‘Thanks, love,’ he muttered. She didn’t acknowledge him. If the tea was a peace offering it seemed to fall short. They had had words. Michelle had seized on his obvious frustration when he had come home the previous day and took it as an opportunity to lecture him further about how he had returned to work too early and in the wrong department. She was worried about him. He knew that but he had reacted by getting angry, angry that she now saw him as someone who was fragile, someone who needed to talk about their fragility at the end of every shift. Once Joel had told her that she didn’t understand, an escalation was inevitable. It had sounded patronising. That was the last thing Joel wanted to be, especially now, when they were past the time when he had assured Michelle she would be able to start putting her own career back together.

Michelle worked in marketing. She was good at it too – like a whirlwind, to use the words of her boss. She quickly pushed her way upwards to run her own department but then she had fallen pregnant and the change in attitude towards her seemed to be overnight. Redundancy came just a few months later and Joel had never seen her so lost. Of course, she had bounced back but only as far as she could on part-time hours. Michelle was being held back, and Joel could sense her frustration; she was capable of so much more. The girls were older now and they had talked about Michelle returning to full-time work, something that would be possible around the shifts of a detective working regular hours. But Joel had known from the start that the hours for any policing role were a guideline at best and investigating murder was never going to fit into a regular shift pattern. Michelle had agreed to ‘see how it goes’, but the elephant in the room was already telling them both that Michelle was going to need to work round Joel more than ever.

When his phone rang it made him jump violently and he instantly looked over to where his wife had stopped what she was doing to stare back.

‘I just need …’ he muttered before sweeping the phone up. He paced through to the living room to get away from that stare. ‘DI Norris.’

‘Boss, sorry to call you up on a Sunday but I was given your name and told you would want to know.’ Joel didn’t recognise the voice but he did recognise a police officer demonstrating the ability to apologise while sounding unapologetic.

‘Don’t worry, how can I help?’

‘I’m Sergeant Taylor, the patrol sergeant covering Dover and Deal. We have a dead person, sir. A suicide, but there’s something out here that might be of interest to you. It might link to some job in Sittingbourne, a source handler shot dead? Does that mean something to you?’