‘Okay, Keats, where’s the coffee?’ she asked, walking into the morgue.

She looked above the figure in the metal dish that she guessed to be Joanna Wade. The image of the last breath leaving her body was bad enough. She didn’t need to replace it with a picture of her naked flesh cold and scarred.

‘There’s no coffee,’ he answered. ‘But there is this,’ he said, passing her a piece of paper.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, before looking at it.

‘The contents of Joanna Wade’s back jeans pocket.’

Still Kim didn’t open it. ‘But Traffic will want any evidence—’

‘It’s a copy,’ he said. ‘The original has been bagged for their err… eventual arrival.’

Much as she had wanted to unfold the piece of paper immediately she was conscious of contaminating evidence that the Collision Investigation Unit would pass on to the forensic scene investigators.

‘Have you done it yet?’ she asked, nodding towards the tray.

He followed her gaze. ‘That’s not Joanna Wade,’ he answered.

Kim couldn’t explain the wave of relief that went through her.

‘That’s an urgent case from Hollytree. Stabbing, potentially gang-related.’

Kim understood that this case took precedence. Murder over RTA. Had Joanna been her case she would have already called her death murder and she’d be arguing priority with Keats right now.

‘You gonna read it?’ Bryant asked, looking to the sheet of paper in her hand.

She moved to the side of the room beside Keats’s desk and opened it up.

The paper was lined with faint pencil writing. The words appeared tentative; some were crossed out and overwritten on the top half of the page. Kim frowned as she recognised Sadie’s writing. It was the poem that Joanna had mentioned. The one that had bothered her.

She squinted and tried to read.

‘I don’t get it,’ Kim said, looking up from the page.

‘What, the poem?’ Bryant asked, taking it from her hand.

‘That, and what it was that troubled Joanna. Seems like more of Sadie’s emotional outpourings.’

‘Why’s “life” repeated so many times?’

Kim shrugged as her eyes landed on the desk. ‘Keats, what’s that?’ she asked.

‘Joanna Wade’s phone. Also found in the back pocket of her jeans.’

‘Not bagged yet?’ she asked, suspiciously.

‘Getting round to it, Stone,’ he snapped.

‘Bloody hell, Keats, getting a bit lax in your old age, eh?’

‘Children are dying, Stone,’ he raged. ‘And I have to cut them open to find out how.’ He glanced at the desk and more directly at the phone and then back at her. ‘And now I’m going to fetch the coffee.’

Kim looked at Bryant as the doors closed behind the pathologist.

‘You’re not going to touch it?’ he asked, reading her thoughts.

There was barely a second of hesitation before she reached across the table for a pair of blue latex gloves.

‘Bryant, we both know that Traffic is not gonna put these pieces together. Even Keats knows it,’ she said, aware that this was exactly what he’d been hoping she’d do.

He sighed. ‘You can’t tamper—’

‘If you’re worried, go help Keats bring the coffee,’ she said, picking up the phone. A single crack travelled diagonally from corner to corner. She pressed the home button, which brought up the passcode screen.

‘Damn it,’ she said, putting it down and reaching for her own phone.

Stacey picked up the phone on the second ring.

‘Hey Stace, hypothetically, if I wanted to bypass the screen password on a smartphone that I shouldn’t really have in my possession, how would I go about it?’

Stacey hesitated and then began calling out instructions.

‘Hang on, Stace, let me put you on loudspeaker so I can hypothetically do it while you talk.’

Stacey started from the beginning and spoke slowly.

Four instructions later and the screen burst into life.

‘Stace, that was worryingly easy,’ Kim observed.

‘Only if you know what you’re doing,’ Stacey said. ‘Hypothetically, of course.’

Kim smiled and ended the call.

‘Nice to see,’ Bryant observed.

‘What?’

‘A smile on your face. First one today.’

‘Yeah, it was wind,’ she said.

‘Ha, it was because you’re doing something you shouldn’t be.’

She had to concede he had a point.

Kim wasn’t surprised that Joanna’s wallpaper was a gorgeous woman in a bathing suit. She went straight for the internet search engine, which clearly Joanna didn’t clear out very often.

‘She was on Tinder,’ Kim observed.

‘Who isn’t?’ Bryant asked.

‘Me,’ she said.

‘Or me,’ he answered

She continued to scroll and spoke as she went. ‘Darts tournaments, Airbnb in Fife, how to cook a perfect beef Wellington and—’ she stopped speaking.

She turned to Keats as he entered the room with three cups.

‘Keats, could Joanna have been pregnant?’ she asked, unlikely as it might be.

He frowned. ‘I can’t say for sure, but my initial examination didn’t offer any indication. No noticeable bulge of the tummy.’

Kim shook her head. ‘Not her then,’ she said, handing Bryant the phone.

His eyes widened. ‘She searched seven different sites about illegal terminations. But why…’

Kim shook her head as she looked from the phone to the piece of paper. There was something here that she was missing.

Why had Sadie written this poem? What exactly had she been trying to say?