“Fine, thanks. I’m on a course of steroids, so I’m permanently starving, but I feel fine, thanks.” Giving up on coherence, she sank into the chair. “Do I need a union rep for this, Kev?”

“No, love.” He gestured to Amira, who twiddled with her mobile phone and then passed it to Jem. It was strange seeing her without Caitlin. All trace of the cocksure bully she had been in Caitlin’s company had vanished, and she couldn’t look Jem in the eye.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t tell anyone sooner,” she said. “But Cait can be—well, we’re supposed to be best mates, and you know what she can be like.”

Jem frowned, still attempting to make head or tail of the proceedings. A WhatsApp message from Caitlin filled the phone’s screen, the text almost lost in a sea of horrified emoticons: Fuck fuck fuck. Help!

“Scroll down,” Amira said, noting Jem’s confusion. “It’s all on there.”

Jem did as instructed, reading through the next handful of messages. “Blimey. This explains a lot.”

Amira shook her head. “She panicked, but that doesn’t excuse what any of us did.”

According to the texts, Caitlin had started her first shift on the RRV by losing the three vials of morphine in question when she’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book: driving off with them on the car’s roof after getting a job in the middle of completing her vehicle checks. Shunning Amira’s advice to come clean and tell a manager, she had instead schemed with Baxter to shift the blame on to Jem.

“Why the hell would Baxter agree to put himself in the middle of this?” Jem asked, but even as she hit the question mark, she had a light-bulb moment. “Ah. They’re a couple, aren’t they?”

“They met on a training day, and they’ve been seeing each other for about six months,” Amira confirmed. “He didn’t know Cait had sent the texts, and she didn’t know I’d kept them. I only found out what she’d done after you’d been dragged into the office, and she swore me to secrecy. I don’t have any excuses, though. I should have told you or Kev.”

Kev rustled the paperwork in front of him, looking even more worn out than usual. As a manager, he was happiest when the crews simply got on with things: started their shift on time, worked to the end of it without mucking anything up, and went home. While he’d had plenty of chats in his office with Jem, they had primarily been welfare checks after potentially traumatic jobs, rather than untangling her from some arse-backwards conspiracy.