IF IT BLEEDS

DI OLIVIA AUSTIN - BOOK FORTY

NIC ROBERTS

Copyright © 2024 by Nic Roberts

‘If It Bleeds’

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Some may be used for parody purposes.

Any resemblance to events, locales, business establishments, or actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

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PROLOGUE

In some ways, what was about to happen was always going to happen. If anything, she was surprised it’d taken this long for karma to catch up to her.

She’d set out that night with the best of intentions. She’d rehearsed the words in her head over and over. I know I’ve hurt you… Even if she still had trouble believing them.

The time they’d spent together was beautiful, and she wanted him to see that. Instead, she’d been punished and scrutinised by everyone she knew and had lost everything as a result.

She’d had to pick her moment carefully to come and see him. She knew that his sister would skin her alive if she knew of her intentions to come and visit.

The meeting hadn’t gone down as expected. Rather than looking back on their time together with nostalgia-tinged fondness, he’d been disgusted that she’d come anywhere near him and had no hesitation in threatening to call the police, leaving her with nothing else to do but to walk to the nearest pub to drown her sorrows.

She should have been suspicious of a complete stranger offering to buy her drinks, but given how she’d been treated like a social pariah before, it felt nice to have someone pay her some attention for once in a while. Okay, so the guy offering her drinks was maybe a little old for her taste, but it wasn’t like she could afford to be picky.

And so she’d downed drink after drink, stating at length about how the whole world hated her.

Once her mind and tongue were considerably loosened, she started talking about the unfairness of it all and how people were still judging her for who she was rather than who she was now.

Then her new friend asked her if she was really still that person, if she hadn’t really changed. And she was reluctant to admit that despite the frequent show of remorse that she’d been forced to put on, she still harboured the same desires as before.

It was then she started feeling lightheaded, which took her by surprise. Normally, she was used to being a steady drinker, knocking back at least five glasses of red wine before she started to wobble.

Her new companion, ever the gentleman, helped her out of the pub and into a taxi… Wait, it wasn’t a taxi. It looked far too personal for it to be a taxi.

She stumbled into the backseat, not bothering to put a seatbelt on. Then she saw her Samaritan get into the passenger seat and wave a bottle of something at her. At first, she thought it was another drink. But no, it looked far too small to be a drink bottle.

More like a pill bottle.

Somewhere deep inside her, she could feel a sense of alarm and panic, but it was muted by the booze. It was the last thing that raced through her mind before her head lulled and she passed out.

When she next woke up, she would be in hell.

Coming to, she should have been feeling terror, but there was a strange sense of calm. Maybe it was the drink—or was it drugs that were still in her system?

She was realising what was happening to her. That this was a reckoning.

It turned out that she wasn’t done paying for her sins.

But her captor wasn’t going to let her off easy. That would be too kind.

She began hearing words. Talk about letting the punishment fit the crime… This made her shudder, considering the crime she was accused of.

1

“It’s not too late to call the Domino guy back again, is it?” Liv joked as she watched her sister wolf down another slice of Margherita pizza.

“I’m pregnant,” Mills replied with a full mouth. “I’m allowed to indulge myself a little.”

“You don’t say,” Tara noted dryly, looking at the stack of boxes.

Liv and Mills had met up before going around to Alex and Tara’s flat for a pizza night.

Mills was nearing the end of her pregnancy and only had a few weeks to go. Liv had already agreed to be her birthing partner and was now praying that she wasn’t going to be interrupted on a case before the baby came. Alex and Tara had already done a painstaking job of fixing up the nursery for the new arrival. She would have liked to have been a part of that, but the team had been short-staffed ever since the departure of Detective Sergeant Nikki Harding, who’d taken a secondment to Derby for a few months. She hoped that it wouldn’t be permanent. There was an emptiness in the office that had yet to be filled.

“Luckily, Max has really stepped up,” Mills explained, easing herself onto the sofa, her ankles slightly swollen. “He’s really taken care of me and made sure I’ve had all my favourite foods. Of course, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I can’t use the excuse that I’m eating for two.”

Before Liv could chime in with a comment of her own, her phone began to ring. “Hello?”

“Sorry to disturb you at home, ma’am, but we’ve had a body found,” a voice from dispatch came through.

“Dead?” she asked, trying not to be annoyed that she was going to be dragged from the tranquil family setting. Why tonight of all fucking nights? Is the latest bastard timing his killing just so he can intefere with my private life?

“There’s no question about it,” the voice replied.

“Okay, I’m on my way. Make sure DS Elmhurst is en route.” Archie was a reliable DS and wouldn’t mind pulling himself away for the sake of the job. She waited as the address was provided before turning apologetically to the family. “Sorry, guys, I’ve got to take this…”

She’d spent a full minute apologising for being pulled away before she headed out and began navigating the streets.

As much as she loved her job, she hated that it was stealing away peaceful moments from her family.

When Liv arrived at the scene, there was something familiar about the house. It was like her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but she could never forget this house.

“Liv, maybe you’ll want to proceed with caution,” Archie suggested as he walked up to her. “I’m saying this as your friend first and foremost.”

And then it all clicked into place for Liv. Of course.

This was the home of Deedee Madden—or Delilah Hart as Liv had known her when she’d confronted her.

Back when Alex was still missing, she’d been following the few breadcrumbs left behind. They’d led right to the front door of Delilah Hart, a Maths teacher at the school Liv and her siblings had attended. Liv had discovered that not only had Mrs Hart taken advantage of Alex and had a relationship with him, but she’d also had him father a child with her, Liv’s own nephew Daniel. It’d been the first case that she and Archie had worked together and they had forged the strong bond they now shared.

“What the hell are we doing here?” Liv asked, wondering if the disgraced teacher had been somehow able to resume her predatory ways. She hadn’t heard anything about Mrs Hart since her arrest for inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.

They walked towards the house where they could see some of the police constables speaking to the neighbours, clearly trying to work out what they’d seen.

Liv walked through the doorway for the first time in three years, shuddering as she recalled the urge to throttle the woman who’d believed that she and Alex were a part of some beautiful love story. Even now, there was a part of her that would have killed the woman if she laid eyes on her.

But when she got into the living room, she found that somebody had beaten her to it.

Delilah Hart seemed to have visibly aged since Liv had last seen her, her hair streaked with grey and her clothes hanging loosely off her body.

She’d been strangled, thick purple bruises forming around her neck. But before the killer had had the chance to murder her, he’d needed to immobilise her.

And compared to all the other methods of restraint Liv had seen on prior cases, this was by far on the grislier end of the scale.

Somebody had cut the tendons in Mrs Hart’s wrists and ankles, ensuring that she couldn’t move, and then strangled the life from her.

“Is there any sign of forced entry?” Liv asked, getting up and looking about the place. Aside from the body on the floor, the place already looked like it was devoid of life, as though Mrs Hart hadn’t put any real investment into living. Not that she fucking deserved it.

“As far as we can tell, there were no break-ins,” Archie replied, glancing to the front door. “We’ll have the forensic team check the handle for fingerprints, but it looks like the killer could have easily let themself in.”

Speculations were racing through her mind, but any sense of protocol and procedure was being washed away by the personal embitterment she felt for the woman. It was just as well there was no next of kin to console because she didn’t think she could muster the necessary sympathy.

“You sure you want to take this?” Archie asked, remembering his own revulsion for the woman who had been convinced that she’d done nothing wrong.

“I’m fine, I promise you,” she muttered, chiding herself for being barely convincing. Got to work on that poker face, Austin.

“There’s no shame in handing this off to another officer,” Archie suggested, looking back on the time when he and Olivia were slightly at loggerheads and he was unaware of the pain she was carrying around on a daily basis.

“When have I ever shied away from a case because of personal connections?” she asked rhetorically.

“You don’t have any thoughts on the victim?” Archie asked, gesturing to the body lying on the ground.

There was a part of Liv that felt she’d got what she deserved. That the killer might have done everybody a favour. But she knew that wasn’t who she was meant to be as a police officer. So, she tried to make that part as small as possible. She knew the only reason she was feeling like this was because of the familial connection. If this were any other case, she’d be chasing down the killer.

But then another thought occurred to her.

“Are the press anywhere near this?” Liv asked, looking outside and seeing a few members of the neighbourhood holding up camera phones and wondering if there were any paparazzi among them.

Whatever time the Newquay police had that wasn’t spent on ongoing cases was devoted to finding the leak that had been plaguing the station for the past few months. Everyone in the unit had become increasingly candid, now painstakingly choosing every single word they said lest it end up on some trashy news website.

And if anyone knew of her personal connection to the victim, she knew that it’d end up being the worst kind of clickbait.

“Does anyone know about the woman’s prior convictions, more specifically, who was involved?” Liv asked, also hoping to keep Alex’s name out of it. This was supposed to be a time of celebration for their family with new life on the way, and it didn’t need interrupting by some smarmy prick looking to score a headline.

I’ll find you, you bastard.

2

PC Katie Gibson looked around the area, her nerves fraught. It wasn't because of the grisly murder that'd taken place. She liked to think she'd seen enough bodies in her time to build up resilience.

This was major news, the death of a convicted sex offender. She knew that when the story hit, there wouldn’t be any mourning, but there’d be a lot of interest in who had had the courage to do what they’d all been thinking about.

If this murder had taken place a month prior, she’d be all over it, trying to find ways in which she could gather much info as possible and get it back to her editor.

But then again, a month ago, she hadn’t endangered the life of a child.

When Detective Sergeant Nikki Harding’s husband was cited to be a suspect in the town centre bombing, it was a dream come true for Katie, the kind of scandal that she could have milked for years to come, and she had no issue with dragging the service through the mud.

But Nikki’s husband Enzo had seen the article, and one step ahead of everyone else, he’d abducted their daughter Francesca and threatened to make off with her if the case against him wasn’t dropped. Katie would later hear from Andrew about how Liv and Nikki had stormed the building where Enzo had been hiding and had barely made it out with the little girl before the explosives Enzo had been holding were set off and the explosion had claimed his life.

Shortly after the incident, DS Harding had accepted a six-month secondment to Derby to get her head together and find out what she wanted moving forward.

Katie couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief, knowing how ferocious DS Harding could be. She would have probably torn the whole station down trying to find the source of the leak that had endangered her daughter.

But that didn’t stop the guilt from nesting deep inside her. She tried to think of a million justifications for why that night had played out the way it did. How Enzo had been the one to abduct the child, and DI Austin and DS Harding had marched in there, guns blazing. But the truth of the matter was that none of it would have happened if she hadn’t had had the story run. Her actions had led to the abduction and near death of a child.

Katie was having sleepless nights as a result, constantly thinking about how things could have played out so differently. The child could have died, and it would have been all her fault.

In fact, after she’d got the news that DS Harding was getting a transfer, she’d been on the phone to her editor. “Listen, I want out.”

“Out?” Greg repeated, the word sounding so foreign on his lips. “What do you mean ‘out?’”

“I can’t keep doing this,” she replied, knowing she was taking a risk in phoning whilst at the station but aware that if she waited until she got back to the comfort of her own home, she might find excuses to not make the call. “A child almost got killed because of me.”

“That’s nothing to do with you,” Greg assured her, though his tone was less reassuring and more ‘get over it’. “The little girl didn’t die anyway, so I don’t see why you’re getting so worked up.”

