‘Going stir crazy at home.’ Even her own voice seemed muffled as she sat, carefully ignoring the way her brain amplified the groan of the seat frame; the quiet clatter of its armrests. ‘Sitting around isn’t really my field.’

Vaughn scratched the side of his nose. ‘I think compassionate leave is a better description. Are you OK?’

She frowned, harder than she’d intended. ‘Absolutely. Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Well, it’s only been four days …’ He trailed off.

Four days since her confrontation with Joseph White at Cold Christmas church.

Four days since Mike’s death.

And she still hadn’t cried.

Her mind flashed back to those final, frantic moments in the tower: events that had played on repeat behind every single thought she’d had since. Her last-ditch attempt to save them both.

There had been no way to know that White had already administered the fatal shock to Mike’s heart, just seconds before Hawkins crashed into him, starting the fight that led to her breaking his jaw with a crowbar. It was that infinitesimal gap she still couldn’t reconcile.

The coroner’s report said that, given the length of time his heart had spent dormant, Mike’s brain had already been starved of oxygen. Even if she hadn’t collapsed, saving him would have been almost impossible.

Almost.

Hawkins herself had been more fortunate. Allegedly.

She had woken three hours later, freezing cold, still inside the tower, to find both men lying exactly where they had been.

It was difficult to say, in the blurred panic that followed, how long she spent desperately trying to resuscitate Mike. But when her attempts failed, she had crawled to White’s holdall, found her mobile phone and stumbled outside in search of a signal.

Twenty minutes later the paramedics arrived, quickly establishing that Mike had died hours earlier. There was nothing they could do.

Nothing she could have done.

The fact Hawkins herself had been somewhat luckier was of no comfort.

It seemed that, given White’s size, and the strength of the chloroform solution he’d used, what remained on the cloth would have knocked the killer out for no more than twenty minutes. That meant he would have woken long before Hawkins, with plenty of time to finish her off, and escape.

Except the blow from the crowbar had ruptured the tumour in his brain, exactly as White himself had predicted, and the resulting haemorrhage killed him in less than a minute.

‘Antonia?’ The superintendent’s voice pulled her back to the present. ‘Why are you here?’

She cleared her throat. ‘I wanted to … register my interest in getting back to work as quickly as possible.’

Vaughn’s expression gathered. ‘Haven’t we been here before?’

‘This is different.’

‘How?’

‘That impairment was physical. Your reservation concerned my ability to work while confined to a wheelchair.’