‘I mean, how many times do you need to be told, Robin? How could you be so high-handed? Doing all this – telling Becca we wouldn’t tell Valerie where she was? Who gave you the authority to make that decision?’

Robin had the sudden dizzying realization that she’d got it all wrong.

‘It isn’t for you to make that call – it’s my business, I hired you to work for me. I wanted to help you out. Actually, I wanted to help your mother.’

‘My mother?’

‘You had no right to do this. No right to go and find Tarryn without talking to me, and zero right to make promises to anyone about who we’d tell anything. Valerie’s the client here – my client – whether she’s in the wrong or not, whether you like it or not.’ She shook her head again. ‘I’m sorry, Robin, I am. You’re a good detective, I don’t question that, but this isn’t going to work.’

The light was on in the sitting room at Dunnington Road, too, but when she let herself in, no one was up, thank god, they’d just left it on for her. Dennis’s snore reached down the stairs, regular and gentle, the sleep of the righteous. She drank a glass of water at the kitchen sink then turned the light off and crept upstairs in the gloom.

‘Mum?’ Lennie muttered, shifting in the bed, but she was asleep again before Robin replied.

She undressed to her T-shirt then got in and pulled the duvet tight around her shoulders. As ever, the house was subtropical but as she’d left Maggie’s, she’d felt cold to her bones and she couldn’t get the chill off.

Fired. Again. Fired by Maggie.

A family friend. Who, by the sounds of it, only hired her in the first place because she wanted to do her mum a favour.

She remembered Luke’s snickering face at the car window. How the mighty have fallen. Getting fired by the Met was one thing but to be fired by a one-man band operating out of a shoebox over a hairdresser. Catching scroungers on the sick. No – she stopped herself. She couldn’t do that, however much she wanted to make herself feel better. Maggie’s business was good – she was good. And she’d given Robin a chance; she’d tried to help her.

Freshwater, Gid, Adrian, Samir, now Maggie – the list of people she’d alienated grew longer. All of them – well, no, three out of five – had tried to help her. And there were plenty of others, too, weren’t there, said a thin voice of self-knowledge: ex-colleagues, ex-friends, ex-boyfriends. Lennie’s dad.