Detective Inspector Kelly Porter felt a mixture of relief and dread when she received the notification on her Toughpad. The call had come from the pod in Keswick, and it gave her a reason to get out of bed and stop pondering her paranoia. She kept the iPad, safe in its police issue cover, by her bed, and reached over for it, flipping it open and reading the details they had so far. Johnny, her boyfriend of three years, slept soundly beside her. He always did now.

Unlike herself, who’d taken to dreaming again. It was no coincidence. She’d lain awake since three a.m. trying to be as still as she could so as not to disturb Johnny. She’d occupied herself with various tricks: watching his back rise and fall, listening to the coming dawn chorus from the birds getting ready to migrate at the end of a long, beautiful summer in the fells; and her cases – old and new – that whizzed around her head occasionally, churning questions, as if accusing her of falling short.

Johnny must have become aware of her fiddling, because he rolled over and put his arm across her.

‘Have you been awake for hours?’ he asked.

‘How do you know?’

‘I can tell because you’re wide awake. You’re not grumpy like you are after a good night’s sleep.’

He felt good and she held onto him and snuggled down into her pillow, dropping her Toughpad back on the floor. Suddenly she was drowsy. It was always the way when one finally had cause to be awake.

‘The letter?’ he asked.

‘I guess so.’

The letter she’d received two weeks ago had got under her skin. It hadn’t been the first and, she suspected, it wouldn’t be the last; but it was the increasing level of familiarity that bugged her. She felt indignant and angry, and the negative energy was pissing her off. The first had been posted before the death of her mother, Wendy, and Kelly had wanted to vomit. That was almost a year ago. The sentiment had evoked a guttural response in her and she’d thrown the letter into a drawer, feeling dirty having handled it.

Next came the sympathy card and flowers, after Wendy’s funeral. Inside the card was a poem dedicated to everlasting beauty, and how the afterlife protected one from further tainting by human hands, or some such crap that Kelly could barely fathom. It went into the same drawer.