He checks in vain for a pulse at her wrist. Leaning forward, he breathes into her mouth. Her lips are cold. Deathly. He throws back his head in a howl, a wounded roar at the sea. Who did this to her? His Kate? The love of his life. He looks down at her broken body again. It’s OK. He can do this. No one else can save her. He starts to compress her chest, desperately trying to remember the first-aid course he attended in the village hall, something about the rhythm of ‘Staying Alive’. Kate loves the Bee Gees, used to dance around the boat to it when he was trying to write. She dived off the bow once when he’d had enough and had started to chase her. He glances up at the clifftop. Something awful must have happened up there to make her jump. After thirty compressions, he breathes into her mouth again: one, two, three.

Kate starts to cough, throwing up chestfuls of seawater.

‘Oh, thank God,’ Jake says, shaking with relief as his heart soars. The tears return. He rolls Kate onto her side and thumps her back as she’s sick again.

‘Ow,’ she moans. And then they’re both crying and he’s cradling her in his arms as he scans the wide empty sea.

Five minutes later, Jake has got the engine going again and he’s heading back across the bay, getting them as far away as possible from the house. No one has appeared again on the cliffs, but he’s not taking any chances. Kate is sitting in the bottom of the boat, out of the wind, wearing his jacket. And he is standing at the stern, steering a steady course for the shore as a coastguard rescue helicopter hoves into view.

111

Silas

Silas and Strover watch from a doorway across the street as the black cab slows outside Rob’s apartment in Nile Street. Silas has arranged for backup and Armed Response officers are in position at either end of the street, ready to assist in the arrest if he needs help, but he’s still nervous. NABIS has just confirmed that the bullet that killed Dr Varma matches those fired in Cornwall and Thailand. And the man who pulled the trigger is still on the loose.

Silas has a weird feeling when he sees the couple step out of the cab. He knows it’s not Kate, but he still does a double-take. And he now knows who the man is. The fingerprint match from Thailand with Gilmour Martin was the final piece of the puzzle. In consultation with the Met’s SIO, Silas requested Air Traffic Control to monitor the man’s earlier helicopter flight from Swindon to London, and two unmarked cars from the Met’s Specialist Crime and Operations Branch tracked the taxi journey from Battersea Heliport to Nile Street, considered the safest place to make an arrest.