‘I hope it’s more complex than that,’ Jonah said, ‘but I suspect you may be spot on.’

‘Can we arrest him?’ she asked. ‘Just to ruin his day?’

‘If you can think of any reasonable charges,’ Jonah replied, grinning.

Jonah was keen to talk to Step Conti, but given he was out in the New Forest, it made no sense for Hanson to drive there separately. They both went via the station and Jonah hovered while Hanson parked up. He fielded a brief reply from Jojo while he waited.

A major incident is a pretty long way to go to avoid getting shown up on a wall, Copper Sheens. But I suppose I’ll let you get away with it this once. J xx

Jonah couldn’t help laughing, as he so often did when communicating with Jojo. He sometimes caught himself in the middle of it all, wondering exactly how he had become so happy.

This wasn’t how any of his previous relationships had gone. Particularly not the slow splintering of his six-year relationship with Michelle. And it was strange remembering that he’d jeopardised a future with Jojo only four months ago, before their relationship had even begun.

He’d known how he felt about Jojo by then. He’d only been waiting for her to come back from Africa before trying to pursue anything with her. It should have been enough to make him resist anything else. But he had bumped into his ex-fiancée while very drunk, and it had been like being hit over the head with past regret. Michelle had been rolling drunk, too, and the result had been pretty inevitable.

The morning after, he’d thought he actually wanted Michelle back. That was the strangest bit. He’d spent the day after their liaison depressed that his ex-fiancée seemed uninterested.

He could only feel profoundly grateful, in retrospect, that Michelle hadn’t wanted to pick things up again. For once in his troubled romantic life, things had turned out for the best. And he knew enough to grab on to that lucky break with both hands and make the most of it.

Hanson took a moment, once in the car, to message Jason. She knew he’d been planning on working today, which meant they would both end up in CID at some point. A slight compensation for a ruined weekend.

Jason, as a detective inspector with one of Sheens’s fellow DCIs, generally worked a lot more independently than Hanson did. He was happiest playing lone investigator. And though he was obsessive about his work to the point where he sometimes seemed flat-out moody, he was a kind soul underneath it all.