‘Hmm? And I wouldn’t mind following up on that potential DV. Maybe he liked his sex a bit experimental, a bit rough. Would fit with the way he was found.’

Freya reels. Domestic violence? Surely not. Not Jon. Butler fires instructions at her. Follow up with forensics from the hotel. Get a warrant for his medical records. Maybe speak to his friends, family, cover off all lines of enquiry and see if he was suicidal.

‘You think he might have done this deliberately?’ Freya stutters.

‘I don’t know, maybe.’ Butler’s head is down; he’s looking at the phone in his hand, typing numbers through the see-through plastic evidence bag. ‘Ah, here we go. Wife was right. We’re in.’

Freya sits down next to him and looks over his shoulder as he navigates the screen. She knows she needs to say something. Now. In mere seconds her superior officer is going to discover her name, her messages. He’s going to know she was having an affair with the victim. But her lips are dry; she can’t seem to open her mouth.

The office is noisy. Rows of desks and computers, detectives talking, shouting to each other across the room. She makes a small sound, trying to attract his attention but he doesn’t notice, too focused on the phone.

She watches as he clicks on WhatsApp, selecting the first message. She recognises the text, sent by her on Monday morning. Are you okay? she wrote, desperate to hear from him after a silent weekend. Call me. Xx

Butler scrolls back; other messages appear on the screen. Freya knows there will be nothing there about their get-together on Friday – they’d made those arrangements in person the week before. But the messages are revealing of their affair: some of them loving, others slightly dirty. Not much though, Freya knows. Gentle suggestions, nothing too lewd. Jon wouldn’t have liked that. But— her brain screams, look how he died!

‘So he was seeing someone on the side,’ Butler observes. ‘No name.’ He shows her the screen, and it’s a row of digits. Jon hadn’t entered the number in his contacts, he’d been that wary. ‘Let’s try it.’

Butler picks up the desk phone and looks from one to the other, carefully punching in the numbers. Freya knows where that phone is now. On silent. In her bag. A second mobile, given to her by Jon when they started seeing each other. ‘My own private line,’ he’d joked. Then more seriously, ‘Keep the voicemail anonymous. Never leave your name. I can’t have Amy finding out who you are.’

She watches as Butler listens. She knows it’ll be ringing, then cutting to voicemail. He puts the phone down, his face disappointed.

‘No message?’ she asks.

‘The answerphone was generic, no clue who this belongs to,’ he replies.