With a rueful smile on her face, she walked across to a wooden bench with a faded brass plaque on it, sat down and wondered if she had done the right thing.

But there again, she had done rather a lot of quite radical things in the last few days, and most of them were still open to question.

The first thing she had done was to ring her landlord and give him a month’s notice on her grim little ‘bijou residence’ in the town. She had then driven out to Cloud Fen, taking with her a builder and a decorator, and told them that they had four weeks to get her old home liveable again. She knew it would mean a very different work schedule for her, living back out on the marsh, but she also knew it was time for changes.

In the last few days, she had done a lot of hard thinking.

The dark thoughts and intentions that she had harboured when in that small room with Frankie Doyle had scared her badly. If she had continued with her old crusade, if she had travelled much further down that ever-spiralling pathway of bitterness and revenge, without ever being forced to take a look at herself, what would she have done in that room?

Nikki shifted uncomfortably. It was the fact that she really didn’t know that had sparked off her new mission to make some big life choices, some big life changes. Before it was too late.

The second thing she had done was to champion the cause of Mickey Smith. There had been no way on God’s earth he could have gone back to his ‘family’, and Nikki had been certain that a foster home was not appropriate, considering what the child had gone through. So she had approached Archie Leonard. To an outsider it may have seemed like madness, but Nikki knew quite a lot of well-kept secrets about the Leonard family, and in particular one that involved Archie’s youngest son. Peter wasn’t a rogue, like most of his family. He had a home, a wife and a small business of his own. And the previous year, he had lost his only son, a boy with severe learning difficulties. The death had left a big aching chasm in the little family’s life, and she had no doubt that, given the chance, Mickey could go part of the way to healing it. And let’s face it, Mickey had been brought up rough, very rough. He was at home on the Carborough, and this was something that Peter understood, given his own background. Give Mickey to a nice, middle class family, and he’d be running riot in no time! So she’d arranged a month’s ‘holiday’ for him. It might not work, but it was worth a try, for Mickey’s sake.