By the time they reached the locker room, she was starting to unravel into the scared young woman Foster had first seen in Paris. She hovered by the door. Foster smiled reassuringly and said, ‘I’m not coming in with you.’

She smiled back weakly.

‘Yeah, I guess that’s how rumours start.’

She pushed backwards into the locker room, rolling her shoulder around the door and only breaking eye contact at the very last second.

‘Shout if you need me,’ Foster called after her. As he turned away from the door, his phone buzzed. It was Ruth Cullen.

‘We’ve just got the pathology reports back,’ she said. ‘Apparently they found rope burns.’

‘You’re going to find rope burns, Ruth. She hanged herself.’

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. At the far end of the corridor a man and a young girl were walking hand-in-hand towards Foster.

‘Thing is, Chris,’ Ruth Cullen said, ‘the burns were on her wrists.’

CHAPTER 14

THE PLAYERS’ CORRIDOR would not have looked out of place in the city hospital, with white walls and halogen spotlights picking out occasional pictures designed to splash a little colour. The guy with the young girl had almost reached Foster, so he listened without speaking and pushed the phone a little harder against his ear, so that none of the ugliness Cullen was describing could escape into the air around him. There was a stairwell opposite and Foster pushed into it. Once he was sure the girl was out of earshot, he said, ‘So you’re telling me somebody killed Rosario and set it up to look like a suicide?’

‘It looks that way. They went to a fair bit of trouble, too. You ever tried lifting a dead weight?’

Foster chose not to answer.

‘I would have shoved a handful of paracetamol down her throat,’ Cullen continued. ‘Saved my back, you know?’

‘So there’s no question that she was targeted?’ Foster reasoned.

‘No question in my book,’ Cullen said. ‘The department wants to investigate the panicking burglar scenario, just to tick it off, but I don’t buy that at all.’

‘Burglars who panic stab you,’ Foster said. ‘Or they strangle the life out of you. No burglar ties someone’s wrists and goes looking for a beam to hoist them up on, out of panic.’

‘What’s your theory, Sherlock?’ Cullen asked. ‘And what’s the deal with Keller?’

‘She’s been getting a lot of threats,’ Foster said. ‘Nothing precise. No accusations, no demands. Feels like it’s escalating, though.’

‘Killing her coach would be a hell of an escalation.’

‘True, but I’m not sure,’ Foster said. ‘Maria Rosario was pretty easy to dislike. She was all about tennis – nothing else mattered. No manners, no small talk. She was focused, demanding, aggressive. You get the picture? She could easily have enemies of her own.

‘Until now, all the threats have been focused on Keller. Nothing about Rosario.’