Porter felt disappointed and elated at the same time. On one hand he desperately needed the help she could give him. He wanted to be out there chasing down his man, but at the same time, the thought that she could be sat up in bed talking in the next forty-eight hours gave him hope.

Rose continued with his diagnosis. ‘There’s a chance with head trauma that her memory of the event may be fuzzy, or even not there at all. She also has a depressed fracture of the cheekbone and orbital socket. She’ll most likely need surgery for that, but that’s relatively straightforward and can wait until the swelling has subsided. Has anyone contacted her family?’

Porter nodded. ‘Her parents are on their way back from a holiday in Spain. They should be here first thing in the morning.’ He glanced over Rose’s shoulder and saw Anderson and Whittaker walking towards them, carrying cups of canteen coffee. Rose made his excuses and left to carry on his rounds, nodding to the other two detectives as they joined Porter and Styles. They all stared through the window as Porter summarised the doctor’s comments for them.

When he finished, none of them spoke for a moment. Through the glass, the muted ping of the ECG echoed on endless repeat, punctuating the background hum of the ward. Porter felt an uncomfortable dose of déjà vu wash over him. The machine Holly had been hooked up to had kept the same rhythm, all the way to the end. The same sense of irony struck him now as it had then, that the very noise that signified a heartbeat, and confirmed life itself, could also be a countdown to the inevitable, depending on whether you were glass half empty or half full.

‘This is so fucked up,’ muttered Anderson. ‘They didn’t have this coming, either of them.’

His sympathy clearly didn’t extend to Carter. Porter glanced at him and saw a thin veil of pink overlaying the white of his pupils; had he been crying?

‘What’s our play, guv?’ asked Whittaker.

Porter tore his eyes away from Anderson and rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. All the tension of the day seemed crammed into a spot just above the base of his skull that throbbed with all the signs of a legendary headache to follow.

‘Our play …’ His voice tailed off as his mind teemed with a hundred unanswered questions. ‘Our play is we hit these bastards with everything we’ve got.’ But his words rang hollow in his own ears. The fact that they had released Bolton and Stenner told him what they had wasn’t enough. He saw that reflected in the eyes of the three men looking back at him.