But she hadn’t. When Paula had stormed out, Carol had barely paused before she gave chase. She caught up with her before she was halfway to her car. It didn’t take much to persuade Paula back inside, where she gave Carol the kind of briefing that had been second nature when they worked together. The more she heard, the more Carol had been inflamed by the absurdity of what had happened to Tony. ‘Not all evidence is created equal,’ she’d protested. ‘More often than not, it’s coloured by its connections. You look at someone like Tony and your starting point is, this man didn’t kill two women. So how is it that the evidence seems to point towards him? You don’t just go, “Here’s a bit of evidence, it must be you.” That’s not how you get justice.’

And so of course she had to wade in. It wasn’t quite that simple, though. She couldn’t entirely escape the notion that she’d been played by Paula. She suspected the detective had motives that went beyond unpicking Fielding’s over-hasty decision. But if Paula thought she had set Carol on the road to reconciliation with Tony, she was in for a disappointment. This was about justice, pure and simple. The only sense in which it was about her and Tony was that their past history meant she knew him well enough to understand he wasn’t a killer. On a personal level, she wasn’t averse to the idea of him rotting in jail for something he didn’t do, since the law had no way to punish him for what he had done. But that would leave a killer at large, and that was unacceptable. She might not be a cop any longer but Carol understood what justice was about.

That was more than she could say for Bronwen Scott. Having to get into bed with Scott was almost as hard as having to stand up for Tony. For years, Scott had been a thorn in her side, exploiting every weakness in the law to help the guilty. In theory, Carol held fast to the idea that everyone deserved a defence, no matter what their crime. But its manifestation in practice made her want to weep. She hated Scott for the maxim the lawyer regularly delivered with an air of injured innocence – ‘Do your job, Detective. Then there would be no technicalities for me to exploit.’ She despised Scott’s cavalier ability to defend clients who were manifestly guilty. Most of all, she hated the way she felt when criminals walked free because Scott had played on sentiment and emotion in the teeth of evidence.