Ben breathed out slowly through his nose. “I suppose we’ll never know for sure,” he said. He shook his head. “Sad, sad, sad.” He gave a little grunt of effort as he stood up, then tapped his watch. “Right, bedtime. Let’s get ourselves back to the hotel and get some kip.”

Sinead closed over her laptop, rolled back her chair, and stood up. “What about Hamza?”

“He’s going to head straight to the hotel and give me a phone when he’s in,” Ben said.

The DC jabbed a thumb in Dave’s direction. As if on cue, he let out a long, throaty snore. “And what about Sleeping Beauty? Should we wake him?”

“Well…” Ben clapped his hands together loudly, sending the sound racing around the room. There wasn’t so much as a flicker from the man in the wheelchair. “I suppose we should at least give it a try.”

* * *

The restaurant was shut when Logan made it back to the hotel, and with no minibar on offer in his room, he had to resort to the second vending machine visit of the evening. There would be plenty of takeaways delivering, but he didn’t have the inclination to trawl through menus, nor the patience to wait for the delivery.

And so, a couple of minutes later, he stood in the lift with a bag of crisps in one hand, a plastic bottle of Irn Bru in the other, and a cheeky Milky Way tucked into his shirt pocket for dessert.

He stopped outside Tyler’s room and listened at the door for any sign that the DC was still awake. The TV was off, which he took to be a sign that Tyler was asleep. He could be lying awake reading or something, Logan supposed, but the chances of that were slim. Getting Tyler to read anything was akin to getting a cow to walk down stairs.

He had an aversion to silence, too, hence his constant need to fill it by talking endless amounts of shite. If the room was quiet, then that meant he was either out, asleep, or dead.

Logan seriously doubted the DC would’ve gone out anywhere on his own this late in the day. And, if he was dead, then there was a very good chance that he’d still be dead in the morning, and Logan could deal with it then.

And so, with his Milky Way burning a hole in his pocket, Logan headed along the corridor, tapped his keycard against the lock of his door, and headed inside for the night.

* * *

Tyler lay on his back on top of the queen size bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling, fingers fiddling with the more troublesome of his two testicles.