As the male disappeared and Lance also decided he’d had enough – some stories you paid too high a price to report on – a woman thrust her way through the sea of bodies, staring after the would-be Internet star. It was her body language that caught Lance’s attention first, a coiled spring, all tension and energy. Then he’d seen her face. Ava Turner, dressed to blend in, not a hint of police officer about her, was in pursuit. Not overtly, though. She didn’t want to be recognised.

Lance slipped his phone into his pocket and followed his instinct that the real story was slipping away behind him. He knew better than to call out to her. If a detective chief inspector was on the ground and working a scene in person, it was serious. Making contact with her now would inevitably blow her cover and, given what he knew about the amount of work stress she was under – not to mention her personal life – that would end badly.

He wondered where Callanach was as he trailed Ava at a distance. They’d had dinner together two nights earlier and Luc had opened up more than ever before. He’d explained about the disastrous evening with the woman ahead of him in the crowd and the traumatic events that had led him to make the mistake that might well cost him the woman he so obviously loved.

Lance had been able to see both sides and privately thought there might be something at work on more of a subconscious level. He’d been there himself. Whenever he’d stood at the threshold of something he’d really wanted in life, he’d been struck with a certainty that it was never destined to work out. A sort of pre-emptive destruction that avoided no end of disappointment.

Callanach, for all the damage he’d taken, had hit his all time low a couple of years ago and had been ready for his happily ever after. Ava Turner was more of an enigma. Finding the prayer slate Callanach had taken from her was, in the grand scheme of things and after a cooling-off period, a transgression that might have been forgiven, but only if you weren’t already waiting for things to go wrong. Or thinking you didn’t deserve happiness. Or that perhaps it was easier to deny yourself happiness at the outset than to have it for a while, only to lose it later on. That revelation was what Lance had taken away from Callanach’s disaster story. A woman who was protecting herself, by denying herself anything that might hurt her. She would be neither the first nor the last.