‘Shut up!’ Nikki never took her eyes off her, but desperately tried to control the heated temper that was boiling away inside. In her head she saw Hannah, just as she was when they hooked her up to the ventilator. She saw Lisa Jane Leonard handing her a cup of coffee and telling her how she had been chosen to model for a suncream advert. She saw the stunning photographs hanging on Kerry Anderson’s pod wall, then Mickey Smith’s battered face swam into view, and standing next to him was young Marcus Lee. She saw the doctor’s attending to Callum, the boy who got stabbed for the sake of a mask. And then she saw Joseph. And he filled her field of vision like an avenging angel.

By the book, Nikki! She has to go down!

Nikki felt a strange peacefulness enter the smelly storeroom, and swirl all around her. And in that stillness the bitterness and the hate began to fade slowly away.

How close had she just come to crossing the line?

Maybe she would never really know, but now she didn’t need to hear Joseph calling to her any more. There was only one way to deal with Frankie Doyle.

Nikki had overstepped the mark more times than she could ever remember. She’d threatened and intimidated drug dealers, she’d even given one or two a good thumping, but at heart she was a good copper. Her whole career had been about righting wrongs. Her conscience was not going to let her move into the same category as the scum that she hated so much.

‘Oi! Inspector Filth! I’m fucking talking to you!’

‘And I’m talking to you, Frankie. So shut up and listen.’ She marched right up to Doyle. ‘As Stephen Cox is now out of the picture, I am going to assume that you are the ringleader for this whole thing. The deaths, the abduction, the drug scam, everything. You will go down for life. There will be no successful appeal because no judge or jury in this land will see you for anything other than what you are, a vicious, evil and calculating killer. You won’t go to a secure hospital, because everything you did was deliberate. You will die alone, in prison. One way or another.’

For the first time, Doyle seemed to realize that she really was a scapegoat. Alone and in terrible danger. Her already pale face drained to the colour of wallpaper paste, and her eyes widened.

‘First, however, I’m going to caution you.’ Nikki quickly untied the ropes that bound her arms, then swiftly cuffed her wrists before the circulation returned. ‘Frances Doyle, I’m arresting you for the murder of Kerry Anderson. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence—’

‘For Christ’s sake! She ain’t dead! How can you accuse me of her fucking murder, when she ain’t dead?’