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off, recharging, swapping gossipy work stories that professional etiquette wouldn’t allow to travel further.
    Marina leaned forward, looked Anni square in the face. ‘Why did you bring me here?’
    Anni looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘To… assess Joanne Marsh. See that she’s sane enough to stand trial.’ Her dark skin flushed.
    ‘Anyone could have done that, Anni. You could have found someone local, East Anglia, anywhere round here. I know I’m good, but I’m not that good.’
    Anni sighed. Before she could reply, another voice spoke.
    ‘Fiona Welch.’
    Marina turned. Detective Sergeant Mickey Phillips was standing behind her. Tall, shaven-headed and well-built, his eyes held an intelligence and compassion that belied his size. He was Anni Hepburn’s partner both in and out of work.
    Marina made to greet him with a hug but his words stopped her. ‘Fiona Welch?’
    He looked at Anni, then nodded at Marina. ‘Yeah. Remember her?’
    ‘Of course.’ The previous head of Phil’s team in Colchester had brought psychologist Fiona Welch in to advise on a case during Marina’s absence. Phil hadn’t taken to her on a personal level, which wouldn’t have mattered had he not found her judgement on a professional level seriously flawed. She was eventually revealed to be manipulating the flow of intelligence behind a series of murders that had been committed at her instigation in order to prove her theories on human behaviour correct. She had been adjudged criminally insane but had fallen to her death before she could be taken into custody. ‘Phil’s still got the scars. Literally.’ Marina looked between the two. ‘But she’s dead, so…?’ She let the question hang.
    ‘Is she?’ asked Anni.
    ‘Isn’t she?’
    ‘That’s what we thought,’ said Mickey, sitting down to join them, ‘but – well, Anni’ll tell you.’
    Anni leaned forward, across the table. ‘About six months ago there was a murder in the Colchester area. A young guy, mid-twenties, killed his girlfriend. Just a domestic, we thought at first, nothing out of the ordinary, unfortunately.’
    ‘Our team wasn’t even called in,’ said Mickey. ‘Open and shut. The guy admitted he’d done it, no question. Didn’t seem to have a reason for it, but that wasn’t our problem.’
    ‘But then,’ said Anni, ‘there was another one a month or so later. Identical. Same age, same everything. The girls even looked a bit similar.’
    ‘How?’ asked Marina.
    Another look between Anni and Mickey.
    ‘Tall. Dark hair.’
    ‘Like you, really,’ said Anni. ‘Your looks, in fact. Dressed like you, too.’
    Marina, shocked and now feeling more than a little uneasy, said nothing.
    ‘And that’s when we became involved,’ said Mickey. ‘Our department. Two too much to be a coincidence. We questioned the blokes again, asked them things the original teams hadn’t. Asked about other women. And that’s when the name came up.’
    ‘Fiona Welch,’ said Anni.
    ‘Except she’s dead,’ said Marina.
    ‘Exactly,’ said Mickey. ‘Considering we saw her die and watched her body being taken away. But these guys were adamant that they had met her, knew her. They’d had affairs with her. She’d told them to get rid of their girlfriends for her. She persuaded them to kill.’
    ‘Manipulated them?’ asked Marina.
    They both nodded.
    ‘But why didn’t this come out at their trials? Why didn’t they say so? They wouldn’t have got off, but they might have lost some years on their sentences.’
    ‘She told them not to,’ said Anni.
    ‘And they didn’t.’
    ‘Had quite a hold on them.’
    ‘Anyway,’ said Mickey, ‘we tracked down this woman. She’d already chosen her next target. She was working on him to leave his girlfriend for her.’
    ‘Permanently,’ said Anni.
    ‘But before that,’ said Mickey, ‘this Fiona Welch was getting these guys to change their girlfriends’ looks. Hair darker, more curly, your dress sense…’
    ‘You