He put the phone down, absently. He didn’t like her saying that he should get to know his own son, but it was more than that. He was trying hard to remember the date, the time he had gone to the house to pick up some of his things. Yes, it must have been about the time he had moved into Jane’s . . .

Then it all came back to him; Steve not being there, Marianne a little tipsy . . . He knew it was madness, but when she wrapped herself round him the way she used to, teasing him, there had been no stopping . . . It could be. He knew her so well, that look . . . Or was she just trying to wind him up for some obscure reason? Was she jealous of Jane, angry that he was getting himself together? Could she be that small-minded? He tried to dismiss it, but the thought kept returning.

There were always so many things he should have said, things that should have been said months ago, but he never had. He never mentioned her new husband, who had once been his friend; the pain and humiliation of that betrayal were still too fresh. He found himself wishing that Jane would come home, and wondered how to tell her that his son might be coming to stay, not just for the odd weekend, but perhaps for weeks at a time.

In the Incident Room, Tennison was munching on a sandwich as her tired eyes searched the notice-board. The tickets for Shefford’s benefit night was selling well. Her eyes came to rest on Karen Howard’s face.

She heard a door bang and jumped, then got up to see if Otley had come back after his drink with Eastel. It might be a good time to attempt to iron out the ill feeling between them and to question him further about the other murder, the one “up north.” She went through to the room Otley shared with the two DIs, but there was only the night cleaner emptying the wastepaper baskets.

The only thing on Otley’s desk was a framed photograph of a rather austere-looking woman standing by a cherry tree, a white Yorkshire terrier at her feet. Tennison wondered if Otley had, as he said, put in for a transfer. She wiped the remains of her sandwich from her fingers and opened the top drawer.

There were a few photos of Shefford and his family, which made her feel guilty for snooping, but she continued. In the third drawer was a familiar file; Della Mornay’s Vice record . . . She knew her copy was on her desk; the cover was almost identical, but a bit more dog-eared and perhaps a shade darker.