She turns to breathe in the pure sea air. No sign of the drone now. Two people are walking towards them on the coast path. Below, a sailing dinghy heads out into the bay, a tiny blade of brilliant white slicing across the haze of blue. And there, on the far side of the bay, is the field where she and Jake used to camp in the summer. Ironic that she’s ended up living within sight of it but not with Jake. It always rained for the week they were down. They argued a lot too – he liked to go sailing, she didn’t – but she still feels a pang of nostalgia. It’s the laughter she misses. His reassuring presence too. Was he a father figure to her, as Bex always used to say? She was brought up by her mother, a West End actress. Her father died before she was born.

  She smiles weakly at the couple as she passes them, allowing their dog, a black Labrador, to sniff at Stretch. Ten minutes later, she’s about to enter the village when her phone rings.

  She almost drops it as she whips the phone out of her back pocket.

  ‘He’s worried about you, pleased that I’m coming down,’ Bex says. ‘Told me to make sure the house is triple-locked and alarmed at night.’

  Sounds like Rob. ‘Did anything strike you as odd about him?’ she asks breathlessly. ‘Different?’

  ‘There really wasn’t anything, Kate. Short of grabbing his balls and asking him to cough, I couldn’t have examined him any closer. He must have thought I was right weird, the way I was standing in his face.’

  ‘Did he offer to pay your fare?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course. And I declined. Let him buy me a coffee, though.’

  Out of nowhere, a treacherous thought snakes into her head. ‘What did you have?’ she asks.

  ‘Cappuccino, why?’

  ‘How about him?’

  ‘What is this, twenty questions?’

  ‘Please, it’s important.’

  Her brain is already getting ahead of itself.

  ‘Flat white, I think,’ Bex says.

  ‘He asked for a flat white?’ she repeats, feeling dizzy, trying to buy herself time.

  ‘Like a latte only with less foam. Can’t see the point of them myself.’

  ‘I know what it is,’ she snaps. There’s no need to be short with Bex. She has gone out of her way to help her. It’s just that a flat white is what Kate usually has.

  ‘Rob only ever drinks espresso,’ she says. ‘A double. He’s a man of ridiculous habit.’

  She’s always teasing him about his routines, telling him he needs to let his hair down more often. In truth, she envies his discipline. She can’t seem to focus so well since the accident.

  ‘Maybe he fancied a change, I don’t know,’ Bex says. ‘It’s just a bloody cup of coffee, Kate.’

  But Kate can tell that she’s not convinced, that Rob’s choice has disconcerted Bex. Kate too.

  12

  Silas

  ‘This better be worth it,’ Detective Inspector Silas Hart says as Jake sits down opposite him in the café. Silas tries to avoid work at weekends, but his current in-tray at Swindon CID is making that difficult.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Jake says. ‘Bus from Marlborough was delayed.’

  ‘What sort of bestselling author travels by bus?’ Silas asks.

  It’s a cheap shot, below the belt. Silas was happy to help Jake with his books when he approached him a few years ago, assumed he’d soon become the Morse of Swindon. But it turns out his thrillers aren’t so bestselling after all. They’re not even published in English.

  Jake takes out a small padded envelope as a waitress comes up to ask if he’d like anything to eat. Silas is halfway through a bacon sandwich.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Jake says to the waitress.

  The guy really is broke. They haven’t met up for a while and, these days, when they do, they spend more time discussing rare birds than police procedure.

  ‘Get him a tea and a bacon sandwich,’ Silas says, turning to Jake. ‘On me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jake says sheepishly, and retrieves a small memory stick from the package. Jake is a big man, and his long hair and flecked beard make him look a bit wild. It’s a mystery how he manages to live on a narrowboat.

  ‘What’s on it?’ Silas asks.

  Jake swings his bag around, rummages through a mess of books and old newspapers and pulls out a battered laptop. Silas catches a whiff of diesel.

