But she didn’t. She left the phone off and pushed it into her pocket instead. What was the point? The last time they had said there was nothing they could do, that the calls were ‘untraceable’. It had sounded like a fob-off at the time. The calls had started when the papers had run the story about Callie, her admission to hospital and how it was linked to a police investigation. They couldn’t name her, supposedly for her own protection, but they could make it damned obvious who they were writing about. The stories in the press had been hard. They were unavoidable, as were the trolls that liked to add their poisonous comments. Social media seemed to have a knack of bringing out the worst in people. Sharon knew why: it was because they could hide behind their screens, behind their fake names and fake profile pictures. These people were cowards looking for a reaction. She convinced herself that the calls were the same.

Sharon threw her phone straight onto the kitchen counter when she got inside but she didn’t take her eyes off it. This felt different. The timing, for one. She ran the phone call back through her mind. It made her shiver: One down, Sharon!

Was that the voice of the man who had killed her husband?

Maybe she should call the police.

She reached into her pocket for the card the nurse had given her before she had left her daughter’s bedside, the one the ‘nice police officer’ had asked her to pass over.

‘DI Joel Norris,’ she read aloud. ‘Let’s see if you’ll take me seriously.’

Chapter 41

‘Just so happens I have a body missing one of these.’ Joel rolled the tightly tied bag over with his pen. It came to a rest against the edge of the shower tray in the hotel room still booked in the name of Danny Evans. The movement worsened the smell and caused straw-coloured fluid to run down the inside of the clear plastic bag. The change of position also made it far clearer what the bag contained and Joel could now fix on a set of melancholic eyes that stared out above a jagged neck wound. The stark white of human bone stood out from the dark tones of clotted blood and black hair.

Joel looked up to where DS Rose had taken a step away too. He could hardly blame her. ‘The job just down the road from here, the body on the beach. The superintendent said that was coming to us too.’ She spoke with her hand hovering over her mouth.

‘It already did. And there I was worrying that it might be taking a back seat indefinitely. Looks like I’ll be working on that sooner than I thought, seeing as it appears to be linked.’ Joel straightened up, sniffed at his pen and put it back in his pocket.

‘How though?’ DS Rose said, still speaking through her fingers.