Her flat overlooked Mansell railway station and she watched as a commuter train heading to London pulled away from the platform. Without thinking, she began counting under her breath as it disappeared out of sight, knowing that when she reached fifty-six the train would pass the house where her sister, Lou, used to live.

Her nephew Jude had made her time it once – him on the phone in the back garden where the tracks ran parallel, talking to Maggie as she stood at her lounge window above the station. She’d suggested they use a stopwatch for accuracy but Jude wanted them to count themselves and it had amused her that, despite a world of technology at his disposal, he was old-fashioned in his methodology. It was like her, a detective constable, preferring face-to-face instead of emailing witnesses.

The memory induced a smile from Maggie, though it was tinged with sadness. Seven months had passed since she’d seen or spoken to Jude, same for his siblings, Scotty and Mae, and their mum, Lou. Less than a year but more than half, it already felt like a lifetime.

The technical term for the current status of their relationship was ‘estranged’, a word that rolled off Maggie’s tongue in a disconcertingly agreeable way when she said it out loud. But there was nothing pleasant about being as close as a person could possibly be to their family one day, the next being ‘as good as dead’ to them – as Lou had phrased it in a final, caustic text before cutting off contact completely.

In the crying-herself-to-sleep stage, Maggie wondered if it might be easier to think of her sister in the same way. Death allowed a person to grieve their loss, whereas estrangement meant being in perpetual limbo, with nothing but the hope things might resolve to hang on to. Now, seven months on, the hurt was levelling out largely due to the distraction of work and in particular the commendation she’d just received from the Chief Constable for her conduct on her last case as Family Liaison, the specialism she was trained for alongside being a detective with Mansell Force CID.

The second distraction stopping her from moping round the clock was gently snoring in her bed next door. Her mood began to lift as she pondered the noise Will Umpire made as he slept. It wasn’t earth-shatteringly loud, rather a gentle, rhythmic hum she had grown accustomed to and liked very much.

She checked the time. Twenty past seven. She should wake him so he could leave hers before the roads became clogged with commuters and school-run parents. Umpire was a DCI and headed up the Homicide and Major Enquiry Team (HMET) at their force’s area headquarters in Trenton, a town as far north in Buckinghamshire as Mansell was south. If the traffic was bad it could take him more than an hour to get there.