Katie wondered how she could tell him that she’d started thinking about all of the people she might have endangered as a result of her fishing for stories. She was seeing them less as background characters in a story and more as real-life people who were at risk of having their lives ruined.

But that was what she’d been doing all along. It brought her previous work into a new and ugly focus. She started thinking about how many lives had been ruined by the pieces she’d run.

“I don’t know if what we’re doing is right,” Katie muttered, the words sounding distant to her. She took a look at herself in the police car window and found she didn’t like what she saw.

“I don’t know if you’ve really thought this through,” Greg said calmly, no hint of panic in his voice. “Let’s say you pull out now. That would mean telling everyone about what has been happening, what you’ve been doing. Now, at the moment, the material you’ve been giving me has been great, top-notch, really brought in a lot of readers… but it’s not national level. We’re not talking the kind of stuff that would be Netflix-worthy. We need something big as much for your sake as anyone else’s.”

“Why’s that?” Katie asked, trying to keep the alarm out of her voice.

“They could come after you for playing the part of a copper,” the editor replied matter-of-factly. “And at the moment, if they do it now, you will be left wide open. In the eyes of everyone, you’ll just be another troublemaker stirring the shitpot. But if you put out the kind of story that displays police incompetence at its finest—maybe even a bit of corruption—then they won’t be able to touch you. Glass houses and all that.”

Katie wanted to remind Greg that he’d been the one who had forced her into that position in the first place, but she held her tongue.

“But if we can get the kind of story that will really shake up the system, then they won’t be able to get you no matter what. As far as the public will be concerned, you will be the woman who courageously ventured into the lion’s den to uncover the truth.”

“That’s a very generous way of looking at it, Greg,” she replied. “Whether people will buy into it is another story.”

“Katie, we work in media,” he muttered nonchalantly. “We don’t need to prove it, we just need to post it. When this is over, you’re going to get the respect and adoration you deserve. Let me put it to you like this. What if Ronan Farrow had dedicated the best years of his career to constantly second-guessing himself? Just think of the reputation he wouldn’t have had.”

Katie thought it typical not to mention that he’d used a male example, but she bit her lip.

“Just hang in there for a little bit longer,” he pleaded. “This will all be worth it in the long run.”

Katie felt it was going to be a long time before she agreed with that.

Liv found herself checking the time on her phone. 10:37pm. She wondered how many hours of sleep she could fit in before she needed to be back at the station for the morning briefing. Regardless of who the victim was, she didn’t want to force her way through a case feeling fatigued.

But she still had the door-to-door to worry about.

“Did you manage to get anything out of anybody?” Liv asked PC Andrew Shaw, who’d taken charge of interviewing the neighbours.

“Sadly, no one's seen anything,” Andrew muttered with a disheartened shrug. “Seems they were all either heading to bed early or wrapped up in a soap.”

“Did anyone know much about her?” Liv asked, wondering if people had been sick and tired of the prospect of living next to a convicted sex offender, assuming she hadn’t been working overtime in trying to bury the past.

“They barely paid much attention to her,” he noted, well aware of the family history and having no shame in his scorn for her. “She went out and came back with a load of shopping. That was it. Pretty much kept to herself. And yes, I did ask whether she had any visitors, adult…” He grimaced, trying to find the right words. “...or younger.”

Well, at least I know she’s not been bringing anybody home.

“You going to tell Alex or Daniel?” Andrew queried cautiously, well aware of how inflammatory he was sounding.

“Hell, no,” she replied before he’d even finished speaking. “They’ve got enough to deal with without worrying about that twisted bitch fucking off to Hell.”

“Don’t forget that that twisted bitch is the mother of his child,” Andrew replied. “I’m certainly not saying that she deserves any sympathy, but I think they at least need to know what is happening.” When she went silent, he added, “If it’s too uncomfortable for you to do, I can always step in and…”

“No worries,” Liv mustered, knowing she should be grateful that her friend was standing by her through thick and thin. “This is something I need to do myself. But thanks anyway.”

3

As she pulled into work the next morning, Liv wondered how she was going to broach that difficult subject.

She knew she couldn’t hold it off forever, not when there was a murder investigation sweeping through the town. But she felt that both Alex and Daniel had gone through so much pain that they deserved a bit of peace.

They say that time heals all wounds… How is Alex supposed to heal if he keeps having it all dragged back into the present again?

Tara had been good for him, helped to stabilise him, even with her own mental health struggles. And with Mills’ second child just around the corner, Olivia wanted to avoid plunging the Austin family into any more grief.

She pushed the thoughts of her family aside—as well as the thoughts of her strangling the bitch herself—as she stood before the row of officers sat down. Even as she looked at the sea of expectant faces, her eyes couldn’t help but drift over to the vacant chair of DS Nikki Harding. She half-expected the sergeant to cut through the professionalism with some smart-arse comment. Liv had to keep reminding herself that Nikki wasn’t dead, but her absence still weighed heavily on the team.

“Right, everyone,” she began, gesturing to a picture of Delilah Hart on the board. “Our victim has gone through several names. Deedee Maddon was the name I knew her by…” She corrected herself, trying to remain professional. “...but she has also been known by Delilah Hart. From what we’ve gathered, she was recently released from prison after serving time for coercing sex with students.” She said the words quickly, not wanting to fixate on Alex’s abuse. “She’s been living alone in her old house. No known close acquaintances.” She was conscious of talking about her nephew in the same vein.

Archie cleared his throat before speaking. “Given her status as a sex offender, do you think it’s possible that this could be a vigilante killing?”

A few heads nodded in agreement, and Liv couldn’t help but wonder if this was their way of communicating ‘she got what she deserved.’

“Well, it is a possibility I’m not looking to rule out,” Liv replied, knowing that if it was indeed someone taking the law into their own hands, they’d have better luck finding somebody who didn’t want the woman dead. “Archie and I are going to speak to Elliot about the post-mortem and see if that turns anything up for us.”

“Tim, I want you working with Nikki…” She stopped herself, remembering that Nikki wasn’t around to field requests. “...I want you working with Clara to see if you can find any online traces of Mrs Hart, websites she might have visited, people she might have hooked up with.”

“I’m on it,” Tim Harris replied eagerly, getting from his seat and leaving for Clara’s workstation.

“Just one more thing, everyone,” the inspector added, prompting Tim to stop in his tracks. “As I’m sure you’re aware, we still haven’t been able to plug the leak that’s been bothering us. We’ve been trying everything, but so far, nothing solid has turned up. I’m starting to get the impression that either he’s really smart or we’re getting stupid.”

“It’s a shame we don’t have Nikki with us,” Tim commented, clearly wanting to say what they’d be all thinking. “Newquay can be a very small place when that woman is pissed off with you.”

“Well, that’s one reason why we need to find the leak,” Liv insisted. “For Nikki’s sake more than anything.” If it weren’t for that selfish bastard, she’d still be here working alongside us. “But her daughter was put in danger because of this man, and we owe it to her to get to the bottom of how that happened. Now, you all have your responsibilities, so let’s get to it.”

As everyone got up from their desks, Liv went over to Collins’ office and knocked on the door. He was staring at the screen on his tablet almost absentmindedly.

“Everything all right, DI Austin?” he asked, and she recalled a memory of him scrambling to look professional after a brief tryst with DS Harding.

“Yes, we’re just about to proceed with the investigation,” she noted, and when she got no further response from him, she decided to press on. “Have you spoken to Nikki yet?”

When Nikki had left Newquay, the atmosphere between her and her superior officer had been frosty at best. When Nikki’s husband Enzo had been unveiled as a suspect, Collins had made the difficult decision not to pull Nikki’s daughter Francesca out of nursery to avoid alerting the killer. And when Enzo had abducted the girl, Collins had been beside himself. People had tried to tell Nikki that it wasn’t his fault over what had happened, but it clearly hurt the superintendent to know that after spending so long relying on the sergeant for comfort, what could be their last face-to-face interaction was laced with anger and regret.

“I don’t think she really blames you,” the inspector offered, closing the door behind her. “You know Nikki. She’s just hurting, and when she’s had time to cool down, she’ll understand it wasn’t your fault.”

“But it was,” Collins replied glumly. “The child could have died that night because I was more concerned with catching her father. I have kids of my own, Olivia, and yet it never occurred to me what I might be putting Nikki and her daughter through. I’ve made a lot of stupid decisions in my career, but if there’s one I’d absolutely take back, it would be that one. I don’t expect her to forgive me. I’m having a hard time forgiving myself.”

Liv thought about her brother, who’d spent so long riddled with guilt over some of the things he’d done as a member of a cult.

“You aren’t responsible for what happened,” Liv insisted, wishing she could play that in a loop in the man’s head for the next twenty years. “And if Nikki’s as smart as we all know she is, then she’ll work that out herself.”

Liv and Archie made their way through the sterile facilities that Dr Elliot James made use of. It was moments like this where she appreciated his professional detachment. A body was a body at the end of the day, and he didn’t let himself get dragged into the background.

“Tell me you’ve got something for us, Elliot,” Liv pleaded, knowing that the first few hours of any case were crucial. And this was one case that she did not want lasting forever.

“If you’re expecting a roadmap that will lead directly to the killer’s doorstep, sadly, no,” Elliot replied dryly, looking down at the woman. “Cause of death was excessive ligature compression.” He gestured to the bruises around the neck. “I’ve got to say, they were putting so much pressure on the woman’s throat, I’m amazed they didn’t outright decapitate her. But given the amount of blood loss from the wrists and Achilles’ tendons, she was definitely alive when those were cut.”

It’s like they really wanted her to know how fucked she was.

“But I’m not sure if she was killed in her own home,” Elliot added, prompting confused looks from the detectives. “Assuming she was bleeding out, there should have been a lot more blood at the scene.”

“Is there any indication of where she might have been killed?” Archie asked, hopefully.

“No, but I did have a look at her stomach contents,” Elliot replied, holding up a clipboard. “Her last meal consisted of a Chinese takeaway—and don’t ask me to pinpoint the exact takeaway because I certainly couldn’t tell you. But she had several glasses of wine, and from the looks of it, she was really knocking them back… and I also found traces of Xanax.”

“Xanax?” the sergeant asked.

“Yes, so someone must have drugged her beforehand, possibly even putting it in the wine,” the doctor continued. “I don’t think she was force fed.”

“We’ll have to check which bars she might have frequented,” Archie suggested just as Liv’s phone started to ring.

“Come on, Clara, give me some good news,” she pleaded.

“DS Harris and I have been looking at the laptop computer recovered from Mrs Hart’s house…” she began, sounding excited. Clara’s eagerness always spilled out when she was onto something. “We think she’d lined up another target.”

4

Olivia and Archie made their way back to the main station where Clara and Tim were perched around the workstation. Even though Clara was only meant to be a civilian officer, she’d more than proved her worth time and time again. Liv had lost count of the number of cases that they would have been unable to crack were it not for the diligence of the dreadlocked technician.

“So, start at the beginning. Tell me everything you know,” Liv demanded.

“Well, I had a look through her computer,” Clara responded, not taking her eyes off the screen. “For the most part, it’s just been online shopping. She’s led a fairly isolated and low-key life.”

“It’s no more than what she deserves,” Liv exclaimed before realising she’d said her thought out loud. “Sorry, carry on.”

“So, she’s been going on these chats, looking for hookups,” Clara explained, opening up a chat that looked like no reputable social network to any of the detectives present.

