Whenever you returned to a place, there were changes that let you know instinctively that someone else had been there, things that you didn’t even consciously register but which your brain took note of and compared to its equally subliminal record of your last visit. It could be big things, like an item of furniture having moved or tea cups having been rinsed out at the sink; more subtle changes, such as which folders were open on a desk, which newspapers were in the bin; maybe even right down to the water-level indicator on the kettle. Rather like when she had first returned to her flat on Victoria Road after having temporarily gone back to live with Mum, in the office that morning she had been confronted by a sense of absolute stasis, of nothing having changed.

Despite taking her on ostensibly to allay his workaholism, she knew that Jim still usually put in a few hours over most weekends. A quick look around showed her that the bin hadn’t been emptied and the most recent newspaper in it was Wednesday’s.

She looked at the files and paperwork on his desk while she waited for his computer to boot up. Jim logged everything by date and time, in keeping with decades of police work. Nothing had been added since Thursday. It was possible he hadn’t been back here since taking off and leaving her to complete the Croft follow in the West End.

She ran a file search by date on the PC. No files had been accessed more recently than Thursday morning. The cold, unambiguous certainty of the digital figures seemed to lock in her sense of dread.

Time passed slowly, every minute stretched out like an unceasingly extending corridor in a dream. The hollow feeling of restless worry refused to fade, nor did she have any means of distracting herself from her concerns. Without Jim to tell her what to do, there was nothing to occupy her, no autonomous tasks to get on with while she waited for the phone to ring or the sound of his feet on the stairs.

Her loneliness was exacerbated by the burden of being the only person who suspected that something might be wrong, but she knew she ought not to phone Jim’s family in case she worried them unnecessarily. Perhaps there was a simple explanation she had overlooked, some message that maybe hadn’t been passed on.

Her resolve on that score held out until about lunchtime, after a call from Harry Deacon at Galt Linklater. Jim hadn’t dropped in at eleven as arranged to discuss the details of a new subcontract they had for him. That was as concrete as the evidence from the PC. Galt Linklater was Jim’s biggest source of work, and no late-breaking lead, no silent surveillance or any other professional circumstance would cause him to blank a meeting there without getting in touch to say why.