She set off down the pavement again, her calves aching from the constant slipping and sliding she was doing, although so far she hadn’t taken a total tumble. By dint of shuffling and hardly lifting her feet, she was managing to get along, but her lower back was starting to feel the strain of walking so unnaturally. She would be glad when she could return to the station and thaw out with a hot cup of tea.

Although it was nice to have a white Christmas, or so everyone kept saying, she’d be glad to see the back of snow. Pretty though it might be – and it had certainly given the already lovely city an almost magical appearance, covering spires and clinging to rooftops like a layer of icing on a cake – there was no denying it was beginning to cause serious issues.

Traffic that did manage to take to the streets seemed to end up in ditches, or ploughing into other stationary vehicles when traction was lost on the ice. Old folk were accumulating in hospitals with their fragile bones broken after a slip on the garden path, or with hypothermia after they huddled too long in inadequately heated homes.

And to make matters worse, a nasty cold or flu bug was going around, incapacitating not only members of the general public, but also decimating the ranks of the police and other emergency services, just when more and more calls were being made on their resources.

Not surprisingly, her inspector was not in the best of moods.

Trudy sighed, but DI Harry Jennings’s foul temper notwithstanding, she headed determinedly for the police station with its noisily clanging but blessedly warm radiators.

*

In his Victorian terraced home, with a pretty view over the nearby park, Dr Clement Ryder, city coroner, watched his son move around the kitchen, preparing breakfast. It wasn’t often that either of his two children, now long grown up, visited him for any amount of time, so he was making the most of it. Not that he didn’t heartily approve of them living their own lives, for he’d always thought that was how it was meant to be.

When his wife had died a number of years ago, the twins had been twenty years old, and already both away at university, getting ready to begin their own journeys through life. His daughter, Julia, had taken her mother’s death particularly hard though, and he was glad that she was now happy and well and settled. He’d seen her on Christmas Eve, and had hoped to see her again for New Year’s Day, but he doubted, unless there was a sudden thaw, that she’d be able to make it. The roads were still impossible to navigate.