‘No can do, Pat. Stop worrying. The man will be well out of the ball game tomorrow. A professional job like this takes planning. That’s what you pay for.’

‘Tomorrow it is then.’

He replaced the receiver and Willy walked in with the tray of coffee.

‘It’s tomorrow, Willy.’

He nodded and poured, adding a liberal amount of brandy. Then, sighing, he said, ‘I take it you’re not seeing Kate any more then?’

Kate drove home and let herself into her house. It was quiet. Too quiet. She went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. She sat at the table drinking it, still with her coat on. She could not take in the events of the last few hours. Everything had gone wrong. Terribly wrong.

Her job was on the line, she was finished with Patrick, everything she believed in was being trampled underfoot. She put her arms on the kitchen table and cried.

Last night she had slept with a murderer. A man who could pay money for the ending of another man’s life. The logical part of her brain told her that Patrick was settling the score for his daughter’s death in the only way he knew how. To him there was only black and white. You destroy something of mine, I destroy something of yours.

But inside herself, Kate knew this thinking went against the grain of her profession, her beliefs. Patrick Kelly still lived by the old adage: ‘An eye for an eye’. And that was wrong. It had to be wrong. Otherwise all she had instilled in her own child, all she had lived and worked for, counted for nothing.

Yet still a tiny nagging doubt burned into her. Supposing he was right?

If her child was murdered could she honestly say she could forgive? Would she be happy knowing the perpetrator of the deed was alive, locked up maybe but alive, while her child was dead? She remembered reading somewhere that the mother of one of Myra Hindley’s victims had even found out when Hindley’s mother had died and had turned up at the funeral to berate her.

As a mother herself, she could understand that feeling of hatred.

But murder?

She licked away the salt tears from her mouth.

Flowers was quite willing to use her association with Patrick Kelly for his own ends. He had dropped her from the case, and despite all her shouting about the DPP and the Lord Chief Justice she knew that she was finished. If she went to the papers it would cause a stink for a few days, but that would be all. Because Patrick Kelly would look like a hero to everyone. A vigilante who had taken the law into his own hands. Were there many men who would not sympathise with him?