Grace struggled to his feet, hurried across, then knelt and stared down at his friend’s face, Branson’s eyes blinking against the bright torchlight. He was bleeding from lacerations in several places and panting hard. ‘You’re safe, mate.’

Branson mustered a pained smile. ‘Yeah, but what about my threads? This suit – it’s brand new!’

Grace looked down at him, feeling a surge of relief flooding through him. ‘I think you’ve lost a button, mate. Get over it,’ he said, his face creasing into a smile.

110

Friday 13 September

Veins of pink streaked the pre-dawn sky through the windscreen as Roy Grace finally turned into his lane, the Ford bumping along the unmade track. Every muscle, tendon and ligament in his arms and upper body ached like hell, and his heart was heavy at what lay ahead, and behind him, and the terrible tragedy that had so nearly happened out there on the clifftop.

He honestly didn’t know how much longer he could have held on. Seconds at most. He shivered at the thought of what might have been.

Halting the car outside the cottage, he switched off the engine and just sat there for some moments, feeling the early morning breeze through his open window, too drained to even get out of the car.

In the distant farmyard, he faintly heard a cockerel crowing. The car clock showed 5.53 a.m.

He felt in turmoil. His dearest friend had so very nearly died. He wondered how, on top of the tragedy of Bruno, he could ever have lived with that. And he was shaking at the knowledge that he himself might not have been alive to see this dawn. To see Cleo and Noah and their unborn baby. He tried to blank that from his mind, but he couldn’t.

He’d insisted that a loudly protesting Glenn Branson be ambulanced to hospital for a check-up, while he waited at the scene for the Coastguard’s air-sea rescue helicopter to arrive. The crew radioed that in its searchlight they had seen the body of a man at the bottom of the cliffs. Presumably Niall Paternoster, but they wouldn’t be sure until after the body was recovered later in the morning by the lifeboat. Roy then phoned the control room to make the necessary arrangements for notifying the IOPC.

Rebecca Watkins had been lucky. She’d crashed through a tree and dense shrubbery onto a ledge twenty feet below the top of the cliff. Just a short distance to the right or left and she’d have missed it, joining Niall on an unsurvivable drop onto rocks at the bottom.

She was injured, just how badly Grace wouldn’t find out until sometime tomorrow. She’d sure been more fortunate than Niall – or maybe not completely so, depending on her injuries, and depending on what happened after she’d stood trial for murder. But that was for another day.

After the helicopter had winched her to safety, he’d gone back to HQ with the rest of the team for a quick debrief, where he learned that Eden had been arrested by a member of the Surveillance Team while attempting to flee, and was now detained at Brighton custody centre.