She half walked, half ran up Stratford Road to Hall Green station. The train would be quicker than the car at this time of day, the ride itself only ten or so minutes and no parking at the other end. When the train arrived, it was packed with commuters, not a seat to be had if she’d wanted one. She stood in the vestibule, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She was doing it again, the exact same thing, taking matters into her own hands. Playing the teen ninja, ignoring the proper channels, trapped in a cycle of repetition like some character from Greek myth.

This was police work. A woman was dead, her killer – as far as Robin knew – not caught. So what was she doing? Hoping to prove them all wrong by catching him then riding off into the sunset on a beam of pure ego – See, I do have value? No, this was different. Both Tarryn and the girl herself had been emphatic: it couldn’t be police, she wouldn’t talk to them. It had to be someone on the outside.

Through Bordesley, the track ran on a viaduct, up among the rooftops of factories and offices and car showrooms wet with overnight rain, shining in the feeble early sun. Ahead she could see the last of Digbeth’s Victorian buildings, then the city centre, the dark spire of St Martin’s, the multi-storey car parks, Selfridges. Resilient, she thought, this city. It took what came and dealt with it. It evolved.

The Hall Green line came into Moor Street station but New Street was only minutes’ walk away. She swiped through the barriers and jogged towards the pedestrian crossing on the hill outside. It had been late afternoon when she’d met Lucy, the day almost gone, but as she came into Grand Central now, light was streaming through the soaring glass roof, almost too bright to look at. She hadn’t been wrong about that, she thought: yes, it was a shopping centre over a railway station but it was a cathedral, too, one just right for Birmingham – big, mercantile, non-denominational.

She found platform six and a line of chairs that she took to be the benches. It was three minutes to nine but she didn’t see anyone who appeared to be waiting or looking. She touched the photograph in her inside pocket. Pimp.

‘Is it Robin?’

A small blonde woman materialized in front of her. She looked shell-shocked, absent in the eyes, but her face was pretty, the eyes brown under the peak of a pale baseball cap, ponytail spilling from the notch at the back. She was twenty-three, Tarryn had told her, but in her pink polo neck and denim jacket, no make-up, she looked about fifteen. She was probably popular among the clientele who would have liked them younger, ideally, Robin thought. The idea made her chest hurt.

‘Do you want to sit?’