To Andrea Walker, US editor extraordinaire. Your faith in me is wonderful, humbling and inspirational. And your team is as warm, smart and exciting as you are. I am so proud to be working with you.

To Beatrix McIntyre, Jennie Roman and the whole wonderful copy-editing team. You provide such smart, insightful comments and save me from huge embarrassment time after time.

To the wonderful rights team at Penguin, who have brought my books to a staggering number of countries across the world. I owe you so much.

To Tariq Joyce, who was there for that all-important conversation right at the beginning. The one that made me realise how this book would work, and that it really would work. Great writers give the best advice.

To Chris Haines, the policing mastermind I go to whenever I want to ask about how some aspect of the forces work. You are just fantastically patient and helpful. It’s so heartening to have you there, and I just hope I managed to ask all the right questions in order to avoid any unintentional errors. Any of those are obviously mine.

To David Stubbings and Sarah Preston, who I somehow (inexcusably) missed off my list of the fantastic Girton Players last time. Thank you for every minute of your time and support over huge numbers of plays.

To my fabulous family and partner, who are still the most incredibly supportive bunch. I hope you have the patience for it all with the next books, too.

To Colin Smith for all the cheerleading, support and epic procrastination. This book would genuinely have been written more quickly without you.

And to all the wonderful members of the crime-writing community I have got to know over the past three years, who are too numerous to name but who have been the most welcoming, fabulous and entertaining bunch. Who knows how such lovely people write such horrific things?

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Prologue

It was far warmer than any September afternoon had any right to be. At 4 p.m., it must have been almost thirty degrees in the garden of the Spread Eagle. Jonah checked on Milly as one of the waitresses deposited a pint of lager on the picnic table. She was soundly asleep under the pram’s parasol, soothed by the heat and background chatter.

Jonah lifted the glass of lager, intensely aware of the condensation under his hand and of the very slight breeze that slid across his arms. It was such a rare moment of peace and normality that he felt drunk on it, even before he’d started to sink the four per cent.

Six weeks of Milly had been life-changing. He’d worried, before the event, that the change would be too much for him. That, at fifty, he was too set in his ways to cope with the arrival of a baby, and too old to deal with the lack of sleep.