And it should never have happened. They should have figured out – no, Tony Hill, forensic psychologist and offender profiler, he should have figured out what might happen. She had the resources at her command to have protected them. But she never had the chance to put those resources in place. It had never occurred to her that anyone could be so twisted. It should have occurred to Tony, though. Most of his professional career had been intertwined with people who were seriously twisted. She hoped he felt as gutted by their deaths as she did.

Two deaths on her hands would have been grounds enough for crippling guilt. But for Carol, there was more. One of her team had been maimed and blinded in a hideous booby trap that had been set for Carol and sprung by Chris Devine. Chris, a former sergeant in the Met, who had moved to Bradfield because she believed in what Carol was trying to do with her Major Incident Team, a raggle-taggle band of specialists who didn’t quite fit in for one reason or another but who had learned to work together and grown into a formidable outfit. And Chris at the heart of it, the most unlikely of mother figures holding them all together. Chris, whose career was now at an end and whose life had been wrecked beyond mending because of a simple act of helpfulness.

When Carol thought about Chris, she felt ashamed. She’d been so wrapped up in her own pain, she hadn’t paid the debt to friendship. Others had sat with Chris through her pain, talking to her, reading to her, playing music to her. Others had taken their turn supporting her through the first difficult steps towards regaining some of what she’d lost. Others had been there for her while Carol had busied herself elsewhere.

No doubt Tony would have some clever explanation for her inability to face Chris. But it wasn’t complicated. It was guilt, pure and simple. Chris’s fate was what had lain in store for Carol. She’d dodged the bullet. And as with Michael and Lucy, someone else had paid the price for her determination to see justice done.

Carol swung the sledgehammer through the gallery floorboards in a steady rhythm to accompany her thoughts. She’d paid heed to George Nicholas’s suggestion about the beam and she’d set a ladder against the gallery and attacked it from above. Strictly speaking, scaffolding would have been a better option, but that exceeded her DIY skills and she was determined to see this through herself, no matter how long it took. She was done with getting a man in to solve her problems for her. She paused for breath, chest heaving with the effort, sweat running down her back.