On the weekend of the Jessie Ellen trip Claire Bingham was not officially on duty. She spent Saturday morning shopping, pushing Thomas in his buggy strung with carrier bags around a Heanor clogged with holidaymakers. She had expected, when she was pregnant, that Richard would do more of that sort of thing. It seemed so obvious that they had never discussed it. They were both working full-time, weren’t they? She earned as much as he did, probably more, especially as his colleagues seemed to pass on all the legal aid work to him these days. He knew she was ambitious, the first detective inspector to return to work after maternity leave in the Devon and Cornwall force. She had expected more of him. But he was as busy as she was and always seemed to bring work home. Then he pleaded domestic ignorance and incompetence.

“You do all that household stuff better than me,” he always said. “If you’re tired, don’t bother cooking. I’ll fetch a takeaway.”

It infuriated her that two intelligent people found it impossible to organise their lives more efficiently.

When she received the telephone call on Saturday night asking her to wait on the quay for the Jessie Ellen, she knew that she was second choice. She always was. The other duty inspector in her division had thought nothing would come of the emergency call and had suggested that the police station should try her.

“It’ll only be an accident,” he said. “Some drunken holidaymaker losing his footing and slipping into the water. Claire Bingham’s keen. Let her see to it. If she’s so bloody efficient about paperwork, let her fill in the forms.”

She knew her male colleague would have been contacted first when the coastguard informed the police station about the death at sea. He was approaching retirement and had begun to take things easy. He was always passing routine work on to her.

“I’m just a policeman after all,” he would say maliciously but without bitterness. “Not a graduate with a law degree. No accelerated promotion for me.”

She felt sometimes that the law degree, which in the beginning had seemed so valuable, was a disadvantage. So was her accent—BBC English, with a trace of Sloane Ranger learned at public school—and the fact that her husband was a defence solicitor. Her friends from school and university thought she was mad to have joined the force. The liberals among them saw the police as state-sponsored thugs, and the snobs considered policemen to be working class morons with dirty fingernails. Only Richard, doubtful at first, had stuck by her. Now she never told chance aquaintances what work she did.

It would have been impossible for her to explain to them that from the moment of joining the police she had felt completely at home. She was comfortable with the philosophy of service and discipline, and without the structure she would have felt insecure.