She should have known people had figured it out. Somewhere inside she already did. Would she even tell Adrian, or let him think that no one was any the wiser? She had hoped to keep it quiet until they had figured out what kind of relationship this was, it still felt too early to go public. She didn’t want to keep secrets from him, but at the moment she had no idea how he would handle the news. He really wasn’t himself.

She leaned against the glass and crossed her arms. It was cold in the car, but she didn’t mind it that way. It occurred to her that maybe Walsh had started that difficult conversation to avoid talking to her for the rest of the journey. Was he that smart?

The catseyes on the motorway blinked past her like the tick of a clock, each around a second apart. She started to count in her head, mostly to stop herself from thinking about the dilemma she was faced with. Same shit, different day. The man or the job. She couldn’t have both.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Imogen knocked on the door to Adrian’s house, but there was no answer. She tried the spare key in the Yale lock, but the door wasn’t budging. Adrian must have double-locked the door and she didn’t have a key for the mortise lock. Maybe he thought she wouldn’t be back and he was elsewhere, with someone else. She pulled out her phone and called him.

‘Where are you?’ Imogen asked, wondering why he hadn’t answered the door.

‘Is that you outside?’ he whispered.

‘Yes, it’s me. Can you let me in, please?’ she said, although he rang off before she even got to the end of the sentence.

He appeared at the door a few moments later and unlocked the secondary lock before letting her inside and closing the door quickly behind her.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said.

‘We just got back from Shropshire and I wanted to see you.’

‘It’s three in the morning.’

‘Do you want me to leave?’ she said, annoyed at him for not being pleased to see her.

She could have gone straight home. The way Adrian had been behaving lately, she should have gone straight home.

‘No. No, of course not. Did you find anything?’

‘Nothing at all. Complete waste of time. I’m starving, have you got any food?’

‘I think there’s some bread in the kitchen. I could make you some toast.’

‘Thank you.’

She leaned forwards and kissed him – that flinch was there again, more pronounced than usual. She pushed it to one side and walked through to the kitchen.