“I think we’re definitely moving out of the realms of Facebook,” Archie muttered, putting his hand over his mouth in preparation.

The chat on the computer was signed in as user ‘M1lfKitten47’. “Jesus Christ, who comes up with these names?” Tim exclaimed, turning away from the screen.

“Someone with a very sick imagination,” Liv muttered.

The chat was sent out to a user called ‘Studman14’. “Please tell me that’s not the user’s actual age,” Archie pleaded.

“Apparently, this chat is used for illicit conversations, the kind firmly in the route of immoral and most likely illegal.”

All present wondered how someone as sweet-natured as Clara could muster the mental energy to look through such depraved chats and still come out with her mental health intact.

The conversation started out innocent enough with Mrs Hart having asked the user what they were up to and the respondent saying that they were reading some literary book. She made the comment that the book sounded a little advanced for a boy of his age, to which he replied that he was quite mature for his age, and the detectives resisted the urge to vomit when she came back with, “I’m sure you are.”

They engaged in banter that got increasingly flirty and grotesque before Mrs Hart asked about possibly meeting in person, giving the address for a local cafe.

“We’ve got to get down to that cafe,” Liv insisted, looking through the chat for any more details and recording the date and time before scarpering off again.

When they arrived at the cafe, they immediately took in the small, cramped area, noting that no one was likely to get a good look inside. That’s probably why she picked the venue. She didn’t want to make herself too visible.

Even though she despised the woman, Liv had still held out hope that maybe she would at the very least stop trying to hurt young people. But instead, she was just finding new ways to make old mistakes.

She walked up to the till and noticed a visible layer of grease. Liv gave Archie a reassuring look as if to say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not ordering anything from here.’

“Can I get you anything?” a young woman in her early twenties asked, looking like she’d long since come to terms with the less than stellar conditions that she was working in, with only the paycheque keeping her there.

“Actually, we wanted to ask you about a woman who visited here about two days ago,” Liv asked, taking out a picture of Delilah Hart’s mugshot and handing it to the waitress.

The waitress studied it intently. “Yes, I’ve actually seen her in here a few times before.” She noticed how the picture was framed. “Is she supposed to be some kind of criminal?”

Liv and Archie looked at each other, trying to weigh up the pros and cons of revealing Mrs Hart’s sex offender status. While nothing would give Liv greater pleasure than dragging the woman’s name through the mud, the last thing she wanted was word getting out and the case turning into a pointless witch hunt.

“She was murdered last night, and we’re trying to trace her latest movements,” Archie replied, able to play the neutral party. And then he asked the question that Liv didn’t dare ask. “I don’t suppose you know if she came in here alone, do you?”

“She did,” the waitress replied. “Though she clearly wasn’t expecting to be alone. She was dressed to the nines, looking like she wanted to impress someone, but she was definitely going overboard, like she was trying to make herself look two decades younger. So I figured that her date must have been a bit younger than her.”

You have no idea.

“So, nobody turned up?” Liv asked, knowing that it could cost a potential lead but hoping that a young boy would have at least averted an abusive encounter.

“No,” the waitress replied, not picking up on the detectives’ boundless relief. “She stayed sitting for the better part of half an hour waiting for someone to turn up. I ended up feeling sorry for her and gave her a coffee on the house.”

“That’s kind of you,” Archie acknowledged, though Liv figured the young woman wouldn’t have been quite so charitable if she’d known why Mrs Hart was in the first place.

“After thirty minutes, she took out a phone and made a call,” the waitress continued. “At first, I thought she was talking to her man, but from the way she was talking, it was definitely an ex-lover.”

“Did you manage to hear anything they were saying to each other?” Liv asked on tenterhooks.

“She kept on saying that he knew he probably wouldn’t want to hear from her again, but she refused to believe that their time together was a mistake. That she loved him and would always love him. She also said that they’d brought a beautiful baby boy into the world, and nothing could change that.”

Liv felt her gut tighten. “I beg your pardon?”

“She said that they’d had a child, and though they couldn’t have enjoyed the typical family, they would always have that connection between them,” the waitress replied, starting to grow nervous by the inspector’s visible change in demeanour.

“Did you manage to get a name for the person on the line?” Archie asked, knowing that the answer could potentially send the walls of his partner’s carefully constructed psyche crashing down.

“Yes, she kept on calling him Alexander.”

And just like that, the walls imploded.

Liv knew that Mrs Hart had often referred to her brother by his full name, and the sound of his name on her mouth couldn’t be a coincidence. Without another word to the waitress, she stormed out of the cafe. Archie offered a fleeting, “Thank you very much for your help,” and followed after her.

“Liv, before you go doing… whatever it is you do when you’re pissed off, do you think we could discuss it?” Archie asked as she strode towards the car. “You know, like partners?” he added sarcastically.

“That call was meant to be two days ago,” Liv replied as she got into the driver’s seat. “I saw Alex last night, and at no point did he mention any kind of altercation with his former teacher.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to think about it,” Archie suggested. “It would mean bringing up memories he’d rather forget.”

“But I’m his sister,” she exclaimed, hoping that their relationship had healed to the point that he could tell her anything and she would listen. “The only way he would keep this quiet would be if he had something to hide.”

“You want to be very careful with what you’re saying, Liv,” Archie warned, and Liv could see his point. Depending on what they found out, Liv’s brother could end up being a suspect in a murder investigation. It’s like the nightmare will never fucking end.

5

Liv and Archie drove to Alex’s workplace and waited in the reception area for him to come down. Rather than say it was police business and risk ruining Alex’s reputation with his employers, Liv just stated that it was a family emergency. Which isn’t technically a lie.

Alex came rushing down the stairs, a look of panic on his eyes. “What is it? Has something happened to Mills?”

“No, she’s all right, I promise you,” Liv replied, feeling a little guilty for her wording but not seeing any other options. “We need to talk, ideally outside.”

“Can it wait?” Alex asked, pointing to the stairs. “I’ve got a mountain of work that I need to get through.”

“Sorry, Alex, but we need to have this conversation, preferably outside, unless you want prying ears listening in,” the inspector insisted.

Alex backed away a little. “Are you here as a copper or my sister?”

“Bit of both. Now, come on.” They walked out of the building and towards the fire exit.

“So, what’s this about?” he asked, looking more and more nervous.

“Why didn’t you tell us that Delilah Hart had contacted you?” Liv asked, and his face froze up.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied in an unconvincing stammer.

“Alex, we know that she contacted you recently,” Liv answered. “She had your number in your fucking phone…”

“You think I wanted her number?” Alex snapped, taking the two by surprise. “You think I wanted that bitch living in my head rent-free? She was stalking me! Sending me letters, trying to get me to talk to her. She even tricked one of the staff members here into giving her my number. She even turned up at the fucking flat two nights ago!”

Olivia’s eyes widened. “She was at your flat?”

“Yes, Tara went to answer the door and there she was. I told Tara that she was just a saleswoman and that I’d deal with it. So we stepped outside and talked.”

“And how did the conversation progress?” Archie asked.

“She told me that she thought about me every day, that what we had was something special and that nothing could take that away from us. She needed to hear me say those words,” Alex explained, getting choked up as he spoke.

“Please God, tell me that she didn’t want to pick up where you left off,” Liv asked, wondering if the woman’s shame knew no boundaries.

“Of course not,” her brother said. “I think by that point I was too old for her taste.”

I’m not sure whether to feel reassured by that.

“So, if she didn’t want to go back to the way things were,” Archie asked slowly, keeping an even tone and hoping Liv would be encouraged to do the same, “then why did she want to meet up with you?”

“She hadn’t been long released from prison,” Alex explained, slumping against the wall as he spoke. “She said that she was trying to make a fresh go at it, but no matter what she did, she always found herself coming back to our time together.”

He looked like he was going to be sick at the very mention, and Liv started wondering whether rushing in guns blazing had really been the best approach.

“I thought that she was going to apologise for what she’d put me through and ask me to forgive her,” he continued. “But she didn’t want me to forgive her. She wanted me to validate her.”

“What!?” Archie roared, now struggling to keep himself in check.

“That’s right.” He nodded numbly. “She felt like we hadn’t done anything wrong. That even though there was an age gap between us, it was just a number, and that we’d been lucky to known each other. That we’d come into each other’s lives at the right time.”

“You were a student, and she was your teacher,” Liv stated flatly. “She took advantage of you…”

“You think I don’t know that?” Alex asked, suddenly looking a lot younger than his years. “You think I haven’t spent every year since going over it in my head, what we did together?” He held his hand over his mouth as though to retch. “What she did to me…” He couldn’t get the words out. Even after all the counselling and support, he still struggled to voice the full extent of what had happened to him. “She abused me. I was just a fucking kid who didn’t know any better.

“She tried to tell me that I was an impressionable young man and that if there is any guilt for what happened, then it lay on both sides. But I reminded her that I wasn’t old enough to know the difference, and I told her that… that nothing she said or did would ever make up for that. I wasn’t going to absolve her of anything. She would have to live with what she did to me for the rest of her life, and she’d have to know that nothing would ever make it okay.”

On the one hand, Liv was relieved that the woman’s mind games had failed to work on him. On the other hand, it saddened her to see him forced to relive one of the most unpleasant periods of his life, the time that had seen him retreat into himself, unable to talk to his friends or family, and eventually fall in with the Flock of Eden who would psychologically twist him even more.

“And how did you leave it?” Archie asked, feeling that they needed to bring the conversation to a close. No one was benefiting from the trip down memory lane, least of all Alex.

“I told her to fuck off, and if I ever saw her again, I’d call the police on her,” he explained, looking over at Liv. “She must have thought of you because she immediately scarpered.”

“And did you talk to Tara about it?” she asked, wondering if his devoted girlfriend had been pulling her own poker face during the family get-together.

“Of course not,” he replied, standing up again. “Daniel’s my son and he’s a part of my life, so it wouldn’t be fair on Tara to shut her out about the full story. I make sure she knows what happened with me, but I haven’t told her anything about Deedee’s latest stalking spree.”

“Why didn’t you think to go to the police about it?” Liv demanded, suddenly conscious of how much time had been wasted chasing down this lead. “If she’s harassing you, we could have made a case that she hadn’t been properly rehabilitated and had her locked up and the key thrown away.” Maybe even prevent her from targeting anyone else—and maybe stopping her from getting killed. But Alex didn’t need to hear any of that.

“I didn’t even want to think about it,” he told them. “After she left, I just felt really clammy, like I had something under my skin that I couldn’t shake off. I spent so long in the shower, and I still didn’t come clean. I am sick and tired of feeling guilty for everything wrong in my life. I think I’ve paid enough to move on, because living with all of these memories… it feels like a prison sentence in itself.” He looked like he wanted to head back into the building, as far away from his sister as possible, but then he added, “Wait, has she been contacting you?”

He doesn’t know.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Alex,” Archie began, leading the charge. “But Delilah Hart was found dead last night.”

“What?” Alex asked, clutching at the fire escape railing for support.

“She was murdered last night. We think in the vicinity of her house,” he added as he moved closer to Alex to help keep him up. “Which means you could have been one of the last people to have seen her alive.”

“Are you asking me where I was when she was murdered?” he asked accusatorily. “Because I was with my girlfriend and my sisters, so I think you can rule me out.”