  ‘Is it suitable for public viewing?’ he asks, glancing around the café, one of his favourite greasy spoons. It’s in the town centre, near the courts, where he’s been most of this week for a human-trafficking trial. Until recently, Swindon’s nail bars weren’t really his sort of place. Now he’s got to know them well. Extensions, overlays, the lot.

  ‘There’s no sound,’ Jake says, but he still turns the cracked screen away from the middle of the café. All he’d said on his text was that he had been sent a video and it had something to do with his ex’s car accident. An RTA wouldn’t normally be the concern of Swindon CID, but Jake’s ex, Kate, is not a normal person. For a year before her road traffic accident, she worked for Silas as a super recogniser, identifying more criminals than the courts could cope with.

  ‘It’s the Bluebell, in Rockbourne.’

  Silas looks up at Jake at the mention of the Bluebell. The pub was recently flagged in an ongoing county lines heroin network. He peers more closely at the screen, wondering how Jake has managed to get hold of the pub’s CCTV feed. And what the hell Kate was doing there.

  ‘Look carefully,’ Jake says, as the barman fixes the drink. ‘See what he did, just before the ice went in?’

  Silas tears another bite off his bacon sandwich.

  ‘Watch it again now – it’s clearer from this angle.’ Jake adjusts the screen.

  Silas leans forward, mopping ketchup from his mouth with a paper napkin.

  ‘There.’

  Silas sees it. Something appears to go into the drink before the ice. But the footage is not conclusive.

  ‘She was exhausted,’ he says. ‘We’ve been through this.’ He scrutinised the RTA report carefully, made his own inquiries, tried not to dwell on how tired she was that night, how hard he’d been working her. How hard he’d worked everyone in the super-recogniser unit. ‘And she’d had a drink – she was right on the limit.’

  ‘Shame they weren’t looking for something else,’ Jake says. ‘A sedative of some kind. Her drink must have been spiked. Must have been. It would explain her falling asleep at the wheel.’

  Silas isn’t convinced. Not yet. He’s more interested in where the memory stick came from. ‘Who sent you this?’ he asks.

  ‘No idea.’ Jake turns the package over. ‘Just arrived this morning.’

  ‘And your mucky prints are all over it.’ Silas takes the package by one corner, as if he’s holding a fish by its tail. Whoever sent it to Jake knew to address it c/o the village post office.

  ‘I didn’t know what it was,’ Jake says.

  ‘We’ll take a look at it – if you’re happy to hand it in.’

  ‘Sure. I’ve made a copy.’

  Silas watches Jake take the stick out of his computer and drop it into the envelope that he’s holding out for him. ‘Do you hear from Kate much?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing.’ Jake looks down at his mug of tea. ‘I don’t even know where she’s living.’

  Silas took a personal interest in Kate’s recovery, visited her most days at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon, on his way to or from Gablecross police station. He also tried to stay in touch when she was discharged, but she wanted to cut all ties with him, her job, the force. With Jake too, it seems. The last he heard, she was living in seaside splendour somewhere on the south coast of Cornwall with a wealthy entrepreneur who does something clever in tech.

  ‘Everyone at the station misses her,’ he says. He knows it’s of little consolation.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘She was an extraordinary woman. Gifted.’

  They both fall quiet. Silas is saying all the wrong things today. Kate is the only reason why he’s prepared to forgive Jake for his poor book sales. It was Jake who introduced Kate to him in the first place. Brought her remarkable talent to the force’s attention.

  ‘I’ll check out the video,’ he says, watching enviously as the waitress puts Jake’s bacon sandwich in front of him. He still marvels at his own short-lived vegan phase last year. ‘Let you know what we find.’

  ‘If it wasn’t an accident, if someone was trying to harm Kate…’ Jake pauses, eyes welling at the thought. ‘… was it because of the work she did for you? It was in the news again yesterday.’

  Silas hesitates. He’s asked himself the same question many times, particularly this last week while he was sitting in court watching a modern slavery gang being sent down for a total of thirty-three years. The original arrests were made by his team, almost entirely as a result of Kate’s exceptional work for the police. It was one reason why he went to such lengths at the time to reassure himself about the circumstances of her accident.

