Caroline was thankful she’d managed to get this far without any serious pressure to hand the case over to EMSOU, the East Midlands Special Operations Unit. She knew that time would come, so for now her priority was to get her investigation up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible. She was determined to show she was up to the task, and that her tiny CID unit was capable of handling more than the odd case of fraud or burglary.

There was one thing she couldn’t change, though. Resources. Rutland had by far the smallest police force in the country, by virtue of being the smallest ceremonial county and it enjoyed an historically low crime rate. Even with their tiny numbers, they were rarely swamped with work. It was usual for a murder investigation to consist of dozens of specially trained officers at EMSOU. So when such an event came along in Rutland, it was extraordinarily rare for it to be dealt with ‘in house’. That made Caroline even more determined to prove her worth.

Although she was a Detective Inspector, her day-to-day duties tended to cross over quite substantially with uniform. It was an odd setup, but one she’d come to respect and enjoy in her short time in the job. There was something safe in the mundanity of ensuring resources were deployed properly, setting and assessing key performance indicators or identifying and managing local threats. But she couldn’t deny it lacked the excitement and exhilaration of a murder case. And this would be her first since leaving the Met.

She’d always intended to take full control when — if — that first murder case crossed her desk. Although convention dictated handing it over to EMSOU, it was far from a written rule. It was more a recommendation for reasons of expediency, and because it was deemed impossible for her small team to deal with something that big. Caroline, though, knew that the size of a team rarely mattered. From her experience in the Met, bloated teams often moved more slowly. There was a certain diligence in smaller units — a sense of deep personal responsibility. Besides which, the decisive breakthrough in any case tended to come from a discovery made by one sharp-eyed officer, and was not usually dictated by the size of the team.

They’d all be working long hours. Annual leave would be a distant memory. But Caroline was determined to lead from the front. She needed to — even if the thought gave her a flicker of doubt and a twinge of nausea.