“No one is saying that you had anything to do with it,” Olivia insisted, knowing that with the estimated time of death provided by Elliot, it would be impossible for Alex to find the time to kill Mrs Hart and then make his way back to his flat for a pizza. “I’m just a little sad that you were going through this on your own and you didn’t feel like you could tell me about it.”

“Liv, there’s going to come a point where I can fight my own battles,” he exclaimed, looking deflated as the news of her death gradually settled into his mind.

6

PC Andrew Shaw was determined to push himself out of his comfort zone.

“I still don’t know why we’re going around here,” Katie asked. Diana Hershel was busy talking with witnesses and chasing up ghosts from Mrs Hart’s past, so he was left with PC Gibson for the day.

He was looking into the woman’s past haunts. He’d already been in touch with Clara who’d given him all the information on what Mrs Hart had been up to with her extracurricular activities.

“A predator like that, she doesn’t spend a few years inside and come out all fixed,” Andrew explained in answer to her question. “If we can find out where these kids were that she was contacting, maybe we can find who killed her.”

“Get you, Mr Detective,” Katie chortled. “I know you were thinking about CID, but isn’t this still above your pay grade?”

“This case is going to be very personal for Liv.” the PC explained. “She’s been through too much because of that bitch. She’ll get through it, don’t get me wrong—she’s the toughest woman I know—but I want to help her get through this.”

“But why?” Katie asked, twisting around in her seat. “You’re not even together anymore… unless… you’re not doing this to get back in her pants, are you?”

“Hell, no!” he replied, disgusted with the very suggestion. “She’s my friend first and foremost, and I want to help her through this. You telling me you never had anyone who tried to help you through a difficult time?”

Katie went silent at that last comment. She’d worked a few years as a cub reporter and had to prove a lot of people wrong to get to a point in her career when she could be considered incompetent. There were even people who were willing her to fail.

Journalism was a competitive environment, and journalists didn’t have friends, they had rivals. Katie knew that she could either be the one getting trampled or the one forcing her way to the front of the line.

Her editor Greg had been the only one to really see her potential. She knew that it wasn’t out of altruism and that he was only using her to the extent that she propped him up. When this assignment had come through to go undercover with the police, there was a part of her that hoped it was because of her skill and experience as a journalist. But she knew that wasn’t the case. She knew it was because she would be willing to cross lines that even her most hardened colleagues would balk at.

She remembered one of her first assignments where she’d been given the task of speaking to a grieving mother who’d lost her son in a hit and run. She remembered approaching the woman in a friendly manner, knowing exactly what to say to get the woman to open up, using just the right phrases, even looking around the room to see if she could focus her questions around the pictures and memorabilia from the son’s life.

When she got back to the office to write up the story, many of her colleagues had looked at her with disdain. She’d only gone out and achieved what everybody else failed to do. It wasn’t until years later that they accused her of taking advantage of the woman’s grief for her own ends.

She then decided then and there that if she wasn’t going to be respected, she might as well be successful.

But having spent enough time with the likes of PC Shaw and his colleagues, Katie had been expecting the kind of people who would gladly throw one of their own under the bus. So, she was taken aback by the steadfast loyalty they’d shown each other. It wasn’t just a team; it was almost like a family. She’d briefly wondered if she could play them against each other, but she knew that they would catch onto that pretty quickly.

There were times when she actually enjoyed the camaraderie between the group. She just wish it wasn’t faked on her part…

Liv and Dean walked along the beach while Briggs ran on ahead of them. They didn’t come to the beach often enough, mostly because of work commitments.

Liv had grown up in the sunny area, but a lifetime of having a tourist attraction on her doorstep meant that it had become part of the background to her. Still, when she saw visiting families and children running around and enjoying the scenery, she felt she could look on her surroundings with fresh eyes.

Dean was certainly enjoying the change of scenery. She could tell there was a shift in preferences. Once, slumping down on the sofa to a few glasses of red wine before enjoying a passion-filled tryst would have been enough for them. Most of the time this was because so much energy had been devoted to solving crimes. By the time they got in from work, most of their energy had been spent.

“Have you spoken to Nikki much?” Dean asked as they walked over the beach.

“She’s settling in all right,” Liv replied, having had a catch-up over the phone with her old DS. Nikki had immediately gone into a lengthy discussion about how she was getting used to the team, self-deprecatingly joking that they weren’t ready for someone like her, but she stumbled a little when Liv had asked how she was doing. She said that Francesca was settling into the new nursery all right, but at home, she was having difficulty sleeping, constantly getting up in the middle of the night and asking her mummy about the ‘big bang’. And Nikki was still having trouble talking to her daughter about that night.

“You know, I think she made the right decision getting out when she did,” Dean stated, taking Liv by surprise.

“She’s in an area she barely knows with a team that doesn’t know her. She needs people around her who can support her,” Liv insisted.

“You and I both know that Nikki would never willing accept any help.” Dean replied. “She’s had a lot of damaging experiences here. Sticking around would have meant she’d have to face them every single day until they wore her down, and believe me, I know what that feels like.”

Two years ago, Dean had told her about his previous life in Italy that had culminated in him beating his abusive father to near death and leaving his job, his fiancé, and everything else behind. “Sometimes, it’s not healthy to stay in that environment. You’ve just got to cut loose and start again.”

Liv could tell the conversation was heading somewhere, and she wasn’t sure if she liked the direction.

“Well, if people moved away every time they had a traumatic experience, I would have done it years ago,” she chortled, trying to make a joke of it.

They watched as Briggs sprinted to the edge of the sea and then retreated at the tide coming in.

She wondered if they were going to hurtle towards that age-old argument of looking for a life outside CID.

“What kind of things did you have lined up with Rhys?” Dean asked, taking her completely by surprise. It’d been a while since her first great love had come up in conversation. “I mean, surely you guys had some idea as to what you wanted to do beyond catching the bad guys.”

Liv pondered the question. Back when she’d been seeing Rhys, her first thought had been how to survive the scrutiny their relationship had brought about, especially because his wife Michelle had been dead set on a reunion.

But they’d started building a life for themselves. She was still thinking about the last day they had together. About the steaks he’d picked up from the butcher’s. His slow reassuring smile. Even though that chapter in her life was closed, there was still a part of her that was terrified that one day, she would start forgetting all of those little tics that’d made her fall in love with him in the first place.

The phone started buzzing, and she took it out, almost relieved to have a distraction from the uncertain conversation. “It’s DI Austin.”

“Liv, you’re not going to believe who’s turned up at the hospital.” Archie’s voice came through, panic steadily rising. “Michelle.”

Rhys’s ex-wife. “What the hell happened to her?”

“It’s simpler if you come to the hospital right now.”

7

Michelle Ferguson had been surprised to get the message from Olivia Austin, having not heard from her for over two years.

The two had not had the easiest relationship, not helped by the fact that Rhys, the love of her life, had chosen to be with Liv over her. Maybe it was to be expected. Coppers tended to mix in their own circles.

Shortly after Rhys’ death, she’d been drawn into a conspiracy by the Flock of Eden cult to ruin Liv’s life, and it’d almost come at the cost of her own. After that, the two women had parted on amicable terms and hadn’t had much contact with each other.

But two days ago, Michelle had received a message from Olivia asking her to come up and speak with her, saying that there was crucial information about one of Rhys’ old cases back when he was a DC. Nothing more had been said.

So, Michelle took a train to Newquay, where she was told that somebody would be meeting her there in a car to take her to Liv’s place.

She disembarked at the station and saw a lone man who gestured towards her, instantly recognising her. Liv must have given them a photo of her.

But the man didn’t look like anyone who might associate with Liv, and she paused, wondering what she should do.

This whole routine felt far too cloak and dagger for someone like Liv. Why wouldn’t the woman come and pick her up herself?

The man started to move towards her and there was something off about his body language. Something… predatory.

She whipped around to see if she should get back on the train, but it was already pulling out of the station. Surely, nothing would happen to her in a public place?

when she turned back around, the man was moving towards her, and even in the dimming sunlight, she could make out the malicious intent in his eyes.

She started moving towards one of the spare taxis, thinking that one way or another, she needed to speak to Liv to find out what the hell was going on.

She moved over to a taxi when suddenly, the man was right next to her and grabbed out at her. She caught a flash of metal and felt something pinch her in the side.

But this wasn’t the first life or death scrape that Michelle had been involved in, and though she hadn’t expected anything like this to happen, she’d come prepared.

She pulled out a can of mace and sprayed it in the thug’s eyes, prompting him to reel back and drop the bloodied knife, which fell to the floor with a clatter.

Quickly picking up the knife with the edge of her coat sleeves, she threw open the taxi door, bundled herself in, and commanded, “Drive.” Seconds later, the taxi pulled away from the station and Michelle peered out the back, relieved as the thug watched her leave.

Letting the blade fall to the floor, she grimaced in pain as she felt at the wound on her stomach, which was now seeping blood all over her coat. It was hard to tell how deep the wound actually was.

“Can you take me to the hospital, please?” Michelle pleaded, her breathing getting ragged. She hoped that she didn’t lose consciousness before she got there.

Luckily, she managed to hold on in time to get to the hospital and get treated. When the nurse’s eyes went wide at the wound in her side, Michelle told her to call the police, asking specifically for Olivia Austin.

By the time Olivia and Dean arrived at the hospital, Michelle was lying in a hospital bed, and the wound had been treated and patched up. But she didn’t dare move in case even the antibiotics couldn’t help her.

“Jesus Christ, Michelle!” Liv exclaimed, observing the woman looking a little sickly from the loss of blood.

“Yes, I get that reaction from most people,” Michelle replied good-humouredly.

“What the hell were you doing in Newquay?” Liv asked, figuring that when Michelle had walked out of her life, it’d been for good. It wasn’t that they couldn’t stand each other, it was more that there wasn’t anything keeping them linked beyond memories of Rhys.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Michelle replied, trying to sit upright in bed but then deciding against it. “Your message asked me to come down to Newquay to talk about one of Rhys’ old cases.”

Liv and Dean shared a glance. “What are you talking about? I didn’t send you any messages. I haven’t heard from you for ages and then you turn up out of the blue.”

Michelle looked away, embarrassed. “Yeah, I would have thought after the last time I’d learned my lesson about trusting people too quickly.”

“Who did that to you?” Dean asked, turning his attention to the dressed wound.

“No idea,” the woman replied. “Bastard came at me and was going to bundle me into his car. When I moved to get away, he tried to stab me. I knew then that he didn’t have anything to do with you.” She was now looking directly at Liv.

“You thought I was the one who called you here?” Liv asked, taken aback.

“Well, it did sound a lot like your voice,” the woman replied, resting her eyes. “So if it wasn’t you, it was a very convincing soundalike.”

“Did they say what they wanted?” the inspector queried, taking a seat next to the bed.

“They said that they needed to talk about a few of Rhys’ old cases,” she explained, going over the message in her head. “You—or rather they—said that it was part of an investigation that you were currently running and because I was still with Rhys at the time, any information I could give you would be appreciated.”

Liv wanted to bemoan Michelle for falling for the ruse so easily… but then again, the woman had rushed over at the drop of a hat to try and work out how she could help.

“But I was able to get a little something that might be useful to you,” Michelle continued, reaching down to the side of the bed, the physical strain clearly taking a lot out of her. She brought up a plastic bag. “Whatever you do, don’t touch it.”

Liv looked into the bag and backed away hurriedly. “Oh, shit.”

