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The train was pulling into Cambridge and Reid had to put the phone away and stop reading. And although it felt jarring to stop, he knew he should.

He needed to walk out into the breezy evening air. To stop reading about Anna. About the weird student life she’d been living.

About Kit Frankland.

About Tanya.

And about how they’d failed each other.

He’d meant to skip ahead after the beginning. It made no sense to follow the story through and not go straight to the conclusion.

But somehow he’d found himself unable to stop reading, despite how painful some of it had been. Maybe because of how painful it had been. And because every word of it had been so warmly, unmistakably, infuriatingly Anna.

He wanted to be angry with her about Tanya. It had taken him such a lot to come to terms with his sister’s overdose, and it hurt badly to have Anna unpick his work on that.

And yet he understood, now, why she hadn’t been able to leave it. That she’d been grieving, just as he had. That this was how she had coped: by refusing to back down until she’d disproved, beyond all certainty, that Tanya had died as a result of violence.

It had never been about her career. He’d been so, so wrong. Anna had genuinely risked her career to try to find out the truth.

She wasn’t a cold-hearted careerist. She was a driven, emotional, caring but also obsessive woman who would sometimes get so consumed by something that she stopped noticing the collateral damage.

What had gone wrong between them had been an enormous clash between her grief and his. And he’d been the one who’d been too blind to see it.

He realised that he was standing outside the station now, unmoving. It was gone 9 p.m. and he needed to rush if he was going to make it to see James Sedgewick and get back before the trains got extremely sporadic. Assuming, that was, that he could actually find James.

At least there were six taxis waiting in the rank nearby, and nobody piling into them. He walked as purposefully as he could to the first one and told the driver to take him to St John’s College.

And then, as soon as he was in the back, he opened the phone up again and scrolled to the end of Anna’s account.

Tell me what happened , he thought.

But with a bitter sense of inevitability, he realised that it didn’t give him the answers he needed. That it told him what she’d been about to do, but that she hadn’t worked everything out by the time she’d stopped writing.

Which meant if he was going to figure this out and find her, he needed to read the rest. Every staggeringly painful part of it. And to do it not as a hurt ex-boyfriend or a man who ached to put things right but as a detective. With the analytical part of his mind alone.

But before he could do that he needed to do something else. As a gesture, if nothing more.

He pressed the reply button on the email he’d forwarded to himself, and he wrote back to her.

I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. This was all my fault, not yours.

I’m going to find you. I promise.

X

Once he’d sent it he took a very deep breath and then scrolled backwards. It took him a minute to find where he’d been. And then he read on.