‘It’s OK.’ Jason gave a brief shrug. ‘I’ll get there. Even if it means no arrests today.’ He straightened up and picked up his mug of tea. ‘How about you? Murder?’

‘Yup.’ She gulped some of the weak brew. ‘Stabbing.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Slow so far.’ She shrugged. ‘Not a lot of people hanging around residential areas in the early hours of the morning.’

She suddenly found herself thinking of Damian sitting in his car outside her house, watching her through the kitchen window, and she could feel a cold sweat sweeping over her. She tried to take another sip of tea, but the mug banged into her teeth, painfully.

‘Are you OK?’ Jason asked, reaching out to squeeze her arm. She glanced at him, seeing his concern. It occurred to her that she really could just tell him about all of this. Share it.

She couldn’t even explain why she’d resisted telling him in the first place. She justified it to herself that it was to avoid overshadowing their relationship. Though she knew it was more complicated than that, and tied up with shame for what she’d put up with. And the more she’d put off actually telling him, the harder it had become, until it seemed like a huge thing that she was hiding from him.

She teetered on the edge of just telling him everything, but it seemed the wrong time and place. So she put the tea down, quickly, and tried to smile.

‘Just a young guy,’ she said, ‘dying like that … He seemed really nice, from his YouTube account. Murders are shit, aren’t they?’

Visiting a suspect. That was all Hanson needed to think about. Not about the forty-five-minute journey to Winchester with Ben Lightman. Not about the awkwardness, or her confusion over their lost friendship. And definitely, definitely not about the night before she’d started seeing Jason, when she and Ben had gone to a bar. When he’d seemed for a very intense moment like he might tell her what was going on under the unruffled facade, and then had suddenly shut her out and left.

The first five minutes of the drive went past in absolute silence. There was nobody on a par with Ben for keeping quiet. In contrast, Hanson felt an increasing sense of pressure to say something.

She sighed without meaning to, and then tried to turn it into a yawn. And then, barely a minute later and with her gaze firmly fixed out of the window, she said, ‘I meant to ask about … your dad. Ages ago. I’m sorry for being rubbish.’

‘Oh.’ She thought she caught a good-natured shrug out of the corner of her eye. ‘You aren’t rubbish. There’s not much to say. He’s been in and out of hospital, and it’s been a bit … shit. There isn’t a lot anyone can do.’