He shifted position, edging halfway behind a bush in case the Kirklees men happened to look in his direction. He considered his options. He couldn’t very well go and give the librarian a poke now. But Sugden was most definitely a person of interest. He was one of the individuals that Joe had ordered background material on last night. Now Rita’s men also had him in their sights. Perhaps whatever they were looking for was in that file, which was now on the back seat of the car with the others, where they’d been all day.

Last night. Something about the library. It had been niggling him. What was it? The librarian? No, something else, something he hadn’t worked out, but which he knew was there, waiting for him, staring at him. He looked across at the building. It was where he’d met Chris. She’d been putting up a poster for Job Club. He got out his phone, found the photos of the posters. Last night? Just before his brain stopped working, he’d flicked through the photos. Job Club… Living with Bereavement… Building with Lego…

Living with Bereavement. What was it? There was something familiar about the poster, its layout, the unfussiness, so different from most of the others, with their jazzy fonts and excessive use of exclamation marks. It reminded him of her. Of Chris Saunders. He zoomed in, found the contact number, then grabbed his notebook, flicking through it clumsily with one hand until he came to the right page. It was her. The same number. Chris Saunders ran that group too: Living with Bereavement.

He leant on the wall, crushed by the sense of someone else’s suffering, and by the thought of his own weakness. To life’s setbacks his response had always been to wallow in self-pity. Yet here was a woman who gave her time to others, that they might suffer less. She’d lost someone, she must have done. And her response had been to help those who were suffering through their own grief.

‘Jesus, you poor woman.’

A frenzy of competing ideas raced through his mind, colliding with one another, refusing to let him form a cogent line of thought. Then the library’s doors opened again. Instinctively he pulled back, until he was further out of view. And there she was. He looked at his watch. Shit, he was supposed to ring her. What time did teachers knock off these days?

She emerged, stopped and took a couple of breaths, as if to steady herself. Her eyes were wide open, and there was an angularity to her body, her senses sharpened. She was guarded, on edge.