Sam shuddered at the mention of her old boyfriend Gary Harrison. ‘I think you frightened him off for good. I’d be more worried about Paddy, seeing as he’s ex-police. But who’s your favourite candidate?’

‘Ronnie has got to be my favourite. Today is the tenth anniversary of putting him away. He’ll be eligible for parole in a year. And it has to be said he’s a totally psychopathic bastard who would arrange something like this.’ He looked at the bag. ‘Did you bring my spare phone?’

She nodded and passed it to him. As her husband started tapping out numbers she realised that even now, an hour or two after a near-death experience, sitting half dressed in A&E, he wasn’t able to stop working. Even as he waited to see the neurologist to get the all clear, he was thinking ahead. She listened as he first spoke to Rob Townsend about fitness trackers, and after that asked to be passed on to Carl Hoskins.

‘Hi Carl. No, fine really, just a few bruises.’ He winked at Sam. ‘You know that car theft from Woking. Yeah, that’s right, the flying slipper. What was the plate on that olive green Mitsubishi Warrior?’ He waited while Hoskins checked. ‘Yeah, that’s the one. And it was driven by a bloke in a balaclava and a navy car coat with high-vis stripes on the sleeves.’ He laughed at some joke Hoskins had told him. ‘Yeah, well that same guy has just had a go at me.’

Chapter Eleven

The moment that DC Rainy Macintosh heard Gillard had been a road rage incident victim, she messaged Rob Townsend to see if any of the details of the threat message signed by IC had been traced. It took a while for the research intelligence officer to reply that the phone in question was a pay-as-you-go, and had been used only a few times.

She walked over to his desk. ‘Rob, I think cell site analysis on this would be useful. If someone is making threats, however vague, against the senior investigating officer, and someone has just tried to kill him with a car…’

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, not really looking up. ‘I’m really snowed under, I’ll get to it as soon as I can.’

Rainy felt exactly the same kind of disappointment she had got when working as a junior doctor. Not quite the exacting hours, perhaps, but a feeling of being under-appreciated, her judgement questioned because she was junior, and because she was a woman, a woman of size. It was that curious version of physics, where a woman was progressively less visible to the male gaze the larger she was. The police were, if anything, even more misogynistic than the medical profession, something that had come as an unwelcome shock to her.

She leaned forward and whispered in Townsend’s ear. ‘Laddie, when I was on A&E at 4.30 a.m. at the dog end of a sixteen-hour shift, I sewed up the torn scrotum of a young man who looked just like you.’