And then he is sliding off her, onto the floor, the thin end of the hammer sticking in his crown like a hatchet into a tree stump.

Roisin McAvoy looks down at the man as he fits and squirms on the floor, his feet spasming, one eye turned inward, his teeth mashing his tongue. She peers closer, in recognition. Sees a man she recognizes. Sees the man who killed Eva Jayne.

She pulls the hammer from his head. Hits him again.

Pharaoh hauls herself upright, wiping the blood from her eyes. Spits. Reaches up and feels Roisin’s hand close around hers.

‘Trish?’ she asks, quietly. ‘Trish, did he hurt you …?’

Pharaoh massages her throat. Spits the taste of the killer’s blood. Cocks her head and manages a little smile. She can hear sirens. She rubs the back of her head. Her fingers come away wet.

‘Oh,’ she says, as her fingertips trace the ugly wound. And then the world is a photograph, ripping down the middle, quartering, disintegrating, turning to fragments and haphazard, monochrome confetti.

A silhouette, suddenly. Red against black; a shape, a feeling; a face that forms in the flicker and dance of some distant flame.

‘Oh, Hec …’

And then there is nothing but the dark.

EPILOGUE

Castle Hill Hospital, Cottingham

‘So,’ says Pharaoh, popping a grape into her mouth and biting down hard. ‘What can we all learn from this experience?’

She’s sitting up in bed, regal and as elegant as somebody can be in a Primark nightie, and with a bandage around their half shaved skull.

There comes a muttering from the far end of the snug little room, on the first floor of Cottingham’s Castle Hill Hospital.

‘Sorry, Andy?’ asks Pharaoh, cupping her ear theatrically.

‘Communication is key,’ he replies, looking bashful.

‘Excellent,’ says Pharaoh, and chomps down on another grape. ‘That, and always be nice to lifeboatmen. No matter how much you want to laugh, you are never to so much as raise a smile at the word “coxswain”.’

McAvoy, standing sentry by the door, can’t find it in him to speak. He just keeps staring at her; trying to catch her eye, hoping to see some kind of truth written on her ice-blue irises. She seems unchanged by any of it. Woke up from cranial surgery and didn’t even have to ask what had happened or where she was. She knows who she is. Knows herself all the way through. There had been something of a rumpus when she discovered the surgeons had shaved her head and that she’d swallowed her false tooth when she collapsed, but she managed to see the funny side. Told the nurses she had always known that getting the cheap denture would come back and bite her in the arse.

Her children were the first to be allowed to see her. In their company, she had no reason to put on an act. Just held them, and wept, and then got back to the business of getting well.