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his ability to concentrate, were gone. He kept a photo of Mary on his desk and found himself staring at it, silently, for half an hour at a time. So he put it in a drawer and only took it out occasionally, when he was alone. But she was always there, at the front of his mind, while the work seemed an irrelevance, a side issue to be sorted and swiftly forgotten.
    He took up running again. He had once been a promising 800 metre runner, not quite fast enough to get into the big time. Now he found that the exercise calmed his body and his mind at the same time. In the evenings he cuddled his little girls and told them bedtime stories as he had done when they were babies. At night they seemed to need him most. They talked about their mother and remembered the good things they had done when she was alive. Sometimes they prayed for her, all three together. But during the days, life had to go on.
    Gradually his concentration returned. But he lost all thoughts of promotion. He tried to arrange his hours to be at home after school and at weekends like a normal parent. It was not ideal for a detective but it was the best practical help his colleagues could give him. He was discreetly withdrawn from the front line, to office work and routine enquiries. DCI Carter retired and instead of Terry a sharp, clever southerner, Will Churchill, got the Detective Chief Inspector’s post. At the time, Terry had been so numb, he scarcely cared.
    But time passed and the little girls began to forget, as young healthy creatures do. When Terry first saw them laugh and play like other children he resented it. How could they be happy when Mary was dead? But they were happy and they were only little children after all. He watched them gratefully, drawing healing from them. They resumed contact with their friends, and sometimes he came home to find a chaotic houseful of children with the nanny in the middle. The sight cheered him, gave him confidence to take on serious enquiries again.
    And so two years had passed. Life went on, but he was not the same detective he had been before. He cut corners and turned down overtime to be at home with his children. He made mistakes, he forgot things. And worst of all he snapped at people for no reason, as he done with young Harry Easby just now. He had to get a grip on this.
    If only he could stop thinking about Mary, seeing her face suddenly when he was looking at something else, remembering the feel of her beside him in bed, the small of her back lithe under the palm of his hand when they danced ...
    ‘Here we are, sir,’ said Harry Easby, turning onto a farm track. ‘Bank House Farm.’
    Sarah didn’t leave her office for another three hours, and when she did, very little about tomorrow’s cross-examination was left to chance. She had prepared her questions and tried to anticipate how Sharon Gilbert might respond. Much of this was logic, based on the written evidence in the prosecution file and Gary’s story; but the rest was intuition, based on her impression of Sharon’s character this afternoon.
    She had an advantage here, for she had lived among women like Sharon. She was used to their brash, slightly resentful manner. She understood how they felt patronised by teachers and doctors, cheated by boyfriends and husbands, short-changed by employers and the DSS. She felt sure that Sharon’s assertiveness in court today masked a fear that somehow the police and lawyers were going to betray her again, as the authorities had always done in the past.
    A fear that Sarah was determined to bring true.
    The softer part of Sarah felt sorry for Sharon. Not just because of the rape - of course she deserved sympathy for that - but because of what she was. Sarah could so easily have ended up like that herself. But she had chosen not to. And for that very reason, a much stronger part of Sarah despised Sharon. The part of Sarah that had made that choice didn’t believe in luck or genes or social excuses. She believed if you