Adrian was shaken by what had happened. He had seen plenty of horrific cases in his time as a DS and he wondered if there would ever come a time when he wasn’t shocked by this kind of thing. But being upset was the right reaction. The moment you stopped being upset was the moment you should go and do something else. It’s normal to be afraid or angry. It’s normal to feel frustrated or powerless in some situations. You had to keep it inside, though. You had to stay strong, not just for yourself, but also for the people around you. One chink in the armour and all of your defences were compromised.

A nurse came in with a small basin and a cloth. She smiled uncomfortably at Adrian then gently wiped the woman’s face and hair, trying to soften the mud that had now dried on her skin and clumped together at her roots. They had already scraped under her fingernails and taken photographs of any abrasions or bruises. But legally they couldn’t take blood samples or test her DNA without consent and she would need to be awake for that. The nurse rinsed the cloth and dabbed at a cut across the woman’s eyebrow.

As he watched the nurse, Adrian remembered his mother, a fragment of time that they shared together. In a conscious effort to block out his father, Adrian’s mother had also disappeared into the back regions of Adrian’s memory, but it hadn’t worked and his father now became more prominent than ever.

The moment he thought of now was of his mother sitting with him at the kitchen table, remnants of a shattered plate on the floor as they played Connect 4. Adrian’s father had thrown the plate across the room and it had glanced off his mother’s temple before smashing against the terracotta floor tiles. She steadied herself against the counter and, in order to distract Adrian from the argument, she smoothed her skirt and suggested he run upstairs and get a game for them to play.

When he returned, she had a plaster over her eyebrow and it was as if nothing had happened. They played the game over and over until bedtime, presumably just to avoid any kind of conversation or acknowledgment of what had transpired. Until weeks later, that is, when there was a fragment of blue-and-white willow china lodged under the corner of the washing machine that his mother had missed. The rest of the memories of his mother then faded and reappeared with little clarity; she was an extra in his childhood with barely a speaking role.