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asked.
     
'So are you okay with two-minute rounds?' Jill repeated.
     
'Yeah, whatever. This should be fun.'
     
He threw his towel over the ropes in his corner and Jill went to her own, her heart pounding. Although she'd wanted a serious opponent, she knew she wasn't ready for this. She took a deep breath and pulled her blindfold down, put her mouthguard back in. I'll never be ready unless I find someone to fight me, she thought.
     
Over the next two minutes, Jill hit the ground five times. When she sat back in her corner, her head was ringing and each breath felt like a stab wound to her ribs. She could hear Price sniggering in his corner. Five more rounds, she thought, this is gonna kill me. The blindfold felt suddenly stifling and she raised her hand to rip it off, a wave of fear and disorientation rising up to swamp her. She swallowed, pushed the fear back down and felt the numbness kick in. She heard Price breathing in his corner, eager to go again.
     
About fucking time, she told herself. I'm finally gonna learn something.
     
Over the next eight months, Jill sparred regularly with Ron Price, and soon found there were others happy to partner her in the ring. She learned to tune out the background noise of the gym and to concentrate solely upon the sounds of her foe – their footsteps, subtle movements, even their breathing, taught her where they were and the moves they would make next. These sounds began to replace the need to see, painting for Jill a mental image of her opponent's position, and she began striking accurately, pre-empting their next blow. She learned to use their punches and kicks to set up her own, increasingly accurate with her judgment of the time it would take for their balance to be regained, and striking before they could reposition.
     
She practised daily, at the gym at six when it opened, and fitting in two hours after school every day. However, when the number of people watching outside her ring increased, and their taunts became cheers, she left the gym and took to training at home.
     
Jill walked into her home gym and filled a cup from the water dispenser near the door. She glanced at the clock. 4.20 a.m. The alarm would've gone off in forty minutes anyway. She started her routine again, her headache forgotten as she punished her body for the weakness of the day before.
     

6
L ATE THE NEXT MORNING , at her desk in the squad room, Jill tried to apply herself to paperwork on the Carter case. She and Scotty had decided to split some of their work to try to progress things faster. Neither of them wanted this to go on any longer than it had to.
     
Scotty was out interviewing the father of an eleven-year-old girl who'd been molested by David Carter five years previously. The case had only gone to court last year, and Carter had been found not guilty because of insufficient evidence. Although two children had testified that Carter had sexually abused them, his highly paid barrister had torn their evidence to shreds, arguing that if they had been mistaken about exact dates and times, they could have been mistaken about being abused at all. It was an outcome the police and DPP saw all the time, with crushed victims and devastated families walking away from the process feeling that the justice system was a sick joke. Little Madison Lee's father had been particularly vocal in his threats to castrate Carter. Scotty would be sympathetic interviewing him.
     
Jill stretched and took another sip of her Pepsi Max. She couldn't settle into this case. With her feet up on her desk, she ignored the muscle pain from her workout that morning and tapped into the COPS database, searching for updates on the murders of Dennis Rocla and George Manzi, also known as George Marks.
     
Within moments, she found what she was looking for.
     
'I knew it,' she breathed, sitting up straight in her chair, bringing her face close to the computer screen. She looked up from the database and punched in Scotty's mobile