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ he says, but the discovery that Kate visited the Bluebell on the night of her accident worries him. At the time, Silas and his unit were investigating possible links between modern-slavery and county-lines gangs in Swindon. The Bluebell was under suspicion, but there was no hard evidence of a connection.

  He looks up at Jake, who’s wolfing down his bacon sandwich. The thought of someone targeting Kate, a decent, ordinary human being who happened to have an almost superhuman gift, sends a shiver through him.

  13

  Kate

  The flat white at Kate’s favourite café in the village doesn’t taste the same as usual. It’s not the coffee, or the artistic way it’s been prepared, and she can hardly complain about the al fresco venue, looking out across the beach and harbour. It’s the thought of Rob ordering one. She knows it’s just a bloody cup of coffee, as Bex says, but he’s never had a flat white in all the time they’ve been together. Why start now?

  She pulls out her phone and listens to his voicemail message:

  ‘Just ringing to check you’re OK. I’m at Paddington, about to head over to the office. Wish I was still with you in Cornwall. I’m so glad it went well with Dr Varma. Don’t worry, your pictures will be hanging in the National Portrait Gallery soon – I just know it. Be careful and, you know, sorry I had to bail. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

  It sounds like Rob, always telling her to be careful, ever optimistic about her art. She smiles to herself, glancing along the line of other customers. There’s only one outside table, a long, wooden bar from where you can look down onto the busy beach below. She needs to stop worrying. She’s got so much to be grateful for. At the far end of the table, a pair of binoculars has been provided by the café for admiring the view – or the tanned bodies on the beach. ‘Perv-oculars’, as Rob calls them. Everyone’s perched on chrome bar stools and Stretch is at her feet, his lead tangled around one of the legs. She realises how hungry she is. Bex is always moaning that she eats like a horse and never seems to put on weight. Must be her metabolism. Glancing at the man next to her, she abandons Stretch and her half-drunk coffee and goes to buy some flapjack from the café.

  When she comes back, Stretch is whining and the man has gone. She slips Stretch a piece of flapjack, finishes her coffee and leaves, chatting with some people at the café counter on her way out.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she says to her friend Mark, who runs the gallery around the corner. He’s got a dog too and she leaves Stretch and her phone with him whenever she goes for a swim. She’s wearing her costume underneath her jeans and heads down to the beach, where she strips off and plunges into the crowded waves. She likes to swim out to the floating platform, about fifty yards offshore. At Rob’s suggestion, she’s been swimming most days. Another healer, like art.

  She makes her way through playing families and into deeper, calmer waters, wishing Rob was with her. They had fun last weekend, swimming at the secret cove. Happy days – before she started to have these doubts. She’s just being silly about the coffee, over-analysing everything. It’s good to be out here. The sea is crystal clear, shoals of silver fish passing below her, glistening as they twist and turn through shards of slanting sunshine. Below them, translucent jellyfish pulse hypnotically.

  And then her calves begin to tighten up. Shit. Cramp.

  She swims on towards the platform, only twenty yards away now, trying not to kick too hard. It’s happened before. Nothing to worry about if she just relaxes and stretches. But it’s not going away. Treading water, she stops to bend down and massage the cramping muscles. A spasm shoots up her left leg and she cries out involuntarily, swallowing seawater. She coughs and gulps for air, panic rising. And then the other leg goes, a bolt of excruciating pain that doubles her up. She’s in trouble here. This is the worst cramp she’s ever had.

  She tries to call out to a group of bronzed teenagers who are now pushing each other off the platform, but she’s coughing too much, desperate for air. The teenagers don’t seem to hear her. She shouts again, thrashing about in the water as she tries to get their attention. She can’t breathe. Each time her head goes under, she sinks further down into the deep before somehow coming back to the surface. This time though she’s too far under, losing consciousness. She knows she won’t make it back up. She’s dropping, further and further.

  And all she can think of is Jake brewing tea in their tent in the rain.

