He would’ve done, once. As a teenager, maybe, and a younger man. But he’d seen the effects of sexual violence up close since then. He’d stood there, a useless great lump of a thing, as women had cried and screamed and demanded to know what they’d done to deserve this. Begged to know why men thought they could do these things. Why they felt they had that right.

They hadn’t been women. Not to the men who’d attacked them, anyway. They’d been things. Objects. Items to be used for gratification. To be overpowered. To be nothing.

And what was pornography, if not just a slightly more civilised version of that?

He didn’t want to watch the lassie currently smiling up from his phone getting her clothes off, and he certainly didn’t want to see her doing anything else.

No. He wanted to sit her down and tell her that she didn’t have to do this. That there were other options—better options than having some big sweaty bastard grinding away on you under the all-seeing eyes of the internet, anyway.

He wouldn’t, of course. That wasn’t why he was here. And chances were she’d just tell him to mind his own fucking business, which would be fair enough.

But he’d rung twice now, and she still hadn’t come to the door.

And not a sound had emerged from within the house.

Hamza clicked the button that made his phone go dark, then stepped back from the door and took a look at the windows. Lights on downstairs, dark upstairs. The hallway, which he could see through the frosted glass panels of the door, was partially lit by the glow from the living room. It wasn’t much, but enough that he’d be able to see anyone moving around in there.

Which he couldn’t.

His footsteps crunched on gravel as he approached the front window. The angle of the blinds let him see a foot or two of floor, and not a whole lot else, and a strip of dark green carpet didn’t really tell him much about anything.

He returned to the door and knocked this time. “Miss McAllister?” he called. “Jazmin? Do you have a minute?”

He waited, listened, watched through the rippled glass.

Nothing.

Or… something, maybe? In the hall. A figure? Or a coat, perhaps? Something there in the gloom, anyway. Something just beyond the door.

Hamza dropped down onto his haunches and prised open the letterbox. The new fixings were stiff, the metal sharp, and he nearly lost a finger as he stretched what he could of his hand inside and pushed a second hinged bit of metal outwards.

He jumped back, and pain ignited across his knuckles as the skin was scraped off them.