Then he turned and walked out.

She watched him through the slatted blinds on her office windows as he crossed the operations room, her guts twisting when he reached the door to the main incident suite and disappeared through it without looking back.

She sat slowly, wondering if the lightness in her head was due to not having eaten for almost eight hours. Emotion welled inside her, but she fought it down, feeling the sickly burn of regret settle low in her stomach.

Don’t you dare fall apart.

She took a deep breath and pulled her shoulders back, opening her eyes just as the laptop’s display ignited again.

The communicator window had updated itself, now showing an image preview in the middle of the screen: a murky, low-quality image in black and white. Hawkins sat forwards, just picking out a figure against the dark background.

She clicked to enlarge the picture, able to make out a rural location. But her attention was drawn to the individual frozen mid-stride in the centre of frame; to its bulky winter coat and wellington boots.

A silhouette she recognized.

She was already reaching for her phone when Frank’s next message popped up.

Think this is your shooter.

28

Frank was with the techs.

Hawkins trudged wearily to the far end of Becke House, now largely deserted. She turned the final corner to find the door at the end of the hall shut, and groaned. Becke House’s resident tech-whisperers were a bunch of nerdy hermits, and visits to their darkened netherworld were invariably unpleasant, always putting Hawkins in mind of what it must be like to raid a teenager’s bedroom for contraband.

But the team’s assistance was an increasingly necessary part of police investigation, thanks to the constantly monitored nature of modern life. Being caught on camera several hundred times a day wasn’t a new phenomenon, but as the number of electric eyes increased, so did the challenge of sifting huge amounts of data, to extract and enhance the pivotal sequence that could make or break a case.

She reached the door, took a deep breath and went in.

Light from the corridor spilled into the murky office, overpowering the dim glow of anglepoise lamps mounted at regular intervals above various noticeboards, the only illumination inside the room except for the large computer monitors hanging from the ceiling and grouped in pairs on the three main workstations. Hawkins stepped inside, retrieving a heavy metal dustbin from under the nearest desk, and used it to prop open the door, in hope of letting some air into the bunker of an office.

From in front of the right-hand desk, now framed in the wedge of corridor light, Frank Todd twisted in his wheeled office chair. ‘Ah, boss. Glad you could make it at last.’