Naomi Widdowson might, or might not, have intended Patrick Rawson to die. But she certainly had no regrets that it had happened. Deborah Rawson had gone further than that. She had badly wanted a person’s death.

Fry knew there were individuals in prison right now, serving life sentences for murder, who were every bit as ordinary as these passers-by on the streets of Edendale. She’d met some of them, and talked with them. They were people who had found themselves in the wrong circumstances, people who had crossed the line.

She thought about what Angie had told her last night. In a smaller way, her sister had crossed a line at some time, too. But was it ever possible to cross back again?

COOPER DROPPED DAVID Headon and Keith Falconer back at the pub and bought them a drink for their time. He knew they’d enjoyed themselves, because it had been impossible to stop them talking all the way back to Edendale.

When he left them, Cooper drove home in the dark, remembering that there would be no Randy to welcome him, and never would be again. Was that why he had subconsciously been seeking something to distract himself, an excuse to avoid going home? It was the sort of thing that he suspected of Diane Fry. But it was definitely disheartening to think that the flat would be so dark and silent, with Randy lying in his grave.

He’d heard nothing from Fry since he left West Street, but he hoped for her sake that her interviews had led to a successful conclusion. His own interest in the Rawson enquiry had waned, and he wasn’t sure why. It was something to do with the ROC badge he’d found at Eden View, and with Michael Clay’s local connection. If Clay hadn’t been a member of the Edendale ROC post’s crew, why did he have the badge?

As he crossed the lights and turned into Welbeck Street, Cooper thought about the stories Headon and Falconer had been telling him about the 1960s and the start of the Cold War. It was hard for him to imagine what people had gone through in those strange times. The 1960s weren’t so far in the past, yet they might as well be a chapter in a history book, for all he could understand of the world those young ROC observers had lived in.

Come to think of it, he didn’t think it had even been covered in his Modern History lessons at school. The Cold War did get a mention, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War. But the preparations in Britain for life after a nuclear apocalypse? That had gone unremarked.

Yet for many thousands of ordinary people it had been something right at the forefront of their lives. Any day, any night, they could have heard that rising and falling wail of the siren, following an Attack Warning Red, and know that they had only four minutes. Four minutes – to do what? To find some way to live, and to decide the way they wanted to die.