She starts walking again, and as she goes into the incident room, a bespectacled guy stops her.

‘You’re working with Butler, yeah?’ he stutters nervously at the floor.

Freya nods and he thrusts an evidence bag in her hand, laptop inside. ‘Greg told me to bring you this. Password on the front,’ he mumbles, and scuttles off.

She carries it to Robin and plonks it on the desk.

‘You’ve scared the techies so much they won’t even talk to you now,’ she says.

Robin looks at the laptop, then back to the door. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he grumbles. He starts pulling at the sticky top of the evidence bag, as she sits down. They set up the laptop in front of them.

‘Was Watts helpful?’ Robin asks, clicking and logging on using the password hastily scrawled in biro on the plastic.

‘Yes, but not what we thought. DV, but her abusing him.’

Robin looks up, surprised. ‘She was beating him up?’ he asks. ‘Did he ever tell you?’

She shakes her head.

‘That’s not unusual,’ Robin says, softly. ‘Many victims don’t report the abuse.’

She knows he’s trying to let her off the hook, and she appreciates his efforts. But she still feels shit. ‘I’m police, we’re trained to recognise this stuff.’

‘But we expect to see men abusing women. When it’s the other way round it’s not so easy to spot. Was there anything in his medical records?’

She turns and looks, scrolling down, eyes flicking through the many lines of text. ‘Broken ribs in 2015, fractured wrist in 2019.’ She looks up. ‘I remember that one. He said he’d slipped on ice in his driveway. You think that was her?’

Robin lets out a long breath of air. ‘We’ll never know.’ He frowns apologetically, then goes back to the computer. ‘Oh, see, this is odd,’ he says, pointing at the screen.

Freya looks. It’s Jonathan’s inbox, rows and rows of emails. Robin scrolls down, until the line of bold abruptly stops.

‘That’s where the read emails end, and here are the new ones,’ he says, cursor hovering over the subject headers. They all say things like Risk Assessment and Contract 4896.4, all boring stuff Freya assumes is related to his work. She looks at the dates.

‘So he hadn’t read any emails since Friday at four,’ she says. ‘That’s when he met me.’

‘And nothing Monday, when apparently he was working from home,’ Robin adds.

They carry on looking at the computer in silence. Freya watches as Robin loads up Jonathan’s work diary. No meetings on that Monday, so no one would have noticed his absence. Nothing in sent messages.

‘What does his car telemetry say he was doing?’ Robin asks.

Freya scoots across to her computer and opens the file. ‘Nothing,’ she confirms, ‘until the driver’s door opens at 16:47, then closes again.’