In her office, Alex sat and read the local news update on her phone, pausing at the CCTV image from the café, which had now been broadcast on the local news and shared on social media in the hope that it might bring them some clue as to who their victim was. She had been listening again to the recording of the 999 call made to police on the night of the fire, but her attention had been distracted by thoughts of the call from the garage. Someone had cut the brake fluid line on her car.

Someone had tried to kill her.

It was late and the rest of the team had long since headed home for the evening. The station had a depressing air on evenings such as this, with everyone’s pessimism left behind them, ready to be collected and worn again upon their return the following morning. Alex wished she could do the same – just head home and shut her brain down for the night – but it had never been that easy for her. With no one at home to distract her from the morbidity of her job, just how was she supposed to find any peace away from it?

Paperwork relating to their ongoing cases lay strewn across the desk, serving as a reminder of just how haphazard the current state of things was. The pace of the investigation was frustrating Alex, and though she knew there was nothing more she could do that evening, she didn’t want to head home while she was feeling so ineffectual.

She moved from the CCTV image back to the internet web page that showed a photograph of Christian Coleman. His poisoning had been one of the most notorious cases of Alex’s career, mainly for the amount of press coverage it had received. She had never forgotten the man. It now appeared that perhaps he hadn’t forgotten her either.

Glancing down at the notepad in front of her, she traced a finger across the address she had just been given over the phone. A few calls had put her in touch with Christian’s parole officer, who had been able to tell her where Christian had been staying since his release from prison.

As she sipped a coffee that was barely lukewarm, Alex started at a sound outside her door. She exhaled audibly when Dan entered the room. She hadn’t realised he was still here. The paranoia that had been born the previous night had grown considerably during the day, morphing into something she could already feel consuming too much of her energy. This wasn’t like her, she thought.

‘Not going home?’ Dan asked, shutting the door behind him.

Alex hurriedly closed the window on her computer. She knew if anyone saw what she had been looking at, they would only think her paranoid. The more she thought about it, the more she suspected the paranoia was in this case justified.

‘I could ask you the same.’

Dan smiled. ‘You’re not fooling anyone, by the way.’

Alex looked back to the home screen of her computer and shrugged in a poor attempt to feign nonchalance. ‘This 999 call,’ she said, keen to divert attention from herself. She clicked a few keys and retrieved the audio file. ‘Listen.’

Dan sat opposite her as she played back the recording. She waited until it had ended before replaying, stopping it midway through. ‘Hear that?’

‘What?’

‘Listen closer.’

She played the recording again, stopping at the same place. Fire, the man said. Old Llwynypia hospital. She went back and played it again. Fire. Stop. Replay. Fire. Stop. Replay.

‘Hear that?’

Dan pulled the chair around the desk and drew closer to Alex as she replayed the recording once again. ‘Is it music?’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘Can we enhance the sound?’

‘Not on here, but we can get it done first thing tomorrow.’ She sat back. ‘There’s something about this call. This person either wanted the fire stopped, or he wanted us to know about it. I just can’t work out which.’

‘Glory-hunting, you mean?’

‘In a sense, I suppose. It’s not unheard of. For all we know, he might have been waiting for us to show up, watching the action as it unfolded.’

Her thoughts drew her back to her own home and to the accident that had happened the previous night, an accident she realised could have been so much worse. Had the person responsible for sabotaging her car been there outside her house, waiting to watch her drive away in a car they hoped she would be unable to stop? The thought filled her with unease. Home was supposed to offer a place of safety. Once that idea was broken, there was no going back. Chloe had been proof of that, and her only solution had been to break free of the place.

‘You going to tell me what’s going on?’ Dan asked. ‘I thought you might have spoken to Chloe about it.’

‘Chloe’s got her own things going on,’ Alex said, though this wasn’t the reason she had chosen not to confide in her. She knew Chloe would listen, but it didn’t seem fair. The younger woman was only now beginning to find happiness, and after shedding her own problems, the last thing she needed was to be burdened with Alex’s. With her mother’s death earlier that year, Alex had already leaned on her colleague too often for support. She sometimes wondered whether she had done the right thing and whether blurring the boundaries between working relationship and friendship might at some point prove to be a mistake. ‘Anyway, everything’s fine.’

‘You’re a terrible liar.’

Alex forced a smile. She wanted to confide in someone, but she didn’t want everyone at the station knowing what had happened. She would be considered a victim, and the term inevitably brought associations of vulnerability. That was the last thing she needed, especially now, when she was in the middle of such a major investigation.

‘Go home,’ she told him. ‘We should be getting a few results back tomorrow, and if we do, it’s going to be a busy day. You’ll be needing your beauty sleep.’

‘It’s a deal,’ Dan said, standing from his chair, ‘but only if you take your own advice. How are you getting home anyway? You haven’t got a car.’

‘Taxi, probably.’

Dan whistled through his teeth. ‘Won the lottery, have you? Get your things, I’ll give you a lift.’

‘I live in the opposite direction to you,’ Alex said, closing down her computer.

‘I’m ignoring you,’ Dan said, heading towards the office door. ‘I’ll meet you downstairs in five. You can tell me what’s really going on with your car then.’

He closed the door behind him, leaving Alex in the silence of her office. She listened once more to the 999 call before closing the file. It sounded like music or a mobile phone ringtone. She would get it enhanced tomorrow, she thought. If it was a ringtone, getting a clearer sound might allow them to identify the make and model of phone.

Five minutes later, she met Dan in the station’s reception area. The roads were clear, and the journey back to her house took fifteen minutes; long enough for Alex to tell him about the cut brake line. The closer to her home they’d got, the greater her need to talk had become, but despite Dan’s generosity in having offered her a lift, she realised he would want to get home to his family. A flicker of envy tripped through her at the thought. For a moment she allowed herself to picture Dan and his wife at the kitchen table together, their two daughters curled up on the sofa watching a film on television.

