Reaching down, I slid my hands under his arms, removed his blindfold, and tried to hoist him to his feet. He was a dead weight. He moaned again, one of his eyes twitched open and he started trying to say my name. The more he tried to say it, the less coherent his speech became, until he gave up altogether. Blood had begun to clot inside his nose, thick and gummy, and it had dried to one side of his face, a streak of it, like the roots of a plant creeping out from the corner of his mouth.

I walked him over to the sofa.

He slumped sideways, his head hitting one of the cushions, and every part of him seemed to exhale, his whole body contracting as if every last breath had escaped. A second later, though, he shifted again, eyelids flickering, body tilting as he tried to get a sense of where I was in the room. I dropped to my haunches at his side, and after a second he zeroed in on me, his eyes glazed, and he said, ‘I’m sorry, Raker.’

‘It’s okay.’

He blinked.

‘Do you know what sedative Mills gave you?’

‘No,’ he managed, the noise like an expiration.

Even if he’d known, it wasn’t going to make much difference: the best thing he could do now was lie here and let it wear off. I went to the kitchen, filled a glass with water and then started searching through the cupboards for a first-aid kit. Even if I couldn’t do anything about the sedative, I could try to repair the damage to his face.

As I searched, I felt a moment of déjà vu, a second where Healy and I were in the farmhouse at Black Gale, after we’d hit the deer out on the road, and I’d been trying to find a first-aid kit for the cuts on his face. The thought of that, of being in the village, of being in the middle of a case that I didn’t want to let go of, sent a spike of anger through the centre of my chest. The anger was for Mills, for the people he worked for, the we he talked about when he baited me with the idea of going after Annabel – but as I looked at the empty wall, at the paper on the floor, I realized that wasn’t all of it.

I felt anger for Healy too.

I’d helped him start again – to construct a new life, however simple it might have been – because I’d believed, at the time, it was the right thing to do. But there hadn’t been many days since when – in my most unguarded moments – I hadn’t wondered if it might have been easier to let him destroy himself.

Because the lies I told for him had just cost me a case.