‘I’m sorry.’ Her DCI glanced up at the clock on the wall; it was gone ten. ‘What are you still doing here?’

‘Just finishing off a few things,’ she said, eyes fixed on the empty desktop of her screen. She had just closed her documents and email, was shutting everything down. Sasha felt embarrassed at being alone in the office with him. Both of them had kept their relationship strictly professional in the last few weeks, and neither had spoken about the elephant in the room, Vaughn’s relationship with her sister.

‘No rest for the wicked.’ He pulled a chair over beside her desk and slumped into it. Rubbing his face with both hands, Vaughn stretched, his expanding bulk making the chair mechanism creak in complaint.

Sasha placed biros in the pen cup and tidied, to emphasise that she was about to leave, but he said, ‘Do you have time for a quick drink?’

‘I’ve got to get home,’ she told him, making a little face of regret. The likelihood was, things with Connie had got complicated already – she was probably giving him the run-around about something – and, really, Sasha didn’t want to get involved. As her computer powered down, she took her jacket off the back of her chair, picked up her bag and gave him an apologetic smile. ‘Another time, perhaps. See you next week, Vaughn.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You have a nice weekend.’

‘Don’t stay too late.’

‘Oh, I’m not staying.’ He pointed vaguely at his office. ‘I just came back to pick up a couple of things.’

She nodded, pretending to swallow the lie. She felt rotten about it – he had obviously come back to work to talk to her – but for the sake of her own mental well-being she wanted to stay out of his and Connie’s personal life. Sasha shuddered at the thought that one of these days Vaughn might even ask for her sister’s hand in marriage.

Victoria Avenue was busy as she drove home, and still pleasantly warm at the end of a long summer. Sasha enjoyed the late breeze in her face, hummed to a guilty bit of Boyzone on the radio, and was waiting for the lights to change at the junction with Queensway when she saw a couple walking on the other side of the road. The lights changed and she drove on slowly, making herself very unpopular with the impatient queue of cars behind her, because she couldn’t believe her eyes. Connie and Barry were walking hand in hand.

They were too far away for her to call to, heading towards the High Street, so she did a U-turn as soon as she was able and returned to the station.

Rushing into the darkened incident room, she saw Vaughn sitting in a pool of lamplight in his office.