Robin’s talking, but Freya can barely hear the words. Her superior officer. Her boss. This man who, like her, is a detective: something that stands for honesty, and upholding the law. And he’s talking to her about how he killed someone.

She touches the photograph in front of her. The woman that looks so much like Robin. The kids that were so similar to him, they could have been his.

Then she puts it down and takes Robin’s hands.

She knows that if he goes to prison, nobody is going to believe their theory about how Jonathan died. Nobody will care. He was a man with a liking for dodgy sex acts, and one day it got the better of him and he died. That’s how he’ll be remembered. And there’s no way she can tell anyone else about how she knows none of this was true, because she knew, loved, Jonathan intimately. She’ll lose her job, for sure.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I want you to find Jonathan’s killer.’

He stares at her.

‘You can do that,’ he says. ‘Look at how well you ran this investigation—’

‘No, no, I can’t. You know I can’t. Baker’s not giving you much longer to work the case. This is the only way we get justice for Jon. We find out who did it.’

‘But this…’ Robin points at the CCTV footage on the screen. ‘What will we do about this?’

Freya presses the eject button on the computer and the disc pops out. She takes it and puts it in the plastic box, shutting it firmly.

‘We make this disappear, Robin. I’ll hang onto it. Or you can. And I’ll write a report for Baker saying that I haven’t found anything new on the Stevens case. Steph’s doing the same.’ At the mention of Steph, Robin’s face clouds for a second, but he stays quiet. ‘I’ll write this report,’ she continues, ‘then get back on the investigation tomorrow. We’ll sort this.’

Robin’s still silent.

‘Please?’

He looks up at her, and then slowly nods. He takes the photo of his family from the table, carefully folds it again and replaces it in his wallet. Freya realises how tired he looks, hollows under his cheekbones, dark smudges under his eyes.

‘Okay then.’ Robin puts his hand on the disc on the table, looks at it for a moment, then pushes it across to her. ‘You keep this. We’ll find who killed Jonathan. And then you can decide what to do from there.’

They walk to her front door in silence, Jonathan’s laptop under Robin’s arm. Once they get there, Robin turns, as if to say something, then thinks better of it. She watches him walk away into the dark, rainy night.