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Professional implies efficiency, doesn’t it? I can’t see what they did as being all that … well, efficient.’
    â€˜Not the right word, is it?’ Vinod said, aware that she was struggling to find a way to describe what she was thinking.
    â€˜No, no it’s not.’ She sighed and then stretched and got to her feet. ‘Look, there’s not a lot more we can achieve tonight. Get off home. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll have found next of kin and forensics will have something useful to tell us.’
    He nodded, knowing there would be long days ahead when the investigation got properly under way. ‘I used to go fishing with my next-door neighbour,’ he said. ‘When we were both kids. His dad used to take us. I remember one day, I got my ankle caught up in some fishing line. I tripped and fell over and pulled the line tight. It bit right into my calf, cut this dead straight line. It drew blood and I was bruised for days after. It hurt like hell.’
    â€˜Teach you to clean up after yourself,’ she said, not really wanting to think about it. She could see, in her mind’s eye, the way the line had cut into flesh, biting its way through as the weight of the body lay against it.
    â€˜That’s what my mate’s dad said,’ Vinod smiled. ‘He was a stickler for that, making sure we took every scrap of stuff away with us.’
    â€˜Pain,’ she said. ‘The way I see it, it was all about the pain.’ She shook her head, trying to dismiss the pictures in her head and she knew that she’d actually be glad to be bumped down the pecking order in this case. If someone else was brought in, Tess decided she’d make just enough noise to save face and then, gratefully, gracefully, just let it go.
    Home, for Gregory, was his boat. Currently she was moored a long way off and he felt cut adrift. He’d never been one for bricks and mortar or for a settled pitch, but now he’d have given a great deal to be aboard and heading out to sea.
    He’d enjoyed his evening with Patrick and Harry, but at the same time it had served to highlight just how much he didn’t belong in their world. Happy to be an occasional visitor; happy, he acknowledged, to count them as friends – that, he found, was a very pleasant thought – but the idea of living in a little house, doing the same job every day, having a routine, now filled him with a kind of dread and while it was true that during his stint in the army he’d had many of those trappings there had always been the assurance of change, of challenge, of difference.
    His mind drifted back to the dream he’d had. Four dead with a single bullet. It bothered him that he couldn’t find an answer, that none of it seemed to make sense. But it would, he thought. He’d find the sense in it, excavate the meaning and then he’d know what he had to do next. Stay and accept Nathan’s offer or go and see what life brought his way.

EIGHT
    T he murder featured on the lunchtime news, just after Alec and Naomi got back from their Saturday morning walk. A murder in a picturesque village was unusual enough to have made the national headlines and it took a moment for Naomi to realize that this was, in fact, quite local news.
    â€˜Halsingham, that’s just down the coast, isn’t it? A bit inland?’
    â€˜It is, yes,’ Alec said. ‘It was never our patch, but I did a short stint on secondment down that way, drove through it a couple of times.’
    He sounded interested, for once, and Naomi felt her spirits lift slightly. ‘DI Fuller. Didn’t you do a training course with her?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Alec said. ‘I did a couple, actually. But it was a while ago.’
    Naomi frowned, her mood crashing once more. It had been a while ago, that was true, but there had been rumours at the time that Tess Fuller and Alec, then both new Detective Sergeants, had been a bit