There’s a massive shock for Dr Liam Cavanagh (Jonny McPherson) in upcoming

Emmerdale episodes when he discovers that his former girlfriend Ella Forster

(Paula Lane) is expecting his baby. And he doesn’t react well to the news.

The complicating factor is, of course, that the reason Liam and Ella broke up, and she left the village, was the revelation that she was a child killer. For Liam it didn’t make a difference that, when Ella killed her best friend, she was only a child herself.

He wasn’t interested in hearing Ella’s explanation that she’d grown up in horribly deprived circumstances and this girl’s mother had been the first adult who’d shown Ella any love or care.

When the girl decided they wouldn’t be friends any longer, Ella realised that she would no longer be welcome in this loving family and, in a rage of grief, she battered her friend to death.

For Liam, a man who’d lost his own daughter Leanna (Mimi Slinger) at the hands of serial killer Meena Jutla (Paige Sandhu), the fact that Ella had taken somebody’s life meant he couldn’t deal with being around her at all.

She’s now back in the village, staying at the salon and working at the vet’s – but still hasn’t told Liam about the pregnancy.

This all changes in upcoming episodes when she feels unwell in the street and Liam is on hand to assist. He’s shocked when she tells him the reason for her funny turn could be because she’s pregnant. And the baby is his.

He relays the news to Chas Dingle (Lucy Pargeter) at the Woolpack and she’s similarly thrown because she and Liam had been taking tentative steps to getting back together.

Liam can’t handle the fact that someone he considers to be a child killer could also be the mother of his child and when Ella comes to talk to him he refuses to answer the door.

Eventually he does speak to her, but Ella is totally humiliated when he forces her to do a pregnancy test – because he doesn’t believe a word she’s saying.

Is she telling the truth?