With an audible rip, her partially severed scalp was savagely torn away from her head. Blinded by the blood in her eyes and paralysed by the shock of the assault, she was in no state to do anything about the knife as it came round again, this time to cut her throat.

Chapter 2

Detective Constable Bailey Morgan studied the cryptic crossword on the desk in front of her. Technically she was supposed to be doing work – checking through a pile of witness statements – but it was one of those days when time seemed to be moving with the consistency of treacle and police paperwork just wasn’t making it go any faster.

She glanced up, scanning the office to see if any of her colleagues had noticed what she was doing. It didn’t appear that any of them had. But then it was a Friday afternoon and the place was relatively deserted.

Anyone meeting her gaze would have found themselves looking into a pair of eyes the colour of cold ashes, the dark rings around them underscored by her pale complexion. They would probably have noticed that although her shoulder-length chestnut hair was tied up in a ponytail, there was a bit that she deliberately wore loose down over the left side of her face in a blatant, and not completely successful, attempt to conceal the thin white scar which ran from the top of her cheekbone down to the bottom of her jaw. They would hopefully at least have observed that she had good taste in clothes compared to the rest of her colleagues in the CID – whereas most of them, particularly the men, got their suits in Matalan, hers was a Donna Karan, cut to fit her lithe figure perfectly.

She fiddled absently with the lock of hair that hung down over the side of her face, curling it around her finger and letting it uncurl, as she was apt to do when she was lost in thought.

The good thing about cryptic crosswords was how completely they absorbed her. She could spend hours doing them, trying to untangle the mind-bending logic that went into their construction. And this one seemed to be doing the job very well. According to the clock on the wall, there were now just twenty-five minutes to go until she could officially knock off for the weekend and begin to concentrate on getting psyched up for the jiu-jitsu grading she was due to participate in the next day. If she passed, she’d move from green belt up to purple. For some people, moving up the belts was all about status, but for her the important thing was that it meant that she got to learn progressively more advanced and deadly ways of defending herself.

She curled her hair around her fingers and let it uncurl. She stared down at the cryptic crossword. There was one more word to fill in which she couldn’t get. Twelve across…

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