But here, in this photograph, that look was mixed with something more melancholy. Something bleaker. She was making all the shapes of a smile, curving all the right lines, but none of it was real.

He returned the picture to its spot on the floor. She must’ve been holding it when she kicked the chair away. It had slipped from her hand, and while it seemed to have landed directly in her eye line, fate and gravity had conspired to place it face down. To hide it from her, in her final moments of life. Whether that was a kindness or a cruelty, only she would have been able to say.

A siren sang from a few streets away. Hamza took one more look at the hanging girl, her hands black, her face a bruise of purple-blue. He whispered an apology for not being there sooner, then he stepped outside into the fresh air and found DI Forde’s name in his phone.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in.”

Logan felt everything between his throat and his arse go tight at the sound of the voice that rang through the corridor behind him. He’d hoped to avoid this. Avoid her. No such luck.

“Heather,” he acknowledged, turning to face the woman striding purposefully towards him. She’d cut her hair since he’d last seen her. It had always been pulled back into a tight ponytail, but now it was short and styled in a sculpted side-parting. It was a man’s haircut, and on other women it might look like some desperate attempt to blend into a mostly male-dominated workplace.

She somehow managed to make it look ironic, though. Like she was taking the piss out of the men who thought themselves better suited for, or just plain better at, the job. I’m not just taking your place, I’m taking your hair, too, was the general message here. She wasn’t trying to fit in with her male colleagues, she was stamping her authority over them.

“Jack,” she replied. She’d locked eyes with him the moment he’d turned, and hadn’t yet blinked or looked away. Her eye contact game had always been first class, and he’d seen killers spill their guts just to get her to stop staring them down. “Aren’t you meant to be somewhere else?” she asked.

“Ha. Aye. I came down the road yesterday,” he explained.

“Not after your old job are you?” she asked, smirking like she was daring him to try. “Because I’m not giving it up.”

“I heard you got made DCI,” Logan said. “I meant to drop you an email or something, but…”

“Oh, you were going to drop me an email?” she asked, and there was a laugh not far behind it. “That’s very official-sounding of you, considering the last thing you dropped for me.”