I opened my eyes a slit, and I turned over. I saw you as a shadow at first. A reassuring, humped silhouette. The window behind you was lit with the orange glow of the street lamp down the road. It wasn’t dawn yet.

That light confused me. I’ve never known you go to sleep with the curtains open. Not once in five years.

I remember I put a hand down to the mattress and then looked at it. I wasn’t quite sure whether I could see a darker mark on my palm, but it occurred to me quite suddenly that the wetness might be blood.

It didn’t shock me yet. Not even when I saw a … spread of it between us. It was a dark circle that stretched almost as far as the pillows and down to my knees.

And then I felt a creeping understanding. A realisation that there were none of the normal sounds of sleep coming from you. No breath. No familiar squeak high up in your nose. No gurgling stomach, which always seems to feature in the early hours.

I touched you on the shoulder. And for some stupid reason, I whispered at you instead of speaking properly. ‘Niall. Niall.’ Like it was possible to check you were OK without actually waking you up.

There were two things that hit me, and I don’t know which one came first. I can’t quite remember either one being clear before the other.

The first thing was that you were cold. Colder than the sheets. Colder than the feeling of my dress on my skin. A coldness that made your skin feel alien.

And the second thing was stranger. It was realising that you were strange. Your silhouette was too big. It was wider at the shoulder than you are. Perhaps thinner at the waist.

By the time I turned the light on and saw the bleached-white face of a stranger looking back at me, I already knew.

It wasn’t you. It wasn’t you.

1

The call reached Juliette Hanson at 6:46 a.m. It was an ice-cold first of March, early enough that there were still stars out beyond the gap in her badly fitted curtains, and cold enough for an overnight fall of snow to have frozen into bright, glittering crystals. It was also a Saturday, but Hanson was wide awake now. More awake than she’d been on any day this week.

Unidentified male found dead, the DCI had said. It was the most piercing of alarms. She was already swinging her feet out of bed as he went on to read the address.

She’d never heard of Saints Close, but the chief added that it was north-east of the city centre. She was likely to be on-scene before him.