We separated and straightened our clothes. When my almost-lover opened the door, he pretended I was ill. That he’d had to look after me. The middle-aged man outside looked like he didn’t believe a word of it. I was almost grateful that he was there, though. It meant I could hurry away from the hot Italian without looking at him. It meant I could pretend not to have been frightened.

So when I came to find the two of you outside, you and April, I wasn’t walking out fresh from a nice conversation with Hannah. I was doing it with the taste of that man still on my tongue, and with a feeling between relief and regret that I’d run from him.

Does that make you re-evaluate everything about us, Niall? Does it make you look back and ask how you’d been so blind?

I really hope it does, darling, because I’m beginning to want nothing more than to hurt you.

21

The magistrates agreed to their request for a custody extension early on Sunday morning, which meant it was now up to the team to build enough evidence for a prosecution within a total of ninety-six hours. Jonah shut himself away in his office on his return from the court, equipped with supplies of coffee and three caramel digestives from O’Malley’s rapidly diminishing supplies.

Sundays were often a frustrating grind of a day, when businesses were closed to enquiries, Intelligence staff were largely at home, and labs did not process results. The unique value of being at CID on such a deadbeat day was that it allowed him downtime to reflect.

In this case, he had a strange collection of hard facts and large questions. The fact of Alex dying at the Reakes house, compared with the question of how and why. The fact of Louise Reakes moving the body outside, placed alongside uncertainty as to exactly what she had been covering up, and for whom.

He spent a while looking at a map of the area between Louise Reakes’s house and Blue Underground. Then he pulled out the printed photo of the knife from his paperwork. After a few minutes looking at it, he rose and asked his team to make their way into one of the meeting rooms.

He got his laptop set up and connected to the data projector, and then settled himself on the edge of the central table while the team trooped in. He waited until Hanson had closed the door behind them all before he said, ‘There seem to be three things all this hangs on, at the moment.’

He clicked on a Google Maps tab on his laptop, bringing up the London Road area. He zoomed out and manoeuvred it until they had Louise Reakes’s street visible to the top right.