went a bit further. Someone was sending her anonymous messages – through email, through DMs – and making it sound like he was possibly following her around. He’d have known where she’d been and make comments about specific things she’d been wearing. That sort of thing.’

Emily raised her eyebrows. ‘Are you telling me Kate had a stalker ?’

‘I don’t know if I’d go that far. She didn’t. But she didn’t tell me about it until after the messages had stopped.’

‘Did you ever find out who sent them?’

Jack shook his head. ‘They stopped, suddenly, and Kate just wanted to forget about them. And really, they weren’t that much worse than the things people were leaving online, in public, with their names and photos attached.’

‘How much of this did you tell the guards?’

‘I told them the truth about her movements,’ he said. ‘And about the messages and comments she’d had in the past. But I didn’t say anything about her having trouble sleeping the night before, or suggesting we move, or my suspecting she didn’t go to the beach for a walk.’

‘Or that she might have been meeting with someone?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I know how it sounds,’ Jack said, his voice rising. ‘It sounds like I think she was cheating on me. And if I thought that, that gives me a reason to … To do something.’

Motive , Emily thought.

‘Or at least,’ Jack continued, ‘for us to have a big fight that evening. The night she died. Which we didn’t, for the record. And I knew – I knew from the start – that the guards were focused on me. Solely focused. Blinkers, they had on. It was as if it couldn’t possibly have been anyone else. Always the husband, good enough for us. And I knew I didn’t do it, so I knew there was someone out there who needed to be identified and caught, and time was ticking on. I didn’t want to give them even more reason to waste their time with me.’

‘Are you going to tell them now? When they interview you?’

‘I think I’ll have to. Joe says I should. Show willing, and all that.’

She let a beat pass.

‘So. You said you felt like Kate was anxious to get you out of the house that night. Tell me more about that.’

‘There’s not much more to it,’ Jack said. ‘I was tired. It’d been a long week. I was looking forward to staying in, watching some TV, getting a takeaway. But then Ben rings me up out of the blue, says he happens to be around and could we meet for a pint and some dinner? I said yes because I hadn’t seen him in ages, and he’s so rarely in our part of the world, but then as the day wore on and it got closer to me actually having to leave … Well, I said to Kate, you know, I really don’t feel like going. And she was adamant that I should. It was like she was worried I wouldn’t go meet him for some reason.’

‘And Ben is …?’

‘Oh, sorry – one of my best mates. We came up together, through the amateur ranks. And then he ended up being one of my teammates at Sync. When I had my accident, he was the guy who went down too but managed to stay on the road. This is his place.’

‘What – here? He owns this house?’

Jack nodded.

‘So this is the guy who lives in France?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why didn’t you want to see him that night?’

‘I did,’ Jack said. ‘I was just tired.’

‘Why didn’t you just ask him to come to the house instead?’

He hesitated. ‘Because it sounded like Ben wanted to chat about something. Something serious. If he came to the house, Kate would be there, obviously, and … Look, I’m not proud of this, but Ben is loaded. He’s a multi-millionaire. This is just one of the houses he owns. He knew Exis was in trouble, and although I’d never, ever ask him, I thought maybe there was a chance he was going to offer to step in and help dig us out.’

‘Did he?’

‘I never saw him,’ Jack said. ‘He thought we were meeting at eight, but I’d said seven. Definitely. I know because I’d told Kate I’d probably be home and all by nine. It was only going to be one pint and a burger – I was driving, after all. We both were. When I tried to call him, I couldn’t get through, so I assumed he was on his way. I was still waiting for him in the pub when my neighbour ran in to tell me about the fire. By then, he was nearly an hour late.’ He bit his lip. ‘I know he feels terrible, but I try not to play that game. You’d drive yourself mad, thinking about all the what-ifs. What if he’d double-checked the time with me, and I’d said, actually, eight is fine, and I’d been at home for that extra hour … But what happened is what happened. Nothing will ever change that, so there’s no point thinking about what might have been. Ben is like a brother to me. And the only person whose fault this is is whoever did it, you know? You have to keep bringing yourself back to that.’

Jack dug in his pocket for his phone, then tapped the screen. He stood up to show Emily what was on it: a photo of two tanned men in liveried Lycra, posing with their bikes outside a bus branded with Sync-AIC’s logo.

‘That’s us,’ he said, ‘on the morning of the first stage of the Tour in 2019.’

As Emily’s eyes focused on the faces, her blood ran cold.

Standing on the right of the picture was a much younger, skinnier Jack.

Standing on the left was him .

The man who’d followed her around Sanctuary, who looked like the man she’d seen staring up at the house from the beach, who sounded like the same man Grace had seen in the courtyard, having broken in, except he didn’t have to break in, because he owned it.

Jack’s best friend and former teammate, Ben.