Hurried, impatient, clumsy: she accidentally pinched the tip of his penis as she pulled him into her. It caused him to let out a little howl, but the bonus effect was that it retarded his ejaculation, taking him a long time to come. Good. She came quite quickly, but she didn’t want him to stop. She wanted him to keep fucking her, and she all but screamed at him to do so, liberated by the knowledge that the boys were at their grandparents’ overnight.

They both showered while they waited for the takeaway, eating it on their laps in front of Commando. They didn’t get to the end. Catherine was lying with her head rested on Drew’s chest, and sometime around Rae Dawn Chong’s rocket-launcher mishap, his hand moved to rest on her breast. She hadn’t put a bra back on, just a T-shirt, and as her nipple tightened and rose in response to his touch, she felt his penis do likewise through his shorts. She took him in her mouth for a while, then told him to fuck her again, right there on the couch, just because they could.

Catherine showered again, briefly, but it was long enough for Drew to be asleep by the time she made it to the bedroom. Giggling in the afterglow, he had remarked how ‘that must have cleared your head’ and predicted that she would be asleep in no time.

He was the one who went out like a light.

Catherine lay for a while in the darkness: calm, relaxed but her brain still alert. Drew was right about the first part: the reason she wasn’t sleeping was that her head was clear. Very clear.

She had been seeing things that weren’t there, distracted by trying to make connections between phantom elements, although in mitigation, she’d been given a few nudges towards doing that.

She had been drawn to Fallan by her anger and a long-burning hatred. She’d have put his face on the gunman no matter what car he pulled up in. Her powers of deduction, judgement and basic police sense had been bypassed by emotion, and now she could see that it was just plain daft that an accomplished hit man would do everything but wear a sign identifying himself, while firing a full magazine into a car only a few yards away without hitting either of the occupants.

Nobody was trying to kill her, but somebody was definitely trying to knock her off track. Somebody wanted her going after Fallan, not because they had it in for him, but because it would keep her eyes off her true target.