The interview with Peter hadn’t given them anything new to go on and, as a result of this, O’Dowd’s fractious temper had snapped and crackled all afternoon.

The timber panel had been dusted for prints and the report had identified seventeen different fingerprints on the front and none on the back. All seventeen had been run through the IDENT1 database but none had been recognised. More tellingly, the post and its crossed member had also been checked but had been found to be devoid of any fingerprints. This suggested to Beth that the killer had worn gloves. She hadn’t expected to get a result so simply, as the murder had obviously been carried out with fore-planning, but every possible lead had to be followed up.

What Beth wanted most of all was to deliver justice to victims and their families. To do that, she needed to learn from the best minds, osmose their investigative techniques and understand their thinking.

She’d done well to get into FMIT, and while the greater wages and influence which came with promotion were attractive, the last thing she wanted to do was climb the career ladder to the point where she became a desk-bound administrator.

For Beth, the thrill of police work lay in catching out suspects in the interview room, chasing down leads and evidence to build a case that was sure to lead to a guilty verdict and, most of all, the puzzle. All her life she’d enjoyed challenging her brain and as a copper she got paid to solve puzzles. The big difference now was that the ones she solved would do a lot more than just give her a sense of satisfaction, they’d bring justice.

Beth was so driven that she’d signed up for the police on the morning of her eighteenth birthday. Her boyfriend at the time hadn’t agreed with her decision and had sulked at the thought of her not being at his beck and call due to shift work and time spent away on training courses. The relationship was only a few months old, and when Beth had told him it was over, he’d accepted her decision with grace. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about him, she just knew that she could never love someone who didn’t support her chosen career and understand her need to become a police officer. For her it was all about righting wrongs and delivering the closure only justice can bring.

He’d tried pushing her towards the modelling work she’d been offered. None of it had been too glamorous, but until she’d turned eighteen, she’d supported her waitressing income by modelling clothes for budget clothing stores and she had been offered the chance of turning it into a professional career. Looking back with hindsight, she realised that he’d wanted a model girlfriend he could brag about, rather than a police-officer girlfriend he could be proud of.

As much as it had flattered Beth to have been considered pretty, model material, the downside of that life was that she’d had to watch every bite, that as she turned eighteen the offers of work had taken on a different, more seedy nature and that in her experience the modelling world was largely populated by people Beth found shallow and bitchy. With only a couple of exceptions, every person she’d met on a modelling shoot was looking to advance their career; if others got trampled, then so be it.

Leaving that world behind was a decision Beth had never regretted.

That her looks had been taken from her when she became a victim of violent crime during her training was an irony she’d never shake off.

She had made sure the glassing had the minimum impact on her training. After she’d been discharged from the hospital, she’d had a week cloistered in her bedroom until the isolation bored her rigid. She went back to training the moment the doctors said she was fit to return and had spent her nights catching up on the work she’d missed.

It had been a distraction; a way of focussing her mind on something other than the pain and the fact that she would carry scars on her face until the day she died.