There was a short delay as she tried to process, decipher, and translate what he’d said, then tears sprang to her eyes again.

“I no know! How is… how am…? I no know what is happen!”

“No, I’m not asking you to solve the case,” Hamza said, but the words came out far too quickly for the woman to follow, and the look that bounced back at him was a tangle of fear and confusion. “I was just…”

This was getting neither of them anywhere, he decided. At this rate, the poor woman would never get home.

“Wait there. One second,” Hamza said, gesturing for her to stay put as he got to his feet.

He crossed to the door, opened it, and leaned through into the station’s reception area, where the on-duty sergeant was typing on a battered old laptop.

“Getting anywhere?” the sergeant asked.

“Not really, no,” Hamza admitted. “I don’t suppose you know anyone who speaks Polish, do you?”

“Well… she does, doesn’t she?”

Hamza gave the other man a second, hoping he’d figure out his error on his own.

When he didn’t, the DS continued. “I meant to translate,” he explained. “Someone who can speak Polish and English.”

“Oh. Right, aye. Gotcha.” The sergeant leaned back in his chair. He hooked a finger over his bottom lip as he contemplated the question, and pulled like a fish on a hook. “Do you know,” he said, after some thought. “I might know just the man.”

* * *

Logan, Tyler, and Sinead stood in respectful silence in the drizzling rain, as four stretchers were loaded into four ambulances, and four members of the same family began their separate journeys north.

Only once the vehicles had turned off the bog-mottled driveway and onto the main road did the detectives’ conversation resume.

Something had happened between them. Logan could sense it the moment he’d met up with them again. An argument of some kind. He could see it in their movements, and hear it in their voices, if not in the actual words they used. They were trying to hide it from him. He was grateful for that. The last thing he wanted to get involved in was some sort of lovers’ tiff.

“Aye, so, nothing in the outbuilding as far as we could tell, boss,” Tyler said. “Looks like it hasn’t been used in a while. Padlock seems to be untouched, and there’s no other way in or out.”

Logan nodded, then lowered himself onto one of the two swings that hung from the wooden frame at the side of the house. “Aye. The owner said as much. Palmer and his lot had a check around the outside and went over the door, and they don’t reckon anyone’s been inside it, either.”

“You find anything upstairs, sir?” Sinead asked.

“No. Aye. I mean… maybe. There’s an imprint on the carpet.”

“Of what, boss?”