Imogen put a towel down on the passenger seat of her car before Adrian sat down. He had that look in his eye, that angry, determined look he got when he was well into a case and it wasn’t going their way. Whatever he had seen had obviously affected him; he seemed anxious and slightly haunted.

‘What happened? I only saw you a couple of hours ago,’ she asked.

‘That woman I found. She was completely fucked up, thrown away like rubbish. It was awful. I thought she was dead. She looked dead.’

‘You found her in time, though. You got her to the hospital.’

‘Who does that to another person? Sometimes I feel like we are swimming against the tide with this job, I really do. Every day it’s something else; it never stops.’

Imogen knew that this was about more than the woman he had rescued today – it was about the woman he grew up with, about his parents. Adrian rarely talked about his mother, but Imogen knew that his father had been violent and that Adrian struggled to accept aggression towards women on any level. She knew what it was like to grow up in challenging circumstances, but not a day went by when she wasn’t grateful that there was no kind of abuse in her own childhood; she had seen what it had done to friends. Working in the police, she knew how demoralising an abusive childhood was and how massively it impacted who people became.

‘You’ll feel better after you get cleaned up,’ she said. ‘We can go straight back to the hospital as soon as you’ve showered.’

‘What if she dies?’

‘Whatever comes next, we are going to find out what happened to her. She’s not going to die. I know it. You saved her, Adrian.’

Imogen parked the car near Adrian’s house and he jumped out immediately. He didn’t want to hang around, she could tell. He unlocked his door and went inside, leaving it open for her to follow.

Imogen made herself comfortable on the sofa and waited for Adrian to return. She was at home in his house now, maybe even more at home here than in her own place.