Dean peered inside for a look himself. Inside was a bloody knife.

“That’s what the fucker tried to get me with,” Michelle explained, letting the bag go as Liv caught it. “I figured it would be best to keep hold of it and see if you could lift some fingerprints off it.” Noting the pair’s impressed glances, she responded with a shrug, “Copper’s wife and all that. Had to learn it somewhere.”

“Well, thank you very much for this,” Liv offered, holding onto the bag. “We’ll get this sent off for forensics and see what we can pull from it.” She suddenly felt a little guilty at rushing off and leaving Michelle to tend to her injuries. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Yes, if I should happen to drop dead, pretend I said something deep and profound,” Michelle joked before turning serious. “No, all you need to do for me is go out there and get the shitbag that tried to gut me. And maybe bring a box of chocolates while you’re at it. Least you can do.”

“I think I can manage that,” Liv replied, relieved that the enmity between the two women was now non-existent.

“PC Gibson?” Liv asked the young woman who was on the scene at the time Michelle had come in. “I want you to stand watch over Ms Ferguson, see if you can find anything else useful out of her, and alert me the minute her condition changes. Do you understand?”

“I’ve got it, ma’am,” Katie responded, returning to the bedside and playing the role of the agony aunt.

“Well, when I said I want a change from wine on the sofa, I feel like I might have jinxed us,” Dean noted dryly.

But Liv wasn’t in a joking mood. “Someone tried to trap Michelle. They could have killed her.”

“But they didn’t,” Dean responded as they got in the car. “If I’m honest, Liv, I think you want to be asking yourself a different question. Two crimes taking place within days of each other… and the only link is you. You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence.”

Great, so the whole world is out to get me.

8

“Sir, I think these current cases could be all about me,” Liv stated the next morning in Collins’ office.

“That’s a fairly egocentric way of looking at it, DI Austin,” the superintendent responded. “You think that a sex offender was murdered and a copper’s wife was nearly abducted simply because someone wanted to piss you off?”

“Somebody could have killed Delilah Hart and then lured Michelle Ferguson here. Why they would do any of this, I don’t know yet,” she continued, frustrated that she had no real answers or logic to offer up.

“And how is Ms Ferguson now?” Collins asked, though she knew that wasn’t the real reason he was asking.

“She should make a full recovery. But I don’t think she’s going to be in a position to give us a statement. She knows even less than we do,” she responded.

“Well, then I think our next priority should be keeping her in protective custody until we can find some suspects,” he decided. “PC Shaw and PC Gibson should be able to handle that no problem.”

“Of course,” Liv replied, but there was intense feeling of dread building inside of her.

“We’ve also got to consider another question, and I don’t think you’re going to want to hear it,” he continued, and she felt like a blow to the face was coming her way.

“Sir, listen, I know you’re trying to be practical, but I can promise you, it would not be in anyone’s best interests to take me off the case,” she spouted out, desperate to get her logic across. “If these crimes are really meant as a dig at me, then that means that I’m the best person to solve the case.”

“And modest?” Collins asked with a raised eyebrow. “Don’t forget, if the killer knows a lot about you, he’s going to use that to his advantage. He knows exactly which buttons to press.”

“But guv, it’s not like there’s anyone else we can put on this. We’re short-staffed as it is, and with Nikki…” She paused, and he looked at her, almost daring her to go down that route. “With her not here, we need as many people as we can get on this”.

Okay, it’s a cheap move to make, but what else was I supposed to say?

But she regretted seeing the hurt in her boss’ eyes. “Okay, you can stay on the case, but I will ask you to consult with Dr Pike, because the last thing I need is this impairing your judgment.”

Liv was about to ask when she’d ever let a case cloud her judgment, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he secretly kept such a list.

Once she was in the corridor, she loaded herself up with coffee. Olivia knew that she’d lived a traumatic life, from losing her brother to vicious people to Rhys’ brutal death, to say nothing of all the shit that’d happened to her since she’d come back to Newquay three and a half years ago. It was like somebody was trying to revisit the worst periods of her life.

She started going over the traumas in her mind, feeling that this wasn’t just a single kill anymore. This was a pattern. And patterns rarely stop at two.

“Liv?” Clara asked, making a rare appearance away from her workstation. “Listen, the user who was chatting with the victim, User…”

“For the love of God, please don’t ever mention that name out loud,” the inspector pleaded, feeling like she needed a brain bleach just from having the knowledge of that chat alone.

“Well, the guy who she was talking to, he’s back online,” the technician explained, prompting Liv to follow her, her coffee abandoned.

Back in the workstation, Clara showed them the tab.

“I had a look on the site in general, and apparently, this guy has a habit of talking to people online,” Clara explained, pointing to a webpage and Liv noticed the same username popping up over and over.

“Does he think he’s some kind of teenage Casanova?” Liv asked wide-eyed. “Wait a minute, how are you able to see what he’s doing right now?”

Clara shifted in her seat, looking uncomfortable. “Well, I… I kind of set up a chat of my own,” she replied hesitantly. “I figured that maybe if I could lure him into a meeting, then maybe we could try and find him. I mean, he was contacting the woman just before she died. If he’s got anything to do with her death, we need to know about it. Or if it’s just some kid wanting some more experience, we need to take safeguarding measures.”

Liv was wondering if a case could be made for possible entrapment. But given they had next to nothing in the way of suspects, it was worth a shot. “So what kind of things have you been saying to him?”

“Well, nothing explicit,” Clara insisted defensively. “I’ve tried to keep it as vanilla as possible. I don’t want to end up contributing to the corruption of a minor.”

Liv looked at the chat that Clara had set up, and indeed, it was much less racy than anything Delilah had said.

At that point, the user came back with a suggestive message, prompting Clara to gulp as though she was going to be sick. “I’m sorry, I don’t know if I can do this.”

She got up from her seat and walked to the corner of the room, wanting to put as much distance between her and the monitor as possible.

“Clara, listen to me,” Liv offered softly, walking over to her friend. “These kinds of crimes would be hard for even the most experienced officer to stomach. You’re doing a really good job. We just need to go a little bit further so we can lure this kid into a meeting. If we do this, we can stop anyone else from getting hurt.”

She knew she was asking a lot of her friend, but she needed some kind of progress for her own closure if nothing else.

Clara took a deep breath and returned to the workstation. The user was waiting for her to respond with bated breath. She typed in a message, her fingers moving more hesitantly than before. “Maybe we should go for a meetup somewhere for a coffee?” She turned back to Liv and asked, “Should I ask him about meeting at the same cafe that Delilah was visiting?”

“No, I think it’ll sound too obvious,” Liv suggested, trying to think of a good place that the young man would be comfortable visiting for an illicit meeting, in a space where they could nab him if necessary. She would have suggested a bar, but if the kid was young, then he’d probably get kicked out. Ultimately, it boiled down to an area most likely to be free of public interference.

“There’s an internet cafe we can try,” Liv suggested, having the place in her mind. It was a rundown place that looked like it was constantly on its last legs. Two of the computers weren’t working, and the staff looked like they were serving a prison sentence there. “We should be able to corner him, if need be.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Clara typed in the request, waiting to see if her deception was successful.

To her surprise and discomfort, the reply said, “Meet at 1:30.”

A few hours later, Liv was sat in the cafe, downing a latte and waiting for her surprise arrival. She was grateful to Clara for taking the initiative to entrap a possibly dangerous young man and hoped that she wouldn’t be too unnerved, not just by what she’d seen, but by what she’d been forced to do.

Archie was positioned outside the cafe waiting for any sign of movement. So far, the only other three patrons in the cafe were middle-aged, and clearly just looking for a quiet place to unwind. Liv briefly wondered whether she should have chosen somewhere glossier to attract the young man. She was wearing a blue shirt to signify to the young man that she was the woman who would ‘make his dreams come true’.

It had occurred to her that the teenage boy she was meeting might be dangerous and take extreme measures to protect himself, in which case, she wondered if she should be armed in any capacity. She tried to tell herself that this was a young man who could need rescuing from an abusive situation. She checked the time on her phone. 1:30 pm exactly.

The door opened and the new arrival headed straight towards the table Liv was sitting at. But the new arrival took her completely by surprise.

9

It wasn’t a teenage boy making his way towards the table. It was a man in his forties with a shaved head and a beard flecked with grey.

At first, Liv had wondered if it was just another patron looking for a cheap coffee.

But he took note of the blue top that Olivia had said she’d be wearing, and his eyes lit up with recognition. He began backing out the doorway and into the street…

Liv sprang from her seat and gave chase, grabbing the man by the scruff of the neck and pushing him against the wall. “Get off me!” he shouted as people started watching the scene.

“What are you doing here?” Liv asked, her mind flooding with questions. Was this the boy’s father? Had he found out what his son was involved with and acted to defend him?

“It’s not what you think,” the man protested, but he no longer seemed to be struggling against the inspector’s grip.

“Well, you certainly seemed to recognise me,” she retorted. “What, are you here in place of your son?” She turned to her partner. “Archie, check his phone.”

Archie obeyed and despite the man’s attempt to squirm out of his grip, he was able to get to the phone and opened it up. “Um, Liv,” he started, looking unnerved. He hovered the phone in front of her. All of the chats from the online user to Delilah had come from him.

“Really, it’s not what you think,” the man assured her. “We’re actually on the same side.”

Later that day in the interview room, Liv loaded up the tape and waited for the dial tone before started. The ID they’d found on the man identified him as Ashley Osborne, a man who worked as an IT technician at the local secondary school.

“Mr Osborne, we’ve had a look at the chat on your phone and it’s clear that you were speaking with Delilah Hart posing as a teenage boy.”

She expected the man to look away with shame. But of anything, he looked proud.

“You know, I’ve dealt with people like you before,” he exclaimed bitterly. “So many kids get picked up and abused and never get any kind of help. They have to suffer in silence. You need ‘proof’. Some kid getting eyed up by his uncle isn’t going to be able to say what’s been happening to them. And these sick fuckers, they just go about their lives day after day, not caring who they hurt as long as they get their kicks. There was a case of a pervert who was living a few doors down from me, a gardener who liked looking at kids for a little too long if you know what I mean. I went to you guys and tried to talk about it, but the guy had a clean record, and no kids reported any harm.”

The case was ringing a bell in Liv’s ears, but she couldn’t quite place it.

“That’s the problem with you people, it’s always your best work after the fact. You’re all reactive. God forbid you actually focus on preventing crimes,” Mr Osborne continued.

“So, how is this supposed to work?” Archie asked, growing weary from the sea of bitterness. “You go online, you post as some innocent child, and then what?”

“I arrange a meetup with them. Obviously, I don’t let them know they’ve been had. And once I’ve got a few pictures taken of them, I take them to you lot and give you the push to actually do your jobs.”

Now Liv remembered. A gardener had been arrested on suspicion of soliciting sex from a minor. The evidence had only darkened with the reveal of several disturbing photos found in his possession. But Liv knew that Mr Osborne’s logic, while well-intentioned, was quite skewed. She couldn’t imagine taking those chats to the Crown Prosecution Service and building an entire case strategy around them.

“How many people have you done this to?” Liv asked.

“About twelve, give or take,” Mr Osborne replied, if anything, sounding disappointed that the number wasn’t higher.

“So, how did Delilah Hart come into it?” she continued, thinking back to the woman who’d started this case from scratch.

