“He’s got two,” the neighbour said. “Eleven and fifteen. You can’t seriously be arresting him.”

As if to prove the neighbour wrong, the TAU sarge marched down the garden path with the man Rosie had last seen buying vodka and chocolate for a fourteen-year-old boy. Apparently dressed for work, he was wearing a smart grey suit, but his head was bowed and his hands were cuffed behind him. A woman ran after him, her slippers slapping the paving stones and her nightie flying up around her thighs.

“He didn’t do it!” she shrieked. “He didn’t do anything wrong! That boy asked him for sweets, that’s all!”

Rosie snapped around to look at Kash, who seemed just as appalled. “Did she fucking know?” she said.

Kash shook his head, stunned. “Perhaps she saw it on the BBC.”

“And what, they decided to sit there and wait for the knock on the door?”

“Maybe not,” he said as a TAU officer carried a holdall through the porch and handed his sarge what appeared to be a passport.

“Bloody hell.” Rosie absently yanked a schoolkid to a standstill by the scruff of his neck. “I guess that’s just pissed all over his chances of getting bail.”

Chapter Nineteen

Jem woke with a thick head and a cough reminiscent of a cat hacking up a fur ball. She was already upright, propped on a pile of pillows, but she leaned forward to rest her hands on the mattress, assuming the tripod position of the chronically oxygen deficient. A couple of blasts from her inhaler kicked the worst of it into touch, and she relaxed back, watching shadows cross the ceiling as the sun shimmied in and out of the clouds. It was late by her standards, almost eight thirty, but she had lain awake until three and then clocked every subsequent hour, on the hour. If there was a bright side, what little sleep she’d managed had been too meagre for nightmares.

Her phone buzzed as she was mustering the energy for a shower: Ferg video-calling her on WhatsApp.

“Shit.” She dipped her fingers in her glass of water and damped down her hair, then straightened her T-shirt. She couldn’t pretend she was up and dressed, but she hoped she’d look a little less lamentable. Plastering on a smile, she accepted the call.

“Good morning,” she said, all bright and breezy and trying not to cry.

Ferg made a show of peering into the screen. “You look terrible, hen. Did I wake you?”

“No,” she said, abandoning her attempts to pull the wool. He knew her too well to be fooled, in any case. “Waking me would imply I actually slept.”

He clucked his tongue. “Should you have stayed in the hospital?”

“I don’t think so. My inhalers and the steroids seem to be doing the trick. Harriet gave me so many pills I’m rattling.”