  14

  Jake

  Jake asks the bus driver to stop at Ogbourne St George on his way back from seeing DI Hart in Swindon. Five minutes later, he’s walking the Ridgeway, a kestrel hovering in the warm currents up ahead of him. His destination is the Bluebell at Rockbourne, a village two miles to the east, where he thinks Kate stopped off that night to have a drink. A photo of the bar on the pub’s website matches the interior on the CCTV footage.

  It’s good to be back on the ancient route, which covers some of the most remote parts of the North Wessex Downs. Soon after they met, he and Kate completed all eighty-seven miles of it with old friends of hers, walking a different section each weekend. Vast open skies, rolling chalk downlands, Iron Age forts and lively conversation. It’s the chats he misses most. Kate was a great listener.

  Jake sets off at a decent pace, the wind in his long hair, knowing that there’s a drink at the other end. He’s got just enough cash for a pint. He should leave the pub to DI Hart, but he wants to talk to the barman himself, see the place Kate visited on her way home. He’s been over that last night so many times, blaming himself for the accident, for initially arranging the police job. If he earned more as a writer, she could have stayed a portrait painter. And then there was his tryst, caught on camera.

  He considers again the footage he was sent. Is it really proof that someone wanted to harm Kate? The police insisted her crash was an accident. She should have kept her head down when she got the job as a super recogniser, not done any media interviews, but hers was a remarkable story: ‘The Woman Who Can’t Forget a Face’. And when she started identifying criminals, lots of them, the force couldn’t resist the good publicity. This week, they’ve been at it again. At least Kate’s name hasn’t been mentioned in the newspaper court reports.

  Half an hour later, Jake is at the Bluebell in Rockbourne, propping up the empty bar with a pint in his hands. It’s a traditional no-frills country pub: low-beamed ceilings, beer barrels behind the bar. All floorboards and blackboards and a no-nonsense landlady. And he’s definitely been here before, when he was walking the Ridgeway with Kate and their friends all those years ago. It’s not how he remembers it and, annoyingly, the barman on duty is not the person in the CCTV footage.

  ‘Don’t suppose you remember seeing a friend of mine in here a while back?’ Jake asks him, pulling out a photo of Kate.

  ‘No, mate,’ the barman says, shaking his head.

  The landlady comes over to look at the photo.

  ‘Never seen her before,’ she says dismissively.

  Jake’s sure the pub wasn’t this unfriendly when they stopped by on their walk.

  ‘Who’s asking?’ the barman says, watching the landlady disappear out the back.

  Jake clocks a further hardening of tone. ‘She’s an old friend, that’s all,’ he says.

  ‘Left you swinging in the wind?’ The barman grins. His teeth aren’t great.

  ‘You could say that.’

  Jake is overwhelmed with a sudden urge to confront this man, challenge him about Kate’s spiked drink, the terrible consequences. He knows something, even if he’s not the barman in the video.

  Picking up his pint, Jake moves over to a corner table in case he does something stupid. Kate must have stopped off here to decompress after work, make the switch before joining him on the boat. She was drinking a lot by the end of their relationship. So was he. Maybe she came here more than once.

  He glances around the pub, at the camera above the door, the one next to the optics behind the bar. A lot of security for a quiet country pub. And a strange place for Kate to visit on her own.

  He’s about to leave when the barman comes over to clean the adjacent table. He’s then at Jake’s table, unnecessarily wiping down its spotless surface.

  ‘If you’re a journalist, you need to fuck off,’ the man says under his breath, still wiping.

  ‘I’m not a journalist,’ Jake says, sipping from his pint. ‘And I’m not fucking off anywhere.’

  He feels a sudden surge of adrenaline. When he was a cub crime reporter, his boss told him to always push back at the first opportunity.

  ‘Who are you, then?’ the barman asks.

  ‘I write books. Crime thrillers.’

  ‘Should I have heard of you?’

  Jake hesitates before telling him his name. ‘Big in Finland,’ he adds, trying to lighten the mood.

  Was it a mistake to reveal his name? He’s carrying a little extra around the middle these days, but he’s more than capable of looking after himself.