Now Suzanne looked him full in the face. She knew, of course, all about Gill and what had happened, although rarely mentioned it. Not since that session with the whisky in her office. Her eyes were tawny and flecked with gold. ‘It’s hardly your fault, is it? And presumably it won’t be forever – won’t she go to nursery soon?’

‘She could do. But it’s so expensive, and I just feel she should be around people who know her really well . . . I’m probably being over-protective but . . . you know . . .’

‘I do know,’ Suzanne said with sympathy. ‘For what it’s worth, I think you’re doing an amazing job.’

‘Really?’ Pat said, with genuine surprise. He constantly worried that his slightly haphazard methods and sudden disappearances home to troubleshoot the latest Bonnie crisis had marked him down as unreliable in her books. ‘That’s great to hear. Thank you. I’ll feel a lot better when I find this Philips kid, though.’

‘If anyone can, you can,’ she said. ‘Right, that’s enough blowing smoke up your arse. Another pint?’

He noticed that she had already finished her G&T.

‘It’s my round,’ he said, and got up, staggering very slightly. ‘Lovecats’ by The Cure came onto the jukebox and he grinned, quashing a fleeting notion that it was A Sign. Suzanne, he reminded himself, was not only his boss, but a married woman. And he was a married man – technically, at least. Waiting at the bar, he turned around to look at her, sitting with her back to him, engrossed in something on her phone. He liked the way her long blonde hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her narrow back.

When he came back, there was a glint in her eyes as she put her phone away and accepted her second G&T. ‘Now, Lennon. We could talk about what just happened and what the ramifications of it all are – but you know what? I really don’t want to. What I would really like to do is to sit here with you and get quite drunk. I think we’ve earned it. Tomorrow we’ll be back at the grindstone, and today was hell, but this evening is neither one nor the other.’

Patrick appraised her, his head on one side. God, he wished he didn’t have such a headache. He sensed that this was not an opportunity that would often present itself again.

‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘Are you sure everything is OK?’ He wanted to add ‘at home’, but it felt too personal.

She immediately changed the subject as though she hadn’t heard him – something she often did at work when someone said something she disliked. ‘Tell me about those,’ she commanded, reaching her forefinger towards his arms. The tip of her finger traced the swirl of the darkest of his tattoos, and her touch sent an electric shock straight to his groin.