‘I’ll mention it,’ Alice said.

‘What do you want for breakfast? I’ve got grapefruit, then maybe some eggs?’

‘I’ll stick to grapefruit,’ Alice said. ‘You don’t have to do all this. It’s sweet, but it’s not necessary.’

‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘But I’m quite hungry, so if I’m poaching some eggs for me, it’s easy enough to add a couple for you?’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘And thanks, Tom. Not just for breakfast. For everything.’

DI Wynne

Wynne stood by the window. DS Alexander was sitting on the couch. Alice Sark sat at the other end. Wynne was not sure she liked the fact that DS Alexander and Ms Sark were friends, but it was perhaps inevitable in a small town that a police officer would know a lot of people of their own age.

She held a copy of the letter. The original was with the forensics team, but they had not discovered anything of value. Whoever had handled it had done so carefully. They had left no trace.

It had been printed on a Canon printer, with standard ink. If they could find the printer there might be some way to link it to the letter, but that meant having a suspect whose printer they could examine.

She held the letter up.

‘What did you make of it, Ms Sark?’

‘That they were trying to make light of the Australian accent, which maybe meant it was real.’

‘The thought crossed my mind,’ Wynne said. ‘Anything else?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alice replied. ‘I don’t have much experience of this kind of thing. Is there something I should be noticing?’

‘I’m not sure, exactly.’ Wynne glanced at the letter. ‘But there’s something not quite right about the letter.’

‘Like what?’ Alice said.

‘The tone, maybe,’ Wynne said. ‘The threats to you – and to DS Alexander.’ She read from the letter. ‘“First, you don’t understand what you are messing with. You don’t want to irritate me. You don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t know what I’ll do.”’ She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t ring true. And then there’s the suggestion that the killer knows the details of your life because they know your husband is an engineer. It all feels – unnecessary.’

‘In what way?’ Alice said.

‘Well,’ DS Alexander said, ‘the killer chose to write to you so they could establish a channel of communication between them and us. Why now threaten you? They’ll simply need another channel.’

‘There’s too much focus on you,’ Wynne said. ‘These people are all about their own ego, about how they’re outwitting the authorities. This letter is about your role in this. It doesn’t ring true,’ she repeated.

‘Maybe not,’ Alice said. ‘But it’s still pretty damn frightening.’

‘Are you scared?’ DS Alexander said.