She watched him scanning the phone, absorbing the details, not noticing her gradually sagging expression. She couldn’t compete with the latest twist in a murder case. She couldn’t compete with Prisha Roy, either. He looked at his watch, and she saw him calculating.

‘You’re going over to see that woman now, aren’t you?’

He looked up at her, surprised by the wounded tone. His eyes softened as he gazed at her. ‘No, Sam. She’s in custody. I’ll go tomorrow morning. I’ve got a few things to ask her. A night in the cells might take the edge off her arrogance.’

‘So what do I do to take the edge off yours?’ She stood up, grabbed her coat and headed for the door.

‘What did I do?’ he asked, but she was no longer there to answer him.

It was midnight when Kirsty got back from an evening at the pub after a couple of good pints with her new colleagues at CSI. Already the recruits were revelling in stomach-turning anecdotes they had heard about dead bodies, maggot infested, stinking or turning to slime. It was no coincidence that these thoughts returned to her as she opened her front door. The flat was cold and felt damp, the carpet threadbare. When she sat on the loo she noticed moisture running down the inside of the bathroom window, and black mould on the inside of the window frames. The perils of renting.

She had just flushed when over the rush of water, she heard the phone trilling. She hurried to the mobile, thinking it must be something important.

‘Hello, my lovely one.’

‘Oh it’s you,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d told you—’

‘My dear Kirsty, I know you want me to call you. I know you need the money. Now listen to what I want you to do. It concerns a Detective Chief Inspector Gillard, whom I believe you know. He is becoming quite an irritant.’

She listened frozen in horror to what she was being asked to do. He hadn’t finished when she cut the call and turned off her phone. There was absolutely no way she would do that. No way at all. She knew she had to report this conversation. But then she realised she could not. He knew, that’s why he’d risked telling her. What had happened those years ago now made it impossible for her to say a word. She knew she wouldn’t get a wink of sleep now. She lay on the bed and reached for her drawer, for a familiar comfort.

Once again the image of a dead body flooded back. Lying in the snow. But this time it had a familiar male face. DCI Craig Gillard.

Chapter 11

Saturday

Gillard arrived at Hatfield Police Station before eight o’clock in the morning, just as Prisha Roy was being given police bail. The email from Hertfordshire Police said she had been clocked by a camera doing 109 miles per hour on a dual carriageway where the limit was 50. The distinctive black Porsche Cayenne was then spotted by a mobile patrol at 8.45 p.m. and followed for a number of miles, during which it exceeded sixty in a residential area, before being brought to a halt just outside Harpenden. She refused a breathalyser on the spot, and was arrested and taken into custody. She then refused to give a urine sample.