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burying her face against his shoulder, sobs racking her body. She wasn’t thinking,and he could have been anyone, just then, but they stayed that way while a solemn nurse slipped out from behind the curtain and someone switched off the beeping machine, and there was only silence except for Jenn’s muffled sobs, and the gulping breaths of Paul, struggling not to cry.

THREE

    In the staff kitchen Mark stirred a heaped teaspoon of sugar into each mug of coffee. Sugar for shock. Whether it was medically sound or an old wives’ tale, he didn’t care. They’d all had an emotionally and physically draining night, and weren’t yet ready for the long drive home. The boost of caffeine and energy wouldn’t hurt.
    He carried the three mugs back to the small meeting room a nurse had shown them to. Just outside, Paul spoke on the phone with his wife Chloe, stoic and withdrawn, while inside the room Jenn wrote on a notepad she’d borrowed from the nurse.
    Hadn’t that always beenthe way she’d coped with challenges? Transform them into written words; order, arrange and analyse the events and the issues. Report objectively and thoroughly. Even in high school, that had been her trademark style – and her strategy to rationalise her emotions.
    He’d seen her on television regularly, the familiar passion for her work enlivening the features she’d always thought plain beside Paula’s prettiness. She still kept her chestnut hair long, caught back in a practical ponytail, and although she often wore basic make-up for the harsh eye of the camera, she wore none now. But plain? No, in his eyes she’d never been
plain
.
    She barely looked up as he placed her mug on the table, but he could see the moisture on her cheeks, the tightly held damp tissue she still needed.
    ‘The detective will need a statement,’ she said, the flatness in her tone amplifying rather than belying her emotional turmoil.
    ‘Steve sent a message a few minutes ago that he’s on his way,’ Mark told her. ‘But the written statements can wait, Jenn. You can do it tomorrow, or whenever you’re ready.’
    ‘I need to do it now.’
    He stood by the window, looking out on to the dimly lit garden between the hospital buildings. He mentally made lists of things to do, people to notify, the words and phrases to include in his witness statement – anything to avoid grappling with his own response to Jim’s death.
    Emotionally there’d been a great deal for one day: the media conference first thing this morning announcing his resignation, the reaction to it, the long drive home, the fire, Jim’s injury and death … and Jenn, sitting at the table a metre from him, back in his life, bringing with her the unsettling strangeness of being so near and yet so distant from the one person who’d ever understood him completely.
    Nostalgia for his long-gone youth? No,not just that. Their friendship had been close and deep. Despite the different paths they’d taken and all his life experiences since then, he sometimes missed that closeness.
    But he’d travelled a long way from the idealism of his youth, and even if some of the girl he’d known remained in the successful, highly respected journalist, Paula’s ghost and his role in her death stood between them now.
    He heard the gentle clunk of her mug against the table, and the breathy intake, not quite controlled. ‘I keep thinking I shouldn’t have moved him,’ she said, grief shadowing her blue – grey eyes. ‘I knew he had a head injury. He shouldn’t have been moved.’
    Mark pulled out a chair opposite her and straddled it.
This
he had been over a hundred times already while making the coffee, rationally cataloguing every alternative, every what-if. But no other course of action had been possible. ‘Jim didn’t die because we moved him, Jenn. He died because someone bashed him on the head at least twice and broke his skull.’
    ‘Paramedics couldn’t have got to him in time,’ Paul said from the