She loaded up the laptop, half listening to Ben in the background. He was now talking to a second person at Niall Reakes’s pharmaceutical firm to ask them about the conference. She had the strong suspicion that they were being difficult from the way he was repeating his requests extremely politely. She’d never known him get angry with anyone. Not a witness, or a suspect, or a colleague. Though she often wondered whether he felt more underneath it all.

She pulled her headphones out of her desktop and plugged them into the laptop, hoping that she wasn’t about to get a telling-off from the cyber team for accessing the files before they’d had a look.

It took her a few tries to locate Alex’s personal videos. There was nothing in his documents, but eventually she thought to look for online storage folders and found a batch of them sitting in Dropbox. Ben had finished his call and started another by the time she’d loaded the most recent one up.

This video had been recorded the day he died, and Hanson took a long, steadying breath before pressing the play button.

Alex appeared in excessive close-up, having clearly just pressed the record button on the camera. His expression, even in that unplanned moment, was warm. Excited. Open.

Alex backed away until he was standing in the middle of his studio, and then, after a brief pause, he launched himself into a greeting.

‘This is Alex Plaskitt, your health and fitness coach, and today I’m looking at how to do a really great core-workout session. Now, a lot of people will use plank holds as their core training, without movement. What I want to show you today is taking that position and turning it dynamic, because your core will always be trained better when you move.’

He hunkered down onto the ground and put himself into an easy plank position, his feet on the floor and his body supported with enviably straight forearms.

‘Now, trying to hold a static plank for longer and longer to try and get better core is like weight training by holding a car over your head. It’s likely to cause injury, and it doesn’t really help. Like with weights, we need movement.’

Alex began to demonstrate a series of moves, all based on forward and side plank, and Hanson found herself taking mental notes. This was good stuff, which made her think again of what a stupid waste his death had been.

The clip ran smoothly for five minutes, and then Alex got up to turn off the camera. There was nothing in there about his life. Nothing to suggest why he might have ended up dead.