It made Jonah grin. This was clearly a new concern for O’Malley, who was well on the way to being a takeaway coffee addict. He noted that O’Malley’s hectic desk had three disposable cups sitting on it, their contents in various stages of moulding over.

He took a few minutes to retreat to his office and mull things over before he spoke to Niall Reakes. Though, in fact, when he sat down and woke his desktop, he found a note in O’Malley’s sloping scrawl asking him to call Janet McCullough. The call had clearly slipped his sergeant’s mind.

Their forensic scientist answered swiftly, and with clear enthusiasm.

‘I’ve talked to my guy about this knife of yours,’ she said. ‘And it’s actually pretty good news. Unless it’s a copy, which he doesn’t think it is, it’s a Ukrainian import. At the moment there’s only one firm in the UK that sells them.’

‘Wow, great work,’ Jonah said, not really surprised that McCullough had contacted him herself instead of just putting them in touch. It was very much her style to go beyond her brief. ‘Can you give me the name?’

‘It’s Steel and Silver, and they’re an online retailer with shops in Newcastle and London,’ McCullough told him. ‘Let’s hope they don’t sell so very many of them.’

‘Let’s hope they don’t,’ Jonah agreed.

18

Louise

You won’t want to read about this next part. I know you won’t. But it’s vital that you know. If I don’t explain the sheer, heart-twisting panic I felt when I woke up on Saturday morning, then you’ll never understand why I did what I did. Even now, I hate that the picture you have of me in your head is all wrong. All distorted.

I’ve told you how it was, when I found him there next to me. But I need you to understand, now, the awful, awful things I began to think. I imagined that Drunk Louise had seduced and then killed him, and that she’d done everything she could to make sure I suffered for it.

You’re probably thoroughly sick of all this talk of Her, aren’t you? By this point you must be railing against it, wanting to shout that it’s all me, and this artificial distancing of myself from Her is both childish and pathological.

But to say that is to misunderstand the nature of me and Her. It is to trivialise the dissociation that happens each and every time. I can see, now, that there is something more profound at work in my psychology than simple alcoholism. And, in part, I can see it more clearly because of another version of me that I met that morning.