It was startlingly similar to when he’d been suspended from work pending trial after Astrid’s false accusation. Then, in spite of the evidence she’d falsified, he was also innocent and he’d had the benefit of never doubting himself. This time he was treading on thinner ice. He might have played no active part in either Bruce Jenson or Gilroy Western’s deaths, but he was guilty of withholding relevant information from a police investigation and he certainly hadn’t answered Pax Graham’s questions fully. He did have a motive. No doubt about that.

The other difference between then and now was that his emails had been full of requests from his lawyers, approaches from the press and official notifications from Interpol about his employment status. This period of administrative leave was so unofficial that he’d literally just drifted quietly away from the police station without so much as a conversation with anyone and since then he’d heard nothing. No human resources standard letter. No ‘right to appeal the decision’ conversations. Not one single email from any other member of the team asking how he was. No one owed him anything, and to expect it was just self-pity and vanity. But still. He’d thought that if no one else, Max Tripp might have been in touch.

He walked through his bedroom, into the bathroom and climbed into the shower, washing away the sweat from hours of working out and the sense that he was so unclean no one wanted to be near him. Turning on a fan to freshen the air from the smell of perfume, he settled onto his bed to read, a dent still in his pillow where he’d apparently been too distracted to follow his usual routine and make his bed properly that morning. He tried to read, to distract his brain from the on-repeat image of Ava finding her slate in his bathroom cabinet.

Other things came flooding back, unbidden, unwanted, too. Ava being taken hostage by a madman. Astrid Borde, so obsessed that she’d followed him to Scotland, stalking him and inadvertently making herself the only witness to Ava’s abduction. Ava’s best friend, Natasha, who’d provided the vital missing link to where Ava was being held. A young woman dead, whose life might have been saved if they’d arrived just an hour earlier. Other victims whose lives had been forever changed, even though they’d survived. Astrid disappearing into his past and allowing him to build a future. And beyond all that, the question he still had no answer for: Why had he never returned Ava’s childhood prayer slate?