They were sitting in one of the briefing rooms at Becke House. It was not a formal interview, although Jesmond was seriously looking into bringing a charge of wasting police time against her.

‘It might make us look a little less like bloody idiots,’ he had said.

The Chief Superintendent had said a number of things since Andrea Keane’s reappearance that Thorne would remember for a while. His favourite was: ‘Well, the good news is she’s alive. Hip-hip-hoo-bloody-ray. The bad news is we’re fucked. All of us, but especially you . . .’

‘Andrea . . . ?’

She was sitting across the table from Thorne, holding hands with her father. She looked very different from the girl in the pictures that had been so widely distributed after she had gone missing ten months before. She was at least a stone lighter and her hair had been cut short and dyed black.

She looked terrified.

‘Have you any idea how much effort went into looking for you?’ Thorne asked. ‘Never mind the cost . . .’

‘I’m sorry.’ She looked at her father. He squeezed her hand. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

‘Just tell us the truth.’

Jesmond cleared his throat. He was sitting next to Thorne, though not quite close enough to hold hands. ‘Take your time, Miss Keane. I know this must be difficult.’

Thorne could not resist a sideways glance. He felt like leaning across the table and letting Andrea and her father know what the caring – sharing chief superintendent really thought. Perhaps he could pass on a few of his senior officer’s more sensitive pronouncements:

‘OK, we lost the case, but with her alive we’ve lost the moral high ground as well.’

‘What’s going on around here? Why the hell can’t the dead stay dead?’

But Thorne said nothing, largely because, deep down, he shared many of Jesmond’s frustrations. He was not sorry that Andrea was still alive, never that: the look on Stephen Keane’s face was enough to cheer anyone with an ounce of humanity. Even so, Thorne was sickened by the thought of the field day Adam Chambers and his high-powered friends would be enjoying right now. The self-righteous bilge that the newspapers would print over the days to follow. The shocking final chapter in Nick Maier’s nauseating exposé.

‘I was in Brighton for a while,’ Andrea said. ‘At Sarah’s. Then I moved around a bit after that.’

‘You were staying with Sarah Jackson?’

Andrea nodded.

Thorne sighed and looked at Jesmond. ‘We interviewed her. Twice.’

‘She’s my mate, so she lied.’

‘She deserves an Oscar, the performance she gave.’

‘Is she going to get in trouble?’

‘Maybe,’ Thorne said. He watched Andrea nod slowly and try to blink back the tears that were brimming. ‘What have you been doing? How did you live?’

‘I just stayed at Sarah’s flat for the first few months, until things had died down. Then she helped me get a cleaning job, cash in hand, so I was able to give her something for putting me up. Hiding me, like.’

‘You’ve no idea,’ Stephen Keane said.

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘What she went through.’

Thorne nodded, said, ‘You are going to have to tell us why, Andrea.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Her voice was suddenly very small. A child’s.

‘It’s all right, baby.’ Stephen Keane leaned across to whisper and squeezed his daughter’s hand again. ‘It’s all right to tell.’

She started talking fast, as though it were the only way she would be able to get it out, her eyes fixed on the edge of the desk and the hand that was not clasped inside her father’s wrapped tight around the arm of her plastic chair. ‘That night, I went back to his place . . . to Adam’s place, after the lesson had finished. We had a couple of drinks, talked about other people in the class, just chatting, you know?’ She took a deep breath, then ploughed on. ‘I fancied him, if I’m honest. He was fit and he seemed dead nice. I knew he had a girlfriend, but he said things weren’t so great between them, so I didn’t feel too bad about it . . . Like I said, we had a few drinks, listened to some music. He was pretending he knew a lot about wine, sniffing the cork when it came out of the bottle and stuff, and I knew he was full of shit but I didn’t really care. He put his arm round me and I let him. I wanted him to.’

She glanced up at Thorne, then turned to look at her father. He smiled and nodded. Said, ‘It’s OK.’

‘We were kissing or whatever for a few minutes and then suddenly his hands were all over the place.’ Her own hand moved from the arm of the chair as she spoke, passed lightly across her chest and down to her lap. ‘They were everywhere, you know . . . his fingers. I told him I had to get home because I had an early start, but really I was starting to feel like it was a big mistake, like I’d really messed up, even though he was whispering and telling me how great it was going to be. How long he could . . . keep going. I told him to stop.’ She looked up again and suddenly there was strength in her voice. ‘I told him to stop and I wasn’t drunk. It was just a couple of glasses and I was . . . not drunk.

‘But he was really strong, you know? He used to show off during the lessons, bench-pressing and all that, using a few of the girls like they were weights, so when he started to get rough there was nothing I could do. He kept talking to me . . . while he was doing it, saying he knew how much I wanted it, that his girlfriend used to pretend that she didn’t like it rough, but he knew she was a lying bitch as well. I just closed my eyes until it was over, tried not to make any noise, but . . . he hurt me.

‘He hurt me . . .

‘Then I got dressed and he was watching me, saying there was no point telling anybody, because I’d wanted to go back to his flat and I’d been drinking and nobody would believe that I hadn’t been begging him for it.’

She paused and Jesmond began to say something about how sensitively offences of this nature were now handled. But Thorne was not really listening and neither was Andrea Keane.

‘When I left,’ she said, looking at Thorne, ‘he just sat there, sniffing his fingers, same as he’d done with the cork. Appreciating it. Like I was just some . . . bottle he’d opened.’

Her father moaned next to her.

‘I couldn’t go home, I couldn’t bear facing anyone for a while, so I called Sarah and she drove up to collect me. I didn’t mean to stay away for so long. I mean, it wasn’t like I had a plan or anything, but when I knew everyone was looking for me it just got harder and harder to come back. Then I saw that he’d been arrested, so . . .’

She looked up and it was clear that she’d finished. Now her father’s face was streaked with tears. Jesmond reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, but it was ignored.

‘So, why now?’ Thorne asked. ‘Why did you come back now?’

‘Because he got off. Because he walked out of that courtroom like butter wouldn’t melt and I watched him on the TV and saw him in the papers and it felt like he was doing it to me all over again. Like he was doing it to everyone.’

‘What if he hadn’t got off? Would you have done nothing and let him go down for murder?’

‘Like a shot,’ she said. ‘Even if it meant staying away for good. Knowing he’d been punished for something would have made that worth it.’

‘What about your parents? How could you not have told them you were OK?’ Thorne blinked as he remembered asking Ellie Langford almost exactly the same question a few weeks before.

‘I would have let them know,’ Andrea said. ‘And they would have understood.’ She looked at her father. ‘They’d have kept the secret.’

Stephen Keane nodded, sat back and wiped his face. ‘So . . . that’s it.’

‘Right,’ Jesmond said. ‘Thanks . . .’

As the chief superintendent started to talk about taking statements, sympathy and determination seemed to be etched in equal measure across his puffy features. But Thorne knew how skilled the man was at showing people what they needed or wanted to see. In reality, Jesmond was feeling nothing but pure and simple relief.

Thorne felt something a whole lot darker.