The trouble with that kind of poison was that it was addictive. It wasn’t his fault he’d been unable to get her out of his system. Two girlfriends had already walked out on him for still trying to contact her, and earlier today a girl he’d only been on three dates with had told him she didn’t feel comfortable about his attitude to his ex.

He’d told her to go fuck herself and climbed into the car. It was inevitable that he’d ended up driving towards Southampton and that bitch Juliette.

He’d made the trip several times recently. He’d been trying to work out whether Juliette was shagging someone. She’d changed phones, so he could no longer check her messages using the apps he’d installed on the old one. He had to be there in person to find out.

She’d definitely stayed away overnight multiple times in the last few months. His immediate assumption had been that she’d got together with the perfume-model cop she worked with. But having followed him home, he’d seen no sign of Juliette visiting.

It was only today that he’d put everything together and realised that the moody-looking bloke she’d sometimes walked to the pub with was now her boyfriend. It had sent a strange, sick electricity through him watching her turn to give him a peck on the lips in the station car park.

God, she was a bitch. She’d clearly never cared about him at all.

What she needed to learn was that she couldn’t do whatever she felt like and get away with it. He was going to get even.

And the thought made him smile.

Louise Reakes’s arrest ended up being quite a public event. The forensic team arrived at a little after five thirty, just as the sun was setting. Numerous families were at home, and others were able to gawp on their way out for the evening. Jonah had been aware of at least ten people stopping to watch as the squad car and scientific support van had pulled up behind him.

It had taken an hour and twenty-five minutes to procure a warrant for the search of the house. Which was, in fact, terrifically fast, while also feeling infuriatingly slow.

He was profoundly grateful that Hanson had acted so carefully. She must have been tempted to arrest Louise Reakes. She could have used it as a justification for searching the house immediately. The power to search on arrest was a grey area that had certainly been exploited that way in the past. But whole cases had sometimes collapsed in the courts as a result. A good barrister could argue that such searches had not been carried out legally, and some judges were inclined to agree.