‘Nick told me to scratch through a towel. He had eczema as a boy and that’s what he did.’

Miller’s jaw muscles tightened. Anna realised she was stifling a yawn. ‘We can get a nurse to look at it.’

‘Do you think they tried to kill him?’ The abrupt shift of subject didn’t even make Miller flinch, as if she’d been awaiting the question. Her answer backed this up.

‘It’ll be money, just money they want. That line about your Nick paying his dues, well, perhaps they were simply referring to paying the ransom.’

There it was again, that reference to money. But at least Miller hadn’t accused Nick of complicity. Anna still wasn’t convinced this was someone’s get-rich-quick scheme, and the detective hadn’t really answered her question. And had no plans to: claiming she was going to oversee Nick’s move upstairs, Miller left the small staff kitchen, where Anna had been placed because she wasn’t allowed by Nick’s bedside while the doctors tended to him. When another uniform arrived to man the entrance, as if Anna needed observation like a patient, she shut the door on him. She ran water to splash her face and burning neck. She tidied the worktop where someone had spilled sugar and coffee granules. But no mundane activity would shift her mind from Josie, the terrible danger she must be in and her own helplessness, and the possibility that the kidnappers might have tried to kill Nick by overdose, so after that she sat to wait. She pulled out her phone and typed a name into Google.

The uniform knocked fifteen minutes later and let in DS Bennet, who said he would escort her to see Nick. Like Miller, he warned her that her husband might not have many answers for her. He also gave the same answer she’d sought a dozen times since leaving the police station: no news about Josie, but we’re following leads.

As she expected of patients in Intensive Care, Nick was connected to plastic and rubber and electricity, but she was buoyed to see him awake and sitting up in bed all by himself. And cleaned. A big laceration above his eye had already been stitched. She sat by his bed, with four police officers in the room and more uniforms outside. And an emergency medicine consultant, who she’d been told had refused to leave the police alone with Nick.

He was groggy still, but his eyes recognised her. Earlier he hadn’t seemed to – Who the hell are you? – but apparently he’d been screaming that line to all and sundry before and after his arrest. But not because he recognised no one, as she would soon learn.