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hesitation. In the kitchen as it was in the barn. She’d learned that the hard way too.

She plonked the plates down and sat opposite him, her face stiff with anger. Annoyingly, Tony seemed unmoved by her reaction. He thanked her then said, ‘What’s the plan for today?’

‘I don’t know about you, but now I’ve finished the first fix for the electrics, I’m going to start plasterboarding the end wall.’ The fresh air had sorted Carol out; she attacked her breakfast as if George Nicholas’s lavish dinner party had been a week ago rather than the night before.

‘Good eggs.’ He swallowed another forkful. ‘I’ve got a couple of pre-sentence reports to write up, and I’ve got my laptop with me, so that’s me sorted. And if I finish them… well, I’ve made a start on writing a book.’

‘A book?’ Carol was startled. A book was a major project. And she’d known nothing about it. That was a measure of the distance they’d allowed to grow between them. ‘What kind of book?’

‘What kind of book would you expect me to write?’

She smiled, in spite of herself. ‘I suppose you could do a mash-up of your interests and do a cartoon guide to profiling for beginners.’

He made a self-deprecating face. ‘With a caped crusader showing up to save the day.’

‘You’d look silly in tights. So what’s this book, then?’

‘It is about profiling. My supervisor – you know, the psychologist I go and talk to so I stay on the relatively straight and narrow – he thinks that if the police are going to try to save money by doing their own profiling instead of paying people like me, we shouldn’t be dogs in the manger and wash our hands of them. He thinks I should write a book that gets away from technical language and theory and lays out in the most practical way possible what it is that I do. Jam-packed with examples of profiling in action from my casebook.’

Carol frowned. ‘Isn’t that like collaborating with your executioners?’

Tony shrugged. ‘One of two things will happen. Either they’ll get it and they’ll learn how to do it properly, which is a good thing because, even when they were paying me, I could only be in one place at a time. Or they won’t get it and they’ll realise there’s actually some expertise involved and they’ll come back to us professionals with a renewed respect.’

She spluttered with laughter. ‘You can’t renew something that was never there in the first place, Tony. You’ve never had the respect your work deserves.’

‘Some people have valued what I do. John Brandon. You. A couple of mandarins at the Home Office.’

‘Just not enough to make ignorant arseholes like James Blake do the right thing.’ She shovelled the last of her breakfast into her mouth and stood up, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. She caught him watching her and felt the blood rising in a blush. Working like a labourer, she’d somehow acquired the same habits. The old Carol Jordan would have used a napkin or even a sheet of kitchen towel. The new Carol Jordan didn’t care.
    Left to his own devices, Tony set himself up with laptop and notebook. He could focus on his own work without having to keep watch over her. Unless she had a secret stash in the main part of the barn. But there was no reason for that. Besides, he reckoned she would be fired up with determination to prove him wrong. That righteous resolve would be enough to keep her going for a while. The problems would come on Monday or Tuesday, faced with the impending disaster of the court case and the loss of face and driving licence. That would be when he had to watch over her like a mother hen.

What she needed was something proper to focus on. Manual labour was all very well, and it had clearly fulfilled a need in her. But it was repetitious; for great tracts of time, it made no intellectual demands. And Carol was a woman who needed to occupy her mind. He had to figure out something that would engage her