“I received a letter through my mailbox telling me that someone in the neighbourhood had recently been released from prison and that they were now living in my area. There are four families living in my street, all with kids. And I wanted to look out for them.”

“Well, that sounds quite noble of you,” Archie exclaimed, prompting a side glance from Olivia. “I mean, that sounds quite unorthodox. What happened after you found out about her status?”

“I started reaching out to her through the chat,” he stated. “I had to ask a few questions to make sure that she was the one I was after. It helped that she was eager to score. So, she told me all these things about her house and herself. It’s amazing how much people are going to share if they think they’re going to score. I arranged to meet with her at the cafe and figured I’d get her reported. Maybe get her thrown in prison again.”

“But you never ended up meeting up with her,” Liv explained, remembering the waitress telling them how she’d been stood up and this had led to the call with Alex.

“I don’t go in straightaway until I have all the proof I need,” he told them, as though this separated him from all the other vigilantes.

“Apparently, you’ve had regular activity on the site,” Archie noted, going over the documents that Clara had provided them. “You’ve been speaking to a few other users as well.”

“Yeah, which is presumably how you were able to find me,” he muttered, crossing his arms indignantly. “Fucking entrap me.”

“I don’t think you’re really in a position to call us out for entrapment,” Liv retorted.

“Touché,” he muttered back, leaving the detectives wondering where they would be going from here.

“Interview suspended at 2:43 pm,” she stated, stopping the tape. “DS Elmhurst, could I have a word in private?” They both got out of their seats and went into the corridor.

“What are your thoughts?” Archie asked, looking back into the room.

“The man’s definitely a zealot,” Liv replied, folding her arms. “Even if I could see him killing Hart—which I’m having trouble doing—I can’t think of any reason why he’d go after Michelle. It’s not in his character. And you heard from Elliot how she died. That kind of brutality does not come from blind rage. There was a lot of sadism behind it. The killer took their time with her. That guy doesn’t strike me as the sadistic type.”

“So, do we let him go?” Archie asked, looking disappointed that they couldn’t take it any further.

“Not my first choice, but it looks like that’s all we can do,” she replied, while also noting that the circumstances under which they’d identified him were dodgy at best. She could imagine a solicitor angling to use that as a defence if it ever went to court.

“Either we charge him or let him go,” she insisted. “But we need to move on quickly. I already feel like we’ve wasted enough time as it is. I don’t really like waiting around and guessing with of my past traumas is going to be brought up next.”

Before Archie could enquire about that any further, she headed back into the room.

“Interview resumed at 2:46 pm,” she declared, taking her seat opposite the man. “Mr Osborne, obviously you’re aware that Ms Hart is dead.”

“Yes, I figured that’s what got the police up in arms the other night…” Mr Osborne’s voice trailed off as the penny dropped. “Wait a minute, you don’t think I killed her, do you? I was nowhere near the neighbourhood when she died. I was down the pub with some friends.” That alibi shouldn’t be too hard to check out. “Like I said, we are the same side.”

Liv wasn’t sure whether to dignify that with a response. Finally, her patience running thin, she declared, “If I were you, Mr Osborne, I’d stay away from the chat for the foreseeable future.”

Shortly afterwards, they ended the interview, Liv feeling aggrieved that they were back at square one.

“There is something we can do,” Archie suggested, knowing his partner needed to be proactive. “We could move Michelle to a safe house out of harm’s way. It’s not like anyone’s going to try anything there. The knife’s already being checked for fingerprints, so hopefully we’ll have more to go on soon.”

10

Katie Gibson felt like she was sitting on a potential goldmine and yet she had no way of digging it up.

She’d been given the task of sitting with and guarding Michelle Ferguson, asking her questions about the circumstances that’d led her back to Newquay. And Michelle had been willing to give over a lot of information on her shared past with Liv. How this information had been kept out of the public eye was beyond her.

If this information had come to her months ago, she’d have jumped on it willingly. It would be all over the news and she’d have another claim to fame.

But she was starting to see people differently. Ever since the incident with DS Harding’s daughter, she was starting to see it all differently. She was starting to realize the damage that she could do to people with a few thoughtless actions. Michelle had already survived one attempt on her life, and Katie didn’t want to add to that.

And there were also pragmatic reasons. PC Shaw arrived later on to support her with the tasks, and Katie knew that if she made a move right now, then the only two people who would be suspected of leaking the story would be her and Andrew. Given that he already had such a good rapport with his colleagues, no one would even consider him to be the leak.

“Can you tell us anything more about the man who assaulted you?” Andrew asked, scribbling down notes in his book.

“Tall, black hair, quite muscular,” Michelle replied with a shrug. “It was dark, and I couldn’t quite make him out. But I did know he wasn’t one of you lot.”

“And you’re sure it was Liv’s voice you heard over the phone?” the PC added, worried that he might need to start trying to absolve his friend.

“Look, I know it wasn’t Liv,” Michelle insisted to Andrew’s relief. “Chances are it was either some AI crap or a very convincing soundalike.”

Katie was listening close by just in case she needed to rely on this information later.

“Is there anything from Rhys’ past cases that we need to be aware of, anything that has links to the investigation?” Andrew asked, thinking back to the murder of the sex offender.

“What, you think I keep a detailed log of all the cases my husband used to work?” Michelle asked rhetorically. “When there was all that business with the Flock of Eden, and I got back home, you know what I did with most of his belongings? I threw them away. I didn’t need a constant reminder of what I’d lost weighing me down.”

Andrew nodded solemnly, knowing that Olivia was often in danger of being weighed down by her own losses, and that was what had led her into his arms in the first place. She’d needed someone to prop her up emotionally, and Andrew was lucky to have been there.

“I’ve tried to move on with my life,” Michelle continued, feeling the last two years pouring out of her. “I’m now married, and I’ve got a little boy. I’m happy with my life. I’ve left Rhys behind. I’ve had to. Otherwise, I’d have never recovered.”

“Oh, I understand,” Andrew offered. “So, why come all the way down to Newquay?”

Michelle shrugged. “Because I thought Liv was asking me to. And I guess considering she saved my life, I owed her that much. I don’t know what it is about that woman, but she’s very good at inspiring loyalty.”

Andrew smiled at that. She’d certainly pushed him to become a better copper.

“What about Liv?” she asked, showing concern. “How has she been getting on since I last saw her?”

Andrew tried to think of everything that had happened to Olivia in the past twenty-eight months. He’d watched as her family had come back together and she’d settled into a committed relationship with Dean Lawrence. “I think she’s recovering.”

“I hope so,” the woman said earnestly. “I think it’s easy for me to forget that she was also mourning Rhys. And it was definitely easy for me to blame her for our relationship breaking down. I know that we had our problems long before Liv came into our lives.” She blinked, as though recognising the PC’s increasing discomfort. “Sorry to rope you into the role of confessor. Just felt like I needed to get it all off my chest. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, whether I’m going to get the chance to speak with Liv again.”

“Well, I can fill you in on the next steps,” the young copper offered. “Once we know it’s safe to move you without tearing open the stitches, we’re going to transfer you to a safe house somewhere just until we can work this out.” He paused for a moment, his face, clouding over. “And one more thing, it’s important that nobody knows where you are. We need to make sure the people responsible for attacking you can’t find you later on.”

“What about your partner?” Michelle asked, pointing to Katie who was on the phone while trying to listen in on the conversation.

“Yeah, her too,” Andrew muttered. “We’ll have another officer come and escort you in a few hours, okay? Just focus on getting some rest for the time being.” He left Michelle lying on the bed and walked over to Katie. “Urgent call or something?”

“Sorry, boyfriend trouble,” she responded, quickly tucking her phone away. “Still paying attention, though. You sure you’re not going to end up spooking her by making out it’s all about safety? You didn’t think it might be an idea to tell her about a possible leak?”

It was a risky move, referencing the leak in conversation, but she figured that if she openly spoke about the leak in an inquisitive manner and made a show of wanting to find the culprit, then they’d be least likely to suspect her.

“We don’t need to be worrying her with shit like that,” the PC insisted. “Not if we can keep it all under wraps. I’ve told four other PCs what is happening. They’re going to be operating on a rota to keep her safe.”

“And you trust all of them?” Katie asked, thinking that one of them might make an ideal scapegoat if need be.

“I would trust them with my life,” he replied vehemently.

“So, where is she being moved to?” she queried, feeling like the question could be too on the nose considering the topic of conversation.

Andrew looked around the room to make sure that nobody was listening in. “We’re moving her to a house just near the sea front.” He took out a pen and paper and scribbled down the address. “Nice little area. At least she’ll get a bit of scenery while she’s there.”

Katie clocked the address, wondering if Andrew would have been quite so trusting if he’d known exactly who she’d been talking to.

Greg was still chasing her down for a story, unwilling to take ‘no’ for an answer.

“Are you taking the piss? Calling me while I’m on active duty?” she’d hissed, moving to the other side of the ward while still listening into the conversation between Andrew and Michelle.

“I need a story to run,” the editor insisted, sounding weary. “I’ve waited long enough.”

“I don’t think you appreciate the risks I’m taking,” she insisted, pacing up and down on the spot in an attempt to calm her nerves. “It’s all right for you if this all goes tits up. You can still walk away with your job intact. Me, I’m going to be a complete pariah. I’ll have betrayed my colleagues…”

“Did you honestly just say that?” Greg asked disbelievingly. “They’re not your friends. They are targets for a scoop. You’d take that approach with anyone. So what’s changed?”

Katie thought back to her first time out on patrol with Andrew when they were checking out the escape room for the possible return of a suspect and Katie had been able to pick up the slack. She hadn’t told anyone at the time, but she’d felt a swell of pride from the incident. Because at the time, she felt like she was doing some genuine good.

But that’d been overtaken by the goal of getting the story. As Greg had told her before, “Make sure you convince them, but don’t end up convincing yourself.”

Katie had been unable to find a decent response to that.

“Look, if you give me something tangible, I promise you I will do everything I can to keep your name out of it.”

Katie knew she couldn’t ask for anything better than that. So, twirling the piece of paper that Andrew had given her over and over in her fingers, she made her decision.

“I can tell you where the latest witness is headed.”

11

Olivia hated the idea of waiting around. Watching Ashley Osborne walk out of that station meant that he was taking their only tangible lead so far with him.

But they had nothing else—no witnesses, no evidence, nothing they could latch onto.

She found herself looking back on all her previous traumas and all the people connected to them. She wouldn’t lose any sleep over Delilah Hart dying, but Michelle Ferguson had been an innocent. And the perpetrator had been asking about Rhys.

Since Rhys had died, she’d learned a lot more about him, that he’d been investigating her conduct over the disappearance of her brother, that he had a hidden family she was completely unaware of. Every single new revelation threatened to derail the image in her mind of the man she’d loved.

Suddenly, Liv’s phone started ringing. It was Sam, the lead Forensic Coordinator. “Tell me you’ve got something good for me.”

“I’ve got a match on the fingerprints.” she responded. “And lucky for you, he’s been printed in your index before.”

“Sam, you’re a legend,” Liv replied, jumping from her seat, and getting ready to collect Archie.

The information on the knife wielder had come as a surprise to Liv. He had a long list of crimes to his name, including breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, and armed robbery.

But none of those crimes had taken place in Newquay. They’d been in London.

“So, what’s he doing all the way out here?” Archie had asked when Liv filled him in, but the answer had come in the form of the arresting officer on his rap sheet. Rhys.

