Alex sat in her living room with the curtains pulled shut to block out the darkness of the evening. She had been able to find a local handyman who had painted the front door for her that afternoon, successfully concealing most of the insult that had been sprayed there. The beginning of the letter W and half an E were still evident on either side of the door, still staining the paintwork of the house, but it would need a proper clean to get rid of them. She would get around to it at some point, but for now it wasn’t a priority.

Sipping a cup of coffee and pulling her legs up on to the sofa beneath her, she opened the second web page on the list that had been thrown up by the search engine. It was a newspaper article that dated back over two years. Poisoned Father Guilty of Domestic Abuse, read the headline.

Alex didn’t need reminding of the details of the case. She had been responsible for charging Nathan Coleman with attempted murder, and later she had questioned the sentence that had been passed down to the boy. It seemed unjust that Christian – a notorious thug whose reign of terror over his partner and children had been documented in distressing detail in court – had been given such a lenient sentence while his son was set to lose the best years of his young life.

Not for the first time, she pondered the question of what would have been right in this case. She hadn’t envied the judge the decision he had been faced with making. Regardless of what Christian Coleman had done, it hadn’t given Nathan the right to take matters into his own hands. Many people had applauded him – in some corners of the town in which Christian had made himself notorious, people had actively celebrated Nathan as some sort of hero – but that didn’t make the boy’s retaliation acceptable in the eyes of the law. If everyone took revenge in such a way, the world would exist in chaos.

But if the criminal justice system had been more efficient, Alex thought, Christian Coleman would have been behind bars long before his son had had a chance to try to kill him.

She left the web page and ran a Google Image search on Christian Coleman. She found him instantly: a broad-shouldered bull of a man with a scar that ran from his left temple to his nose; a souvenir of a fight he had lost as a teenager. He had a face that looked permanently angry, scrunched up and wrinkled like a bulldog’s. Alex had wondered what Sian Foster, Christian’s ex-partner, had ever seen in the man, though it was obvious fear had kept her in the relationship long after she had wanted to leave. It had been impossible not to feel sympathy for Nathan. He had watched his mother endure years of suffering at the hands of his violent father, and evidence in court proved that this violence had extended to the boy and his sister too. Perhaps he had seen no other way out for them.

Looking up from the screen of her laptop, Alex thought back on Christian Coleman’s trial. As well as charging Nathan with the attempted murder of his father, she had also been responsible for Christian’s arrest. She had questioned him at his hospital bed, where he was being treated for irreparable kidney damage following the poisoning.

Those last words he had spoken to her on the day he was finally sent down repeated yet again in her head.

She pushed the laptop to one side and got up to go the kitchen, taking her empty coffee cup with her. She needed something stronger. From the fridge she took a screw-top bottle of white wine, half finished the previous evening. Since Chloe had moved out of the house and into her own place the occasional glass had become something of a nightly habit, but the alcohol helped soften the edges of Alex’s loneliness.

Whore.

She was being neurotic, she thought as she poured the wine. Yet the word was so specific – so memorable as his. Bitch could have belonged to anyone. But whore was different. Alex couldn’t recall anyone else having referred to her using that word.

Throwing back half the glass, she attempted to straighten out and organise her thoughts. Not for the first time, she was overthinking things. Besides, graffiti hardly seemed Christian’s style. He was more likely to send a couple of heavies to her house to frighten the life out of her rather than resort to idle insults, and if he had been intent on carrying out his threat of killing her, then he was hardly like to achieve it through paint fumes.

But what if this was just the start of something more?

Shaking herself from her musings, Alex took the wine to the living room and returned her focus to the laptop. Concentrating on work allowed her to distract herself from thoughts that plagued her: her mother’s recent death, her estranged ex-husband; the silence that surrounded her, filling the house she had hoped would be a family home. Images of the beaten and burned victim found in the abandoned hospital building took hold, all the more harrowing for the detail in which she was able to recall the scene. There was hardly time to waste on Christian bloody Coleman when they had a killer to find.

She pushed the laptop to one side and went to the front window, checking past the curtains and out into the front garden. The shadow cast by the hedge to the left boundary threw darkness over the small stretch of steps that led down to the pavement, and the breeze caught the tree that stood at her gate, sending its branches flailing.

There was nothing out there, she told herself, letting the curtain fall. But in spite of herself, she went back out into the hallway to check the lock on the front door one last time.