Dog-eared pop played somewhere in the background as Hawkins excused her way through, picking out a group of work faces at a table opposite the bar. She nodded as glasses and eyebrows were raised, ignoring their muted cheers.

The place brought back too many cringeworthy memories.

During her first few months at Becke House, Hawkins’ commanding officer had dragged her here most nights after work. Initially she’d been too polite to voice her disgust at its grime-engrained carpets and smoke-infused paint; the sickly blue-painted bar, or the sexist cliché of a landlord, unaware that the relentless stream of lewd jokes and double Jack Daniels thrust upon her were the DI’s attempt at seduction.

In a way, it was funny. Hawkins had expected her first on-duty confrontation to be with a tooled-up youth.

Not with her boss.

Yet weeks of subtly detaching the same hairy-backed hand from your knee without being able to recoil was enough to irk any woman. As a result, her eventual reaction had been forceful and impulsive. Dousing your boss with whisky and Coke in front of several colleagues, while applying a lock hard enough to dislocate his wrist from his arse-groping hand, wasn’t a career-focused move, and she had braced for some kind of professional backlash.

But it never came.

And the hairy fingers hadn’t needed removing again after that.

The three detectives skirted the bar and ducked a beam lined with crooked pictures of birds, passing into the back room, where the hubbub of the main bar subsided, and the smell of lightly brûléed pub food filled the air. Hawkins crossed the floor, realizing that she hadn’t considered eating since lunchtime, and now the adrenalin from events at the church had fully left her system, she found herself suddenly ravenous.

Frank and Aaron looked up from pints of cloudy brown fluid as their three colleagues arrived at their table.

Hawkins noted mild panic in Aaron’s expression, nonchalance in Frank’s. ‘You two on strike?’

‘What?’ Frank leaned back in his seat.

‘We’ve been trying to contact you for over an hour.’

Frank fished his phone out of his coat and looked at the screen, where various missed calls were clearly listed.

He shrugged. ‘Guess it’s a bit loud in here, like.’

‘As for you,’ she looked at Aaron, producing the sergeant’s phone, ‘this isn’t much good on your desk.’

Aaron patted himself down needlessly. ‘Sorry, chief. Thought I had it on me.’

‘Never mind.’ She handed it to him, sliding into their booth, waving Chris and Amala into adjacent chairs. ‘At least we found you.’

She was about to initiate discussion when a pub worker dressed from head to toe in black appeared at the table, hefting two plates. ‘Who’s got the cod?’

‘Over here.’ Aaron raised a hand.