Dr Holt sat back after a moment, wiping his mouth with a shaking hand. Snowflakes whirled around us, settling on our cheeks and eyelashes, and on to Nick’s white, still face, a spread of blood flowering on his temple.

‘Oh God. I’ve killed him. I’ll lose my licence. I’ll be struck off.’

I don’t know what would have happened if it was just Dr Holt and me there. I was half-delirious with shock and cold, and all his instincts were to tell the truth, call the police. We might have got off, given that Nick had come out of nowhere on a dark road. But there was the dent I’d made in his forehead, and the pot lid still with his blood on it, and the car had swerved towards him, and the police could check for things like that. Maybe Dr Holt would, as he’d said, have been charged with dangerous driving. Lost his job. Lost everything. And me – I didn’t know what would have happened to me.

Either way, it didn’t happen like that. What happened was Nora – Eleanor – stepped forward, took Dr Holt by the arm.

‘Let’s go into the warmth,’ she said, nodding towards the house I’d just run out of. ‘Let’s go inside and talk about what to do.’

Alison

Alison

FEBRUARY – TWO MONTHS LATER

‘That was the wife on the phone. Suzi Matthews.’ Later that day, Tom leaned against Alison’s cubicle wall, causing it to buckle alarmingly. ‘She’s fine.’

Alison had been vaguely worried for the woman, who seemed to have disappeared, and who she knew had been heavily pregnant. ‘You tell her she’s a widow now?’

‘Nah. Said to come in. We’ll need her to formally identify him.’

When they’d gone to see their boss, DCI Claire Fisher, and tried to explain Alison’s hunch about the case, she had told them it was pretty much a certainty their corpse was Nick Thomas. His body had barely degraded at all under the snow, and he even conveniently had his wallet in his jeans pocket. Hit and run, body hidden in the ditch all this time. The story was clear to read.

All the same, there was still something about it that Alison didn’t like.

‘Where’s she been all this time?’

‘At her mum’s, she said, and then with a friend. They had some big row and Thomas stormed off. Texted to say he was leaving her, told his own mum the same. She’s got the messages to show us, says she hasn’t seen him since December.’

It was very neat. Little chance of finding the car that had hit Nick Thomas, so long afterwards, and an explanation for why no one had seen him all this time.

Alison thought for a moment. ‘And the link to the other two cases?’