Their relationship had come apart at the edges, as he guessed it would, mainly thanks to his job taking him thousands of miles away, but also due to the woman’s bitter nature. Tours of Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t conducive to nurturing familial ties. It’s why he’d eventually left. But it still took him a long time to work his way back into Josie’s life, and by then, she was emerging as a young woman herself.

It threw him. But then he realised that his daughter was a mirror image of himself in temperament, approach and character. She didn’t suffer fools and she was driven to go after what she wanted. She was just like Kelly.

The thought of Kelly sat face to face with The Teacher made his skin crawl. The whole investigation was odd. Usually, during a high-profile inquiry, Kelly had forged her direction by now, but this one had thrown her. They talked. What couple didn’t? He kept her secrets. It relaxed her to throw snippets at him and listen to his take on a suspect interview or a family dynamic. And for his part, he found it fascinating. He couldn’t do what she did – the agony of seeing the victims would kill him, especially kids – but he was in awe of her approach, and how she attacked the job. He had no doubt that she’d catch whoever did those horrible things to those two women, but he could tell that she was wavering uncharacteristically.

He looked up at the sky as it darkened and, by next week, the days would grow shorter until the spring. It was a depressing prospect but he and Kelly were similar in that they loved the winter when it finally came. They adored the sunshine of summer but not the throngs of tourists who choked the roads, or needed to be rescued from the fells. Maybe now that Josie was climbing, she’d want to come along with them as they escaped the crowds finding hidden havens. He’d toyed with the idea of meeting the kids at the foot of the rock face on which they practised, but he knew that it would embarrass his daughter, especially in front of Callum.

He seemed a nice enough boy, but nice enough was never going to be adequate for his daughter. It was the first time that he’d thought of Josie’s affections in a grown-up way and it made him uncomfortable. He tried to remember what his first girlfriend had been like, and how old she was when they had sex for the first time. He reckoned she was around fifteen. Josie’s age exactly. Callum was sixteen and he seemed to remember that was his age when said occasion occurred.