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Toby pulled over and checked the address of Justin and Brooke’s hotel on his phone. He was on the outskirts of Hunstanton, a Victorian seaside resort. Toby didn’t know the town at all — he had only driven through it with Alice once — but according to his phone he wasn’t far from the hotel. He had kept an eye out for Bill’s red Range Rover as he had driven through the village of Old Hunstanton, but he hadn’t spotted it. Easy to miss in the dark.

On the drive he had been figuring out how to raise Lars’s death indirectly with Justin. Find some way of ascertaining whether Justin had still been at the police station the previous afternoon when Lars had been shot.

The phone buzzed. It was Alice.

‘Toby! We think Dad’s going to kill himself! On the cliffs. We think he’s going to jump. Can you get there?’

‘What! How do you know? Did he call you?’

‘He sent an email to all of us.’

Toby turned the car around and headed back the way he had come, as Alice swiftly explained what had happened. It made sense to him. For someone as proud as Bill, the humiliation of exposure would be extreme. Humiliation in front of his family as much as anyone else.

He had noticed a road called Cliff Parade on his way into town, a clue that the cliffs were nearby.

He was there in a minute, and turned left on to the road. Straight ahead stood a squat white lighthouse. The parade curved left between a row of stiff suburban houses on one side and a stretch of green on the other. The street was well lit, which made it harder to see beyond the pools of light on the grass to what were presumably cliffs and beyond that the sea.

He decided it would be easiest to look for Bill’s red Range Rover first, then look for Bill.

The lighthouse seemed a natural place for Bill and the admiral to meet. Toby turned off the parade into a short road which passed the lighthouse towards a car park. At nine-thirty on a dark November night it was empty, save for two cars, one of which was the Range Rover.

Toby stopped next to it and jumped out. The Range Rover was only yards from the cliff edge. It was a dark night; the sky was black in all directions, the sea a barely perceptible different shade of ink. A stiff, cold breeze was blowing in from the north. Toby couldn’t make out any beach, and in fact he could hear waves breaking against rocks below and out of sight. It must be high tide.

Where to try first? He jogged back to the lighthouse, which was shut up tight.

‘Bill!’ he shouted. He checked all around the building: no sign of anyone.

What if he didn’t get to Bill in time? What if Bill had already jumped? Would that be such a bad thing? If Bill really had killed Sam Bowen and Lars, shouldn’t he be allowed to judge himself? To choose his own punishment?

Toby wasn’t sure. Despite what his father-in-law had done, Toby didn’t want him to die. More importantly, Toby’s wife and her sisters didn’t want him to die.

Toby had to find him.

He trotted over to the fence that lined the swathe of grass, and that stopped walkers from getting too close to the cliff edge. He hopped over it, and fought his way through bushes until the sea opened up before him.

It was a long way down, and the waves were indeed beating against the rocks at the bottom. He couldn’t see a body, but it was too dark to be sure.

If Bill had already jumped, Toby was too late anyway. He was looking for an upright figure above the cliffs, not a floating body below.

Which way?

To the west, Cliff Parade ran towards the town, to the east lay the car park and a path along the cliffs heading back towards the village.

The admiral had specified Old Hunstanton rather than Hunstanton. Toby took the path eastwards.

He jogged along the edge of the car park. Away from the street lighting, it was very dark.

No one.

A sandy path branched off to the left, steeply downhill, and he carefully scrambled down it towards the beach, which was almost entirely covered by angry sea.

He looked back up, along the cliffs.

For a moment he thought he caught a silhouette moving against the black sky, just beneath the cliff edge.

‘Bill!’ he shouted, but the wind took his cry and dashed it against the waves.

Megan drove through the potholes on the lane at forty miles an hour, crunching the underside of Brooke’s hired car and jolting its occupants. Alice was in the front seat next to her, and Brooke was in the back.

They sped past the green and the pub and swerved on to the main road.

‘Megan!’ cried Alice, and she reached across to yank the steering wheel to the left. For a second she was blinded by a pair of headlights coming straight towards her, and a horn blared. The car lurched to the left and straightened up.

‘You were on the wrong side of the road, Megan!’ Too late, Alice wondered whether Megan had ever driven in the UK.

‘Only briefly,’ said Megan, as she took a tight curve too fast, the car clipping the verge.

‘Jesus!’ said Brooke from the back.

‘Do you know where we are going?’ said Megan.

‘Yeah,’ said Alice. ‘Just stick on this road. We go through Old Hunstanton and then we’ll get to the cliffs.’

‘We should reply to Dad,’ said Megan.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Alice. She stared at her own phone screen. How do you plead with your father not to kill himself? There wasn’t time to fashion a well-crafted appeal. Keep it straightforward and quick.

Don’t do it Dad! We all love you. Stay alive for us. Please! Alice Brooke Megan and Maya.

She read it out.

‘That’s good,’ said Megan.

Alice hit Send .

‘Do you think Toby will get there in time to stop him?’ said Brooke.

‘I hope so,’ said Megan. But that’s all it was. A hope.

‘Dad might hesitate,’ said Brooke. ‘You know. He talks to the admiral. Realizes he’s been found out. Decides to kill himself. Sends a message to us. Then... Perhaps he walks around a bit. Can’t make up his mind? Suicidal people do that. Maybe your reply will make him pause.’

But Alice was thinking about something else. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘There’s something not quite right about Henry Greenwald’s story.’

‘What’s that?’ said Megan.

‘Henry said he saw his mother with a naval officer. We assumed that was Dad, right?’

‘Right.’

‘It can’t have been.’

‘Why not?’ said Brooke.

‘Because Henry said he was six. If he was sixteen in 1996, that means he was six in 1986.’

‘And Dad had left the Navy!’ said Megan.

‘Correct. Pat Greenwald was speaking to someone else in a navy uniform.’

‘Lars?’ said Brooke.

‘Lars left the Navy in 1984 too,’ said Megan.

Megan’s phone rang and she passed it to Alice to answer, swerving as she did so.

‘Hi, Maya, it’s Alice.’

‘Alice! Did you see that email from Daddy? What’s going on?’

The fear in Maya’s voice reached out over the Atlantic to her older sister.

‘Oh, Maya, yes, we did get it. And we think it must be a suicide note.’

‘Oh God! Where is he?’

‘We think he’s on the cliffs by Hunstanton. Toby’s looking for him now, and we’re on our way.’

‘Has he jumped? Oh my God, Alice, has he jumped?’

‘We don’t know. We hope not, but we don’t know. Look, Maya. Can you quickly get in touch with Henry Greenwald and ask him if he can remember whether the officer his mother was with in the kitchen was bald?’

‘But Dad isn’t bald?’

‘Precisely.’

Maya was no dummy. ‘I’ll do it. Wait there.’

The car sped through the darkness.