Hanson nodded. ‘Not the security light. Not yet. But the other two. I couldn’t prove it was him, though. I did put up two big, noticeable, completely fake CCTV cameras off Amazon, but he still took out the light. Looks like he stood at the end of the drive and threw rocks at it until it went.’

‘I’d say the odds are definitely in favour of it being him,’ Lightman said, drily. ‘You don’t generally go around pissing people off that much.’

‘Hey,’ she protested. ‘I work pretty hard at being annoying.’

‘Granted.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘I should probably say that this isn’t the first defamatory bullshit I’ve read from your ex.’

Hanson’s shaky sense of certainty took another dip. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A month after you joined, I got an email,’ he said. ‘An anonymous one. It tried to claim that you’d been dismissed from your last role for gross malpractice, but that Birmingham had hushed it up.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘I thought I should take it to the chief, and it turned out he’d had an email too.’

Hanson turned away from him, a reflexive instinct based on defence. She hadn’t thought she could feel any more humiliated by her ex-boyfriend. But, of course, Damian could always sink lower. Could twist the knife in that little bit further. She’d never met anyone with such a gift for hurting people.

‘I would have told you,’ Ben said, with a note of apology, ‘but the chief was convinced it would just stress you out, even if you knew he didn’t believe a bloody word of it. And I thought he was probably right.’

‘You’re sure he didn’t believe it?’ she asked. The thought of it made her cringe. This must have been, what, a week or two after she’d had a showdown with the DCI over his own behaviour in an investigation? What must he have thought of her?

‘Come on,’ Lightman said, with a grin. ‘He’s too smart for that. What he actually did was have a quiet word with our IT department, asking them to filter out any similar content and report it to him. He was hoping to catch the perpetrator out. And by the way, his immediate guess was a disgruntled ex, which was what I thought, too.’

There was a short pause, and then Ben said, ‘I guess the question is what we do about all this.’

The word ‘we’ made Hanson feel indescribably better.

‘You aren’t starting to wonder if Damian’s actually telling the truth?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice light. ‘Whether I am actually a deeply manipulative, deceptive psychopath who’s been stringing everyone along?’

Lightman out and out laughed at this. ‘Don’t give yourself airs, constable.’

‘Yes, sarge.’ Hanson found herself grinning, a genuine grin that almost broke into real laughter.