A bit of extra digging from Clara had revealed that he was staying at a Travelodge. It was almost a disappointment when they apprehended him. They’d hoped he would put up a bit more resistance, but when they arrived at his door, he didn’t look surprised to see them.

“Ian Blakeley,” Liv declared as she slapped on the cuffs. “I’m arresting you on suspicion of assault and attempted kidnapping. You do not have to say anything, however it may harm your defence if you fail to mention something which you later go on to rely on in court. Anything you do say may be used as evidence.”

Archie had a look through the room and found some voice-amplifying equipment. He spoke into it, and the resulting voice sounded a lot like Liv. “Ma’am, this is how he was able to lure Michelle to Newquay.”

Her nostrils flaring at the injuries he’d inflicted, Liv marched him out of the room, hoping to get some answers out of him. And maybe I can find out why he needs to drag Rhys’ name through my head all over again.

“This is about that bitch, isn’t it?” Mr Blakeley muttered in his seat. “I hope I managed to get her good.”

“For your information, Ms Ferguson is alive and well and currently recovering,” Liv replied as she looked at the weathered face. He’s not making this easy for himself. “You’re actually lucky, Mr Blakeley, because if she hadn’t got away when she did, you’d be looking at a murder charge.”

“I wasn’t looking to kill her,” Ian insisted, trying to play down his actions.

“So, what was your intent behind the abduction?” Archie asked, trying to understand the man’s logic.

“I was supposed to get hold of her and lure you into a trap,” the suspect explained, looking over at Liv. She felt a shudder go through her as she imagined what this guy would do to her if given the chance.

“I knew her husband back in the day. He was the first copper to ever arrest me,” Ian continued, taking an unpleasant trip down memory lane. “After that, I was in and out of prison because of him.”

“So, you’re blaming him for your own bad decisions?” Liv demanded, unable to let him smear Rhys’ good name.

“My life has been a car crash because he just couldn’t go easy on me,” the man retorted, unable to take any accountability for his own actions. “The day I heard that he had been killed, I was punching the air for joy.”

Archie placed a hand on Liv’s arm underneath the table, as though fully expecting her to fly across it to assault the man.

“And I did genuinely try going straight, I really did. But no one was willing to give me a second chance,” he continued, though Liv privately wondered how much he’d actually changed considering he was so quick to violence.

“How did you end up in Newquay?” the inspector queried, forcing herself to maintain professional standard.

“About a fortnight ago, I was contacted by someone over the phone who knew all about my history with that dead dickhead and asked me how I felt about getting even. At first, I didn’t see much point considering the guy was dead. But then he started talking about his wife, and I figured yeah, I can settle for that. I asked him to tell me where she lived so I could teach her a lesson. But he wanted to be elaborate about it. He told me he’d make it worth my while and put some money in my account. And I was supposed to go to Newquay, intercept her there, and then wait for you to make contact. I was supposed to make you trade your safety for hers.”

“So, your whole plan hinged on DI Austin being willing to martyr herself?” Archie asked, though Olivia knew that if push came to shove and there was no other option, she’d have gladly given her life for a civilian.

“I was told that you had a bit of a saviour complex,” the man responded, disturbing Liv. Whoever this person was seemed to know an awful lot about her.

“What do you know about the person who hired you?” Archie asked, trying to steer the conversation away from something more personal. “Mr Blakeley, you’re aware of the charges against you, and you were conspiring in the planned abduction of a serving police officer. I can assure you, it’ll be a long time before you get a shot at that second chance. However, if there’s anything you can tell us about who hired you, then we can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to take that into account and try and get you some leniency.”

Ian looked like he was very eager to accept that offer, but his face was troubled. “Believe me, I’d grass him up if I could, but I don’t know anything.”

He looked helpless where he sat, but the memory of Michelle lying in a hospital bed batted away any sympathy Liv might have had for him. Still, she wasn’t done with him yet.

“Mr Blakeley, are you familiar with this woman?” she asked, sliding a photo of Delilah Hart across the table.

He glanced at the photo for all of five seconds before responding with, “Never seen her before in my life. Why? What’s she got to do with you?”

Liv searched his face for any signs of bluffing. She’d already seen that he wasn’t a very good liar. His story sounded very convincing, and just as had been the case with Ashley Osborne, he’d been contacted by someone and lured into a case that had very specific links to her past.

“So, we’ve got the man behind Ms Ferguson’s abduction in place,” Collins stated later in the day. “I suppose we can call that progress.” They all knew that Collins would sooner catch a murder.

But whoever was connecting the two cases was still out there. And what’s more, the person behind it seemed to have intimate knowledge of Liv and had taken the time to get to know all of her tragedies. She ran through her mind all the people she’d so much as locked eyes with but drew a constant blank.

The case was taking a toll on her emotionally. At the beginning of the week, Liv had learned to be happy with what she had, but this week had only served to remind her how much she’d lost to get to this point.

How long do I have to wait before he tries again?

12

Mills was unwrapping what ended up being the third ‘Your Baby’s First Year’ book, handed over from Dean. Liv didn’t have the heart to tell him someone else’d beaten him to it. “Thank you, Dean,” her sister replied, kissing him on the cheek before plopping back down on the sofa, no doubt to rest her swollen ankles.

Liv and Dean had popped around to Mills’ and Max’s house to drop off a few last-minute presents before the baby arrived, determined to spoil the new Austin.

Ru was eyeing some of the toys that’d been brought for the baby, clearly angling to play with them himself despite Max telling him, “You’re too old for those, little man.”

Normally, Max struggled to be Liv’s biggest fan, considering the amount of peril she brought her family’s way. But he was often forced to make peace with the woman for his wife’s sake, so he’d had to settle for keeping his scorn to himself.

He moved over to Dean, who rarely got the chance to hang out with Liv’s family.

“So, how’s things going with Olivia?” he asked, trying not to sound prying.

“We’re quite steady,” Dean replied confidently.

“I imagine your relationship must be a lot easier than most,” Max said as he took a swig of beer. The inspector wondered how many he’d had.

“Define ‘easy’,” Dean replied, not sure if he was liking the insinuation.

“Well, you both work in the same profession, so you have a bit more awareness of the risks you’re both taking,” he continued. It was obvious that he had been drinking heavily, and Dean wondered how long it would be before he was letting the booze do the talking for him.

“I mean, I’m lucky with Mills in that she chose a job that isn’t without its fair share of stresses, but it’s fairly harmless,” he went on, leaving Dean wondering how much shit Liv had had to endure from him whenever she visited. “I couldn’t see either of us being a police officer. Because bringing that chaos home every single night? I’m pretty sure there are some people who’d call it selfish.”

Dean was tempted to slam his glass down and punch the man in the face, but he was conscious that there was a family environment, and he didn’t want to risk showing up Liv by forcing himself into the role of knight in shining armour.

“If you think being a police officer is a selfish job, then you really don’t understand why we do this,” Dean hissed, trying to keep his indignance at bay with questionable success. “We see the worst of people every single day, the kinds of things that you can never unsee. You think you get down from watching the six o’clock news about some teenager found stabbed to death? Imagine what it’s like having to actually look at it.”

Max went silent, so Dean continued, taking a glance at the sisters who were deep in conversation, making sure that they couldn’t overhear any of their conversation.

“Liv has had to deal with all of that, to say nothing of what she had to deal with in her family,” he continued, remembering when he first met Olivia, how frosty she’d been, but he could tell that she was just hiding a lot of hurt. Gradually, once she’d trusted him enough to start lowering the walls, he saw her for the driven, compassionate woman he was. It’d taken him a while to realise his feelings for her, and now, he didn’t dare imagine his life without her.

“It would be simpler if she quit this job. Certainly would be easier,” he continued, thinking guiltily of all the times he’d tried to help Liv find a life outside CID. “But I know that she wouldn’t be able to rest easy knowing that there’s some shitbag out there trying to hurt people. If anything, she’s the most selfless person I know, and she doesn’t need people like you trying to put her down.”

Now Max was on the defensive. “I didn’t mean…”

“You think I don’t pick up on the dirty looks you’ve been giving her?” Dean growled, now in full-blown protector mode. “I’m not going to bollock you because then she’ll give me a bollocking for fighting her battles for her. But I’ll tell you now…” He pointed to the two sisters chatting happily together. “...she’s earned that bit of peace, and I’ll be damned if I let anyone try and fuck it up for her.”

Max nodded, having ran out of things to say.

“I could feel her kicking again this morning,” Mills exclaimed, rubbing her stomach. “You know you’re getting massive when you can start balancing a cup of tea on your bump.”

“You given any thought to any names?” Liv asked, scooting closer on the sofa. She could see Dean and Max talking with each other, and though she couldn’t quite make out what they were saying to each other, she knew that if Max were trying to throw shit her way, Dean would put a stop to that instantly to try and defend her honour.

“I was thinking of calling her Annie,” Mills responded, rubbing her tummy with such tenderness as though the child was already with them. “I’ve tried rolling it off my tongue a few times and I really like it. It was Ru that suggested it.”

“Are you sure he didn’t get the idea from watching endless episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine on repeat?” Liv asked, watching the little boy run trains on a toy track.

“I think he’s really eager to have a sister,” Mills explained. “You know, when we were doing up the nursery again, he was trying to ‘baby-proof the house…’ which basically consisted of Ru taking all of our cushions and pillows and putting them anywhere sharp or hard.”

Liv laughed out loud at that. She tried to imagine the two children playing together, looking out for each other. “Can you promise me something, sis?”

“I can try to.”

“Whatever happens, just make sure that these kids have it easier than we did.” She’d spent far too much time wondering whether the Austin family was cursed, and she wanted to know that there would be at least two kids in the family who’d survive their childhood mentally intact.

“Well, despite everything that’s happened, we turned out all right,” Mills offered, gesturing to herself. “Though I probably shouldn’t say anything like that in case I jinx it.”

Liv wanted to laugh, but the very idea that her sister could one day be in danger terrified her. I feel like I can’t keep everyone safe forever.

She tried to enjoy this moment, right now, here with her boyfriend and her sister. Everything was exactly as it needed to be.

But Liv wouldn’t have felt quite so relaxed if she’d glimpsed the person standing outside, watching them from across the street.

It was the first time he’d laid eyes on her in years.

She hadn’t changed one bit, while he felt worn down by the passage of time. It wasn’t too surprising given what he had to contend with.

The sight of her laughing and enjoying herself was enough to make his blood boil. He wanted to march into that house and throttle her with his bare hands. It wasn’t fair, wasn’t right that he should be out here with nothing to show for himself.

When he thought about every bad thing that’d happened in his life, he could trace it all back to her and her fucking interference. Granted, the other copper had been there too, but he knew she’d been the one that’d led the charge.

He knew he was at risk of getting caught, but he didn’t care about the risk. He’d spent enough time in prison as it was. If he had to step back into a cell, he’d gladly do so knowing he’d thoroughly ruined Olivia Austin’s life—so that she would know what it was like to live a tarnished life where all the sacrifices that she’d made were pointless.

He hadn’t felt bad about killing Delilah Hart. He figured that at the very least, it would bring up all the bad memories associated with her brother’s abuse.

Michelle Ferguson’s abduction hadn’t gone down the way he’d hoped, but if his time away from Newquay had taught him anything, it was to always have a backup to the backup.