Stupid, she reprimanded herself. This time of year was always the worst; as soon as Bonfire Night had passed, all the focus would be on Christmas, a time when everyone was supposed to be in high spirits.

Plus it was her birthday tomorrow. Forty-five, Alex thought, as she gazed through the window at the darkened blur of the A470 rushing past her. Had anyone asked her a decade ago where she imagined her life in ten years’ time, this wouldn’t have been it. She didn’t really know what she wanted, but perhaps that had always been her problem.

She hadn’t told anyone that her birthday was approaching. She didn’t want the fuss, and besides, since turning forty, birthdays had no longer felt like things that needed to be celebrated. She knew that if she had a family, things would be different. But alone, another birthday meant just another day.

She shook herself from her thoughts in order to direct Dan to her street. As they pulled up outside the house, the thought of Christian Coleman lurking somewhere in the shadows of the neighbours’ hedgerow filled her with an increasing sense of unease. If she’d had anywhere else to go that evening, she knew she would have headed straight there.

‘Let’s have a look, then,’ Dan said, unlocking his seat belt.

Alex had told him about the graffiti when they’d left the station. ‘There’s not much left to see,’ she said, getting out of the car.

She led him up the front steps.

‘I would have said it’s probably kids,’ Dan said, running a hand across the remainder of the letter E on the wall of the house, ‘but the car changes things. You know who did it, don’t you?’

‘I’ve got my suspicions.’

‘Do you want to tell me?’

Alex shook her head. ‘Get yourself home. I’ll be fine.’

‘I’m sure you will be,’ Dan said, ‘but that wasn’t what I asked. Is there anywhere else you can stay for a few days?’

Alex shook her head. She had contemplated the idea of checking into a hotel temporarily, but what would be the point? She would have to return here at some stage. Running away never solved anything.

‘Let me at least check the place over before I go.’

She unlocked the front door and Dan followed her into the hallway. It occurred to Alex that the place was a mess and she wondered how it managed to be so cluttered when she spent hardly any time here. Perhaps that was why. She popped in, she popped back out; she left things where they landed and over time those things had accumulated to a chaos she didn’t have the will or the energy to confront. An array of coats and jackets hung from the end of the banister, while a pile of shoes lay abandoned at the foot of the staircase. Unopened post sat in messy piles up the left-hand side of the stairs. The vacuum cleaner – pulled out from the cupboard but not recently put to use – was propped against the wall and the wooden flooring bore the muddy footprints that had been dragged in over a week earlier. The hallway seemed a sad metaphor for her life: chaotic and unloved.

‘Do you want a cup of tea? I’d offer you something stronger, but you’re driving.’

‘Tea’s fine.’

Dan checked the living room before following Alex through to the kitchen. ‘Nice house.’

‘Thanks, though I’ve been thinking of moving. It’s a bit big for just one.’

Dan leaned against the fridge and watched Alex as she checked the back door. ‘You can tell me who you think it was, if you want to. Why won’t you report it?’

‘You know as well as I do that it’ll be a waste of time,’ she told him, pouring steaming water from the kettle into two mugs. She dribbled milk into the tea and moved one to the worktop beside him. ‘How often do reports like that lead to anything?’

‘So?’

‘So what?’

‘Name.’

Alex exhaled loudly and cupped her tea in both hands, allowing its heat to warm her. ‘Christian Coleman.’

Dan pulled a face. ‘Why do you think it’s him?’

She shrugged. ‘Just something that was said, that’s all. He called me a whore, right after he was sentenced. It’s not that common an insult, really.’

She moved to the other side of the kitchen, feeling Dan’s eyes watching her. She didn’t want sympathy or pity, but she didn’t want to be alone with this fear either. She had tried to fool herself into believing she wasn’t scared, but she knew only too well what Christian Coleman was capable of.

‘Have you chased it up?’

‘Not yet.’ Alex thought about the address tucked into her jacket pocket. ‘He’ll have an alibi, no doubt. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved, though, does it?’ With a sigh, she put a hand to the back door, pressing on the handle to check that it was locked. ‘It was a long time ago now … I’m probably being paranoid.’

Dan drank his tea, watching as Alex pulled down the blind hanging at the window. ‘The very reason I sometimes think of quitting. The paranoia can get to you a bit.’

‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?’ Alex said, setting her mug down on the worktop beside the sink. The thought wasn’t a pleasant one. Young blood had proven itself worthy in Chloe’s case, but in DC Jake Sullivan’s it was causing increasing problems. He seemed to require constant supervision, and Alex didn’t have the time for babysitting. He needed to prove himself worthy of his place on the team soon, or she would need to start questioning his position. It wasn’t in Alex’s nature to make things unpleasant for people on her own team, but perhaps this was part of the problem, she thought. She’d always been a team player. She’d been too nice for too long. Nice didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ Dan said, draining the last of his tea and crossing the kitchen to place the empty mug beside hers at the sink. ‘I’m too old to start anything new now.’

‘Exactly. You’re stuck going grey with me, I’m afraid. Please don’t leave me with the kids.’

Dan smiled. There was a moment between them; something so subtle that it could have been just left to pass had Alex not chosen to cling to it.

‘You should get home,’ she said.

‘I don’t really want to leave you like this.’

‘I’ll be fine.’ Even to Alex, the words sounded unconvincing.

He reached for her hand, allowing it to warm his. ‘Alex …’ He leaned towards her, and when he kissed her, Alex kissed him back.