He listened to Magda’s breathless panting as she lugged her cleaning box up the incline to the guest house’s front door. She was wheezing like an old racehorse on the way to the knacker’s yard. Christ, don’t tell him he’d have to start looking for a replacement. Cheap foreign labour was proving increasingly difficult to get.

“You there yet?” he asked, after what felt like an eternity of listening to her puff and pant.

“Soon. One minute more,” she rasped.

Rufus rolled his eyes, gave an apologetic sort of wave to his golf partner, then turned away again.

“How far away did you park?” he asked. “Cornwall?”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Just hurry up. I’m in the middle of something important.”

“Here now,” Magda said, dropping the level of her voice.

“Why are you whispering? Don’t whisper. Just knock once and go in. You’re in the right,” Rufus told her, then he simplified that all down before she could question it, and repeated only the, “Go in,” part.

He heard her knocking. It was quiet and timid-sounding. If the guests were still asleep, it would do nothing to wake them.

“They no answer.”

“Then go in, woman! You’ve got keys.”

Rufus listened to the clack and the creak of the door being opened.

“It no locked,” Magda told him, her voice barely audible now above the sounds of wind and birdsong. “I go in. I go in and—”

He heard her gasp.

He heard the thump of her phone hitting the floor, the rustle as it bounced and slid across the carpet.

He heard her babbling in her native tongue, the words themselves meaning nothing to him, but their increasingly hysterical tones telling him that something was seriously wrong.

And then, through a crackle of low-signal static, he heard her muffled screams.

Chapter Three

DC Tyler Neish had been married less than forty-eight hours, and was already halfway through the first official argument with his new wife.

They sat in Sinead’s car outside the polis station on Burnett Road, windscreen wipers fighting a losing battle against the raging rain. He sat in the passenger seat, shoulders stooped and head down, like a child being reprimanded.

“No, it can’t wait,” Sinead told him, her voice all hard and sharp around the edges. “You need to tell him today. Your operation’s on Thursday.”

Tyler wobbled his weight from one arse cheek to the other. “Aye. No, I know, I just—”

The look she shot him was harsher still than her words had been. They’d been having this same conversation for almost a week now, and no amount of gentle encouragement and supportive words had helped spur him on.

Seeing him slouched there, she found herself softening again. She couldn’t be annoyed with him. Not about this. Plenty of other things, aye, but not this.