And he had a hell of a backup in mind for the next part. The most beautiful thing of all was that when the penny dropped for Austin, and she realised exactly what had happened… there’d be nobody to blame but herself.

The woman had been shouldering trauma her entire life, but he suspected this would be the moment that finally tipped her over the edge. Where recovery was not an option. Not long now…

13

Michelle Ferguson paced up and down in the room, trying to familiarise herself with the place that could be her home for the next few days. PC Diana Hershel had been the main officer on duty during that time, and so far, the young woman had routinely popped her head in the door offering to make a cup of tea. But Michelle didn’t need a caffeine fix. She needed to know if she could walk down the street without having to worry about looking over her shoulder.

She wanted to enjoy the peace and quiet before it inevitably got disrupted again.

Greg Dawson was going through the final prep work for the next big assignment.

He’d been worried about Katie having a wobble and getting cold feet, but the day before, she’d really delivered for him.

The chance for an exclusive interview with the widow of DI Austin’s first great love. He didn’t know how she’d found her way to Newquay, but it was the kind of news that he couldn’t just sit on. Olivia Austin had proven to be an interesting name with an even more interesting past.

He wanted to give Katie this assignment but knew that it would immediately blow her cover, so instead, he brought in three of his best reporters.

“Okay, lads,” he declared that morning, handing them a photocopy of the address Katie had sent him. “That is where Ms Ferguson is meant to be hiding out. Pictures are going to be fantastic, but the guy who gets a few comments on record is getting a raise.”

Nothing like a bit of healthy competition to motivate them.

PC Diana Hershel found herself checking out the mirror regularly for any disturbances outside. There was a huge part of her that was nervous about whether she could handle a situation if it arose, but she was glad to be back out in the field again.

After her run-in with a nail-bomb had seen her hospitalised, Diana had found herself reduced to sporadic desk duties until they felt she would be all right out and about again.

She appreciated the concern from her superiors, but she missed the routine that came with patrol. And of course, she missed her banter with PC Shaw. She wondered how he was getting on with the constable he’d been partnered with. When she first met PC Gibson, she’d been surprised by how chipper the young woman had been, leaving Diana wondering how much of it was for show.

Katie tried to look as relaxed as possible as she got ready for her shift that day. By that point, her editor would have seen the information, and he would already mobilise his best reporters like a pack of hyenas.

She tried to tell herself that she hadn’t really been given any choice, that this had been the only option. She found herself imagining what it must be like for Michelle, who could be a bundle of nerves after her latest brush with death.

More and more, Katie was wishing she hadn’t been given this assignment. She was much better off as a cutthroat. But Andrew had already told several other officers about where the witness was based, so she could only hope that they all had dodgy reputations.

“You coming?” Andrew asked as he straightened his uniform.

“Where are we going today?” she asked, hoping to show off some chipperness.

“We’re going to go and speak with Michelle Ferguson again,” he declared. “See if there’s anything she can tell us about Rhys that could be useful.”

Katie’s stomach turned. It’d been her hope that when the journos started knocking on the front door, she’d be far away from the incident, at the very least giving her an alibi.

“Are you sure there’s no one else that can handle it?” she asked, trying to sound light. “I’m sure she’s getting sick and tired of seeing us.”

“Oh, no one’s ever got tired of seeing me,” Andrew boasted with a wide grin. “I’ve never met a witness who’s ever needed to turn me away.”

“So, when are we doing this?” she asked, wondering if she had some time to delay.

“Now,” he said, in an authoritative tone she hadn’t heard from him before.

Realising there was nothing she could say without making herself look even more suspicious, Katie nodded slowly and headed for the car.

The reporters all took the same car and parked near the sea front, figuring that if they parked directly opposite the house, the witness would hide away. They needed the element of surprise on their hands.

One of them decided to try their luck and snuck around the side gate, clambouring over and trying to keep his camera from getting tangled.

One of them tried the front door, going for a professional stance. He smoothed his hair down, hoping that his boyish charm would win her over.

Luckily, the blinds in the kitchen weren’t drawn, so the photographer was able to get a good look at the occupant inside.

But as he raised his camera to take a shot, his face twisted in puzzlement.

Katie shifted uncomfortably in her seat, wanting to believe that the journalists would have finished up with the witness by the time she got there. She couldn’t risk one of them identifying her and letting it slip.

Suddenly, the radio crackled, and Andrew answered it. “PC Shaw.”

“We’ve got reports of a group of people hanging around outside a house. The mother inside wasn’t sure if it was kids mucking about, but as soon as she went outside, they ran off,” the voice replied, to Katie’s subdued surprise.

“Mother?” she repeated.

But Andrew didn’t look the least bit perplexed. “No need to worry about it,” he continued, looking directly at Katie as he changed the channel. “PC Hershel, can you report any stalkers or suspicious people hanging around by the town centre?”

“No, Andrew, quiet as a mouse,” she replied, as Katie felt a red-hot flush.

Andrew placed the radio down and pulled onto the pavement. “Are you going to continue treating me like a div or actually try being honest… if that’s possible.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered, trying to think of something to say, but her usual nerve failed her.

“Come off it, Katie,” he spat, his voice full of disgust. “I know you’re the bloody journalist pissing on all of us.”

“I can assure you I didn’t say anything about the house by the seafront,” she insisted, trying to think of a decent scapegoat. “It must have been PC Finch. You know how loose lipped he can get after a few drinks.”

“Yes, you’d have thought that he would be the kind to blab,” Andrew admitted with a little nod.

“Exactly!” she exclaimed, desperate for any explanation that absolved herself. “It had to be him. It’s not his fault, it’s just…”

“Except I told PC Finch that Michelle Ferguson was going to be stationed in a house right next to the train station in case she needed to make a quick exit,” Andrew interrupted, savouring the moment. “I told PC Rogers that Michelle was going to be based in a house by the town centre. I told no one that we were going to be putting her next to the seafront… no one, but you.”

Katie’s face went white as she realised how thoroughly she’d been played. She’d made a huge mistake in writing Andrew off as the local clown. Her face hardened. “Well played,” she finally muttered under her breath.

“You know what, I’d ask you for an explanation, but somehow I just don’t think I’d get one,” Andrew muttered angrily. “I’d tell you that you’ve betrayed your colleagues, but you were never really one of us, were you?”

“So, what happens now?” she asked, trying to maintain a steely resolve.

“Now, I think we need to have a chat with the superintendent,” Andrew insisted, turning the car back around and driving her back into the lion’s den.

14

“Well, at least we now know who’s responsible for all the leaks,” Olivia noted, sitting opposite Katie in an interrogation room alongside Superintendent Collins. This matter could have been handled by other people with Liv being the Senior Investigating Officer on an ongoing murder case and Collins being the highest authority in the station, but both officers had a very personal bone to pick with the young PC.

“You’re a disgrace to the uniform,” Collins spat, and even though he was trying to keep himself under control, Liv could see that it wouldn’t take much for him to let loose.

Katie struggled to maintain eye contact with them both.

“I know it looks bad—” she began, but Collins cut her off.

“Looks bad?” he exclaimed. “That’s the understatement of the year. Not only have you betrayed the trust of everybody in this station, you have also broken the law. Masquerading as a police officer?”

“I accepted this assignment because I thought it was important,” she began, not sure what she could say but seeing no point in dressing it up. “I thought there were flaws in the police service that needed addressing.”

“So, your response was to obstruct ongoing investigations and endanger lives?” Liv demanded, knowing that any justification would set her off.

“It just got out of hand, that’s all,” she muttered. “I didn’t mean for the stories to go that far. And I didn’t enjoy having to—”

“So you’re telling me that you didn’t enjoy having to lie to all of your colleagues, betray their confidence, exploit their trust, and jeopardise our already-precarious reputation with the public?” Collins asked, falling back on professional jargon when his personal feelings risked clouding over. “You know what happens when you publish scandalised shit about us? It creates a general lack of trust in the public, meaning that they will treat us with contempt and won’t help us with our investigations or come to us when they need help. You might have set our standing back by a good few years.”

“And don’t give me that bollocks about how you felt so hard done having to lie to us all,” Liv chimed in, determined to have her piece. “You knew exactly what you were doing whenever you slipped a little nugget of wisdom to your editor, what that would mean for the rest of us. And if you are seriously going to sit here and tell us you had no idea, you’re either a die-hard bullshitter or you’re stupider than we thought. I mean, how long were you going to keep up this charade? Were you just going to pick us off one by one until no one even wants to work in the service?”

“I got into this assignment with the best intentions,” the PC pleaded.

“Yeah, and I’m sure DS Harding would agree with you on that,” Olivia spat as the room went silent. “You’re lucky that she’s not here to give you a good hiding after what you did to her family.”

Now there was no hiding Katie’s shame, no trying to paint it as a noble cause. “I regret that happened, every single day…” she mumbled, her eyes focused on her hands in her lap. “I swear if I’d known that anything would happen to that little girl…”

“You honestly expect me to believe that?” Collins asked, and Liv could see as his own guilt over Nikki’s departure came bubbling to the surface. “Because of you, a small child was abducted and damn near killed by her father.” His hands balled into fists as tears formed in his eyes. “I swear to God, if that child had died…”

Both women could see how he’d lived with the guilt of his decision for the last month, and the loss of Nikki’s trust in him had affected him deeply. He knew how close Nikki’s daughter had come close to dying.

Collins finally pushed himself up from his seat. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, pacing up and down. “There is no way I can do this interview and call myself objective. You do what you want with her.” He walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

There was a moment’s silence as the two women recollected themselves.

“So, what happens now?” Katie asked, fiddling with the sleeves of her top.

“My God,” Liv guffawed. “Actually, you know what, I shouldn’t be surprised that your first priority is still number one. Never mind the damage done to the people around you.”

“I hate what happened with Nikki Harding,” the false PC pleaded. “Believe me, every single night since it happened, I’ve wished I could take it back.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s going to really reassure Nikki,” the inspector quipped, knowing that if she put in a phone call to the sergeant right now and told her they had found the leak that started the chain of events leading to her daughter’s abduction and her husband’s death, Nikki would drop everything, hop on a train from Derby and there wouldn’t be a force on Earth keeping her from tearing PC Gibson limb from limb. “And you can quote me.” She made sure to lace that last part with as much venom as she could muster.

“Would you honestly believe me if I told you that I tried to find a way out of this?” Katie insisted. “After what happened with DS Harding, I begged Greg to take me off the case, but he insisted on keeping me on. What was I supposed to do?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Olivia muttered nonchalantly. “I’d say act like a fucking human being for once, but I wonder if you’re capable of even that.” Then Liv remembered all the time spent thinking about her own past and how she felt like it was catching up with her.

“I’ll bet I was your prime target,” she suggested, leaning across the table. “I’ll bet you couldn’t wait until you got me in a position where I was completely compromised, my whole life reduced to true crime clickbait.”

Tellingly, PC Gibson didn’t have a response to that, because they both knew that if this had carried on long enough, Katie would have gladly smeared Olivia’s name all over the front page until her past was on show for the whole world to see.

“Please,” Katie asked. “There’s got to be something I can do to make this right.”

“What did you have in mind?” Liv asked sardonically. “Print a retraction?”

“I am so sorry that it got to this,” the young woman replied.

“No, you’re not,” Olivia replied, shaking her head. “You’re just sorry that you got caught. And you can play the remorse card all you want. I don’