Three tubes, two fat and corrugated and one thin and smooth, snaked over the side of the bed like tentacles, and were connected to another tube, which in turn was connected to his nose and throat. The doctor had told me that the puncture in his trachea meant that he could only breathe through a ventilator. And the doctor was right – I didn’t really understand what that meant until I saw him and heard him. The ventilator made every single breath Piggy took sound like a small war.

His neck was swathed in bandages which made him look like a relic from an Egyptian tomb, or as if someone had tried to decapitate him. There was no blood.

‘Detective Wolfe,’ a voice said, and only now did I see Ben King sitting on the far side of the room, hunched up in the solitary chair. ‘I want to thank you for saving Guy’s life.’

His voice was very soft, and although there was no chance of us waking the man in the bed, I responded in the same hushed tones.

‘I don’t deserve any credit for that,’ I said. ‘Thank DCI Mallory. He stopped him bleeding to death.’

‘Of course. And I will thank him personally. Have you any leads?’

‘No.’ I hesitated for a moment. ‘But we think he saw a face. We think he can identify whoever attacked him. And we believe he will. When he wakes.’

‘When he wakes,’ Ben King said. ‘Then let’s hope he wakes soon.’

He stood up in the darkness and I thought he was leaving. But he just wanted to shake my hand. There were tears in his eyes as he held my gaze.

‘This has to end,’ he said. ‘These senseless murders. This unspeakable violence.’

‘I want to end it,’ I said.

His eyes blazed at me in the twilight of the hospital room, and that was when I felt the full force of his personality, and I understood exactly why he had climbed so far so fast.

‘And I want what you want,’ he told me.

Chapter 16

16

I RECOGNISED HER as soon as I walked into MIR-1 the next morning.

She was alone in the room, having arrived even before Mallory, sitting on a desk, looking at a laptop that was open on a PDF of the Murder Investigation Manual.

She turned to look at me with the cool, steady gaze that I remembered from my first day in Homicide, up at the bank, Hugo Buck on the shag carpet with his throat opened up. It was the rebellious red hair that really gave her away. Everything else seemed different, because this time she was not in uniform.

‘DC Wolfe?’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you remember me. From the one-oh-one at ChinaCorps. TDC Edie Wren?’

‘I remember. You’re a trainee detective constable now? How did that happen?’