It was one thing Jasmine forgetting that Jim was supposed to be waiting in to film Croft, but there was no way it would slip Jim’s mind. Unless his schedule had been overtaken by events, perhaps on another investigation, more important than this. Maybe that was it: there was a late-breaking development on whatever he’d been working on over the past few days and he had decided that the tape of Croft accepting the job would be good enough for Hayden-Murray.

Her mobile still gripped in her left hand, she speed-dialled Jim. The ringing tone pulsed in her ear for a few seconds, then stopped for a brief moment, just long enough for her to excitedly anticipate the sound of his voice. Unfortunately, the ringing tone resumed after its short pause, accompanied by the trilling of the office phone, which she was on her way to answer when she realised she would be talking to herself. Jim’s phone was on divert back to here.

He could be on a follow, she reasoned. A van surveillance could sometimes require silence. If the subject was walking past or out in his garden, you didn’t want him realising that the van with the tinted windows parked close by was actually occupied by a PI with a video camera. Had she seen the van parked outside on her way in? She couldn’t remember.

She walked out of the office and looked through the window in the back stairs. Jim’s van was sitting in its usual spot in the car park. Shit.

She returned to the office, where she was acutely conscious of its emptiness, its unaccustomed stillness. She began to deduce that this was what had unsettled her in the first place. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in here alone: she’d manned the phones a couple of times and been sent back to retrieve equipment or paperwork (possibly as a means of getting her out of the way for a couple of hours while Jim calmed himself or repaired the damage she had just done). The place hadn’t felt like this then, though. Something was different. She wasn’t simply conscious of being the only person here: she was subconsciously aware of being the only person who had been here in days.