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towards her.
    ‘Mrs Cliff? I’m very sorry.’ He shook his head.
    Sophie stared at his blackened face. ‘No!’ She gazed around, stupefied. Over the fireman’s shoulder she could see her smouldering house. Men in uniform were moving around, silhouetted against the red glow. The line of onlookers behind her was being pushed back. A man with a megaphone was shouting at them.
    ‘We’re evacuating the neighbouring houses,’ a voice called out.
    ‘We need to move all those cars, now,’ another voice barked.
    A movement nearby caught Sophie’s attention. Two men were carrying a stretcher, its small load covered. Sophie stumbled over to it. The stretcher bearers paused. She raised the blanket. Tom was sleeping, his face smudgy and grey. Soon he would open his eyes and scold her for leaving home without waking him to say goodbye. She reached out. Gently she stroked his cheek, ran her finger along his bottom lip, round his chin. Her eyes filled with tears and her head sank forward on to his body. She would have stayed there forever – she had nowhere else to go – but someone pulled her away. A hand pulled the blanket over Tom’s face as he was carried into the van.
    ‘Where are they taking him?’ she asked. Her voice juddered as though she was sobbing but her eyes were dry. No one answered her. A siren rang out. Sophie watched the mortuary van disappear in the smoke-filled air.

9
    Summons
    Geraldine was up early on Saturday morning. Over a breakfast of coffee and wholemeal toast, she studied a well thumbed cookery book. Craig was visiting his sister at the weekend but would be back home by Sunday evening. It was going to be the first time she cooked for him. Before their holiday in Dubrovnik, he had always insisted on taking her out to eat.
    ‘You work hard enough,’ he would say. Geraldine had smiled, conscious that his refusal to stay at her flat gave their relationship a temporary feel. Now she was determined to impress him. She considered just about every recipe in the book before finally settling on an old favourite. Best to play it safe. She was queuing in the supermarket when her mobile rang.
    ‘How soon do you want me there?’ she asked, eyeing the stationary queue in front of her. The girl at the till was chatting to a woman at the front of the line.
    ‘I need a price’ the cashier called out.
    ‘I’m on my way,’ Geraldine sighed into the phone. Abandoning her trolley, she hurried home, changed into a work suit, and set off.
    Her destination was the nearby historic town of Harchester. Originally a popular stopping place for pilgrims travelling to Canterbury, it had grown into a thriving market town on the main route from a busy sea port to the city of London. It was said that Geoffrey Chaucer himself had spent the night at the Hawtree Inn in Harchester. The inn had long since disappeared but Geraldine had read somewhere that Chaucer’s visit wascommemorated by a plaque in the shopping mall, ironically placed between WH Smith’s and Starbucks.
    Geraldine pulled into the police station car park with less than an hour to spare, tugged a comb through her hair, pinned it back off her face, and went into the station. Her day took an unexpected turn for the better when she caught sight of a familiar face on her way to the Incident Room. She had worked with Detective Sergeant Ian Peterson on an earlier case when his quick thinking had saved her life.
    ‘Gov!’ Peterson’s handsome features relaxed into an infectious grin which quickly faded. ‘I heard about your mother…’ He paused, struggling for the right words, an awkward giant of a man. He ran one large hand through neatly combed hair which leapt into spikey disarray.
    ‘We deal with it all the time, but it’s different when it happens to you.’ Geraldine gave a rueful grin. It wasn’t easy to talk in the corridor. They were constantly interrupted. Several uniformed officers overtook them, they had to stand aside for people carrying