I’m the last to leave the office. That’s not unusual. Ryan went home an hour ago. The rest of my colleagues left a good hour or more before that.

‘Do you not have a home to go to?’ he asked me, his earlier terseness forgotten, as he slipped into his coat and pulled his scarf around his neck.

He asks me that question every night. And every night I tell him I work better here. When I’m alone. When there are no distractions.

Sometimes he tries to distract me before he leaves. He leaves his office with a wolfish smile on his face and I know immediately what’s on his mind. He’s an attractive man. Older than me, of course. In his mid-fifties, but he looks after himself. Dresses well. He’s well groomed; tanned and toned, but not too much. He’s not vain. He has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Piercing – that’s how I’d describe them. When he turns on the charm, I find him impossible to resist, even if most of the time he enrages me with his arrogance. Some would say we have a love–hate kind of an arrangement. But it’s more complicated than that. I wouldn’t say that I loved him, and yet I find myself drawn to him anyway. I’m pretty sure he feels the same.

He wasn’t in a predatory mood tonight, though. ‘I’ll have to talk to HR about this,’ he said, which is a threat he makes at least once a week. He always follows it with waffle about ‘lone working protocol’ as if, as reporters, we aren’t dispatched to talk to dodgy people in dodgy places on our own all the time.

I didn’t argue with him. I just rolled my eyes. Nodded. Told him I’d see him in the morning.

As soon as he left, I looked at the negatives I’d retrieved from the archive room earlier. They were from pictures of the funeral. Pictures of Kelly Doherty’s grieving family. Pictures of me and my school friends standing, shivering in the cold, as a guard of honour outside of the chapel. Thankfully, I seem to be hidden behind one of my classmates, the top of my head just about in view, but that doesn’t stop me from remembering the day. The wind was icy-cold, whipping around our legs. School uniforms – skirts and knee-high white socks – were not enough to protect bare legs from the cold. I shivered so hard that my teeth chattered together, giving me a headache.