Within a week of being home, Jack couldn’t remember what life had been like without his baby girl, and having three generations of Warr women under the same roof felt like the way it was meant to be. He thought about Charlie every day but, the truth of it was that if Charlie were still alive, then he and Penny would be 200 miles away in Totnes. As Jack hung a little picture of Charlie on an unobtrusive corner of the nursery wall, he smiled. ‘Keep us right, eh, Dad.’

In the master bedroom, Maggie was sitting with Hannah on a V-pillow on her lap. Both of them were asleep. There was a milk-soaked pyjama top on the floor, along with three dirty babygrows and several wet muslin cloths. Two mugs of tea had been allowed to go cold on the bedside table alongside a blackening, half-eaten banana. Maggie’s right breast was out, and there was a streak of milk on Hannah’s cheek.

The scene was a strange mixture of blissful calm and utter chaos, and Jack felt certain he would never, ever tire of being a parent.

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

It wasn’t long before Jack was desperate to go back to work. And it wasn’t as if he was even doing a third of the parenting, as Maggie and Penny had everything in hand, but, even so, Jack quickly found himself yearning for the peace and sanity of a murder investigation.

Quite how one tiny baby could run rings around three adults was beyond him. He was a smart man. He could manipulate the sharpest of criminals into a confession, so why the hell couldn’t he convince a clean, fed, winded baby to go to bloody sleep at three in the morning?

But lack of sleep wasn’t the real problem: the truth was he found the endless routine tasks mind-numbingly boring. Jack hadn’t been surprised by anything for as long as he could remember.

He’d been given the job of wheeling Hannah around the neighbourhood in her pushchair, because Penny insisted that she needed a ‘daily dose of fresh air.’ Jack knew this was probably just a ploy to get him out of the house, so that she could do all of the noisy chores such as vacuuming, but he didn’t mind as it was his opportunity to breathe too. He’d sit on a bench in the park and check his emails because even though he wasn’t involved in any active case, he sometimes got cc’d into the round robins. This at least gave him a welcome sense of the outside world he so desperately missed, but Jack didn’t dare say anything to Maggie about being bored, for fear of upsetting her. He would have been surprised to hear what she and Penny were saying back at the house.