According to so-called professionals, her enforced sabbatical would be best spent with close family and friends. What Vaughn clearly didn’t understand was that Mike, almost exclusively, had been both. A point she had tried to make.

Except by that stage in the conversation, the combination of fear, fatigue and increasingly unrestrained emotion had engulfed her argument. The DCS had been compassionate, but unrelenting.

She was out.

She hadn’t been back to her office, partly because, without a warrant card to back it up, the place held nothing to offer even the most basic comfort. Plus, she didn’t want to see her team; risk letting them see through the delicate veneer that insisted she was coping; that her one remaining link to normality hadn’t just been torn from her grip; or worse, be persuaded to explain how that felt.

The wind stabbed at her, dragging leaves in scratchy waves across the tarmac.

Somewhere in the recesses of her mind resilience sparked and Hawkins nearly turned, the temptation to march back into Vaughn’s office and stand there till he relented almost overwhelming. Then it was gone, replaced by cold logic that said shouting in the adjudicator’s face rarely resulted in immediate change.

That didn’t mean her penalty couldn’t be reduced. But right now, she was in no condition to mount an appeal.

Resigned to her fate, for the moment at least, Hawkins drifted to her car. She put the key in the ignition, but instead of turning it, her hand fell into her lap, and she let her head drop back on the rest, feeling the protest of five recently applied stitches. Willing the pounding silence of emptiness, just for a moment, to let her be.

It didn’t.

This torture, the untethered confusion that had rung in her ears since the moment she regained consciousness for the second time in Cold Christmas church, was here to stay. And the only way to silence it; the only treatment that had ever silenced it, had just been taken away.

Several of Mike’s family were on the way to London, flying in to organize his funeral; to find out exactly how their son died. The distant voice of reason said she should be glad that the burden of dealing with Mike’s affairs hadn’t fallen on her – his former fiancée. Yet even that gut-wrenching duty might have been preferable to the horrific period of vacancy she now faced.

But as she sat there, cocooned in rubber and tin, a spark somewhere inside her reignited. It wasn’t full flame, but it was there, defiant; irrepressible. She turned to look out of the window at the front of Becke House, her breaths coming faster now, as she mentally stoked what she’d assumed until a moment ago had been lost.