Kash fell in step with her as they walked to the door. “It certainly has potential. Speaking of which, did you get in touch with Jem?”

“No, not yet.” She raised a hand, forestalling any rebuke. “Don’t frown, it doesn’t become you. I’m going to phone her later. She won’t be in work today, and I don’t want to wake her, that’s all.”

“Fair enough,” he said. They had worked together for almost three years, and he had sound instincts when it came to subjects best left alone. “Come on, Smiffy promised to save us a seat.”

The trip across Manchester to Stockport was a white-knuckle ride, dodging buses, half-asleep commuters, and suicidal cyclists. Rosie tracked the van’s progress on her phone, following a stuttering red arrow through Longsight and Levenshulme as shops began to open and locals with jobs in the city crammed into bus shelters to avoid the unpredictable downpours. The driver extinguished the lights and sirens as he left the main road and began to weave through residential streets, the outlying scruffy redbrick terraces giving way to semi-detacheds with well-tended gardens and fancier cars.

“Next right,” Rosie told Kash, and seconds later, the van slowed to make the turn. The Tactical Aid Unit were already waiting, their presence at the arrest probably overkill but intended to send a message to the perps who hadn’t yet been found, to Bill and Nancy and Fagin, but primarily to the person who had set fire to a house, trapping four people inside it.

“You okay?” Kash asked in an undertone, as the van pulled into a parking spot at the far end of Cedar and their sarge began his briefing.

“Yeah,” she said. She’d fastened her stab vest too tight, and the shirt below was damp and clinging to her. “I’m fine.”

“Smiffy, Topper, and Jonas, block off from number nine,” their sarge was saying at the front of the van. “I don’t want anyone getting past you until this bloke’s out. Rosie, Kash, and Lem, block from one. That’s the school end, so you might have your hands full.”

“Bollocks,” Kash said, and Rosie widened the view on her phone to show the academy two streets away.

“Cheer up, mate. Where’s your sense of adventure?” she said, very much in the mood to brawl with a bunch of gobby schoolkids.