Mallison had said she was in the staff loo just before Lauren’s crisis, which is why she didn’t notice anything unusual happening in the bay—Mrs Tranter would have made quite a bit of noise when she panicked and pulled the babies with her into the bathroom. Sure enough, on the tape, the midwife left her post to go to the loo at 04.21, and was still absent from the frame at 04.29, when Lauren’s 999 call was made. Harper stared hard at the screen and wished she could hear what was happening, but there was no audio. The midwife did not return to her post for another six minutes, when she sat down and started typing again. One minute after that, at 04.37, Dave appeared in his security guard’s uniform, using the desk to brake as if he’d been running—so he did in fact make it there in about five minutes, if you allowed him a minute or two to be on the phone with dispatch. Dave almost head-butted Mallison as the momentum carried his top half forward, and then the two of them rushed towards bay three, disappearing out of the camera’s view, to get Lauren out of the bathroom where she’d locked herself before dialling for help. Harper was frustrated that the camera didn’t cover the bay. If it had, she could have seen exactly what happened in there between 04.15 and 04.29. That poor woman had seemed deeply traumatised by whatever it was.

But why was she so curious about what couldn’t be seen by the camera? After all, according to the nurse, Lauren’s real trauma had happened in the two days before: the birth, the haemorrhage, the lack of sleep. If Harper could have seen what was happening in the bay it would have been a film of a woman losing her mind. No one needed to see that.

But those shadows. She shivered. Something about this case didn’t feel right.

She took an investigative materials envelope and filled in the details on the front, before burning a copy of the CCTV footage and slipping the disk inside. She had to know what the shadows were, and Forensics would be able to tell her. Hesitating over the funding authorisation box, Harper looked over her shoulder to check no one was coming before she signed an expertly practised facsimile of DI Thrupp’s signature, adding his officer number.

Turning back to her screen she opened the email from Records with the mp3 recording of the 999 call Lauren had made from inside the bathroom. Harper hadn’t been able to get much out of Mrs Tranter at the hospital, and it wasn’t just because the woman had been medicated up to her eyeballs. Mrs Tranter was holding back, certainly. Maybe there was something Harper could learn from hearing exactly what Lauren had said to the emergency operator. Maybe the mp3 would stop the internal detector from twitching.

She didn’t like to call it a hunch. Hunch sounded clichéd, like something out of a bad detective novel. What she had was a keenly developed sense of intuition, one that wasn’t always based on hard evidence, but that she’d learned to trust over the years. Her bosses didn’t trust it, however: Harper’s intuition, while it sometimes resulted in arrests, never seemed to have a warrant, or a decent evidential paper trail. DI Thrupp was particularly sore about a recent case in which some evidence had been gathered in a less than orthodox fashion.