He pressed the bell. The chime took him by surprise. That had changed as well, and he tried not to read it as an omen.

He waited, until from somewhere inside he heard the sound of footsteps. The glass in the front door darkened, and then the door itself was opening wide.

‘Rob?’

Holly was wearing sweats, a faded T-shirt and a pair of gardening gloves. She looked more beautiful than Fleet had ever seen her.

‘Hello, Sprig.’

Holly served coffee in the back garden. It was one part of the house that was totally transformed. When Fleet had lived here, they’d never quite got around to tidying it up, save for mowing the lawn every couple of weeks in the summer, and repairing the fence at the rear of the plot. Holly, though, had gone to town. She’d put up a trellis and coaxed a clematis through the gaps, and tamed the rest of the plants into order – so much so that the garden appeared twice as wide as it once had. A little jasmine Fleet remembered Holly buying had graduated from its sad little plastic tub into a huge clay pot on one side of the patio, from which it had wallpapered the entire seating area.

‘You’ve been working hard,’ Fleet said admiringly.

Holly shaded her eyes against the low autumn sun. She looked around the garden, as though seeing it for the first time. ‘I have,’ she declared, before adding, with a little smile, ‘You see? I’m not totally helpless.’

Not for one moment had Fleet ever thought she was, but it was a clear reference to the discussion they’d had the last time they’d spoken to each other face-to-face, just before DS Bevan had interrupted them on the rooftop. They’d exchanged a handful of texts since, and Nicky had filled Holly in on everything that had happened with the case, but that still left the conversation she and Fleet had been having unfinished.

‘So apparently Roger’s taking early retirement,’ Fleet said.

‘Roger Burton?’ Holly was sitting on the chair nearest to Fleet, and she set her mug down on the little round table. ‘Really? I always figured he’d work into his grave.’

Something must have shown on Fleet’s face.

‘Oh, no. He isn’t—’

‘Cancer,’ said Fleet. ‘Stage three, apparently.’

‘No. Poor Roger! And poor Marian. And their kids … They must be, what? Eighteen and twenty?’

Holly had a better memory for such things than Fleet did, and he trusted that she was almost certainly right. But however old Roger’s kids were, it was a shitty thing for any family to have to deal with. Fleet’s own father had died of cancer when Fleet was just thirteen, and it was a battle he wouldn’t have wished on anybody. And while he and Burton may have had their quarrels, they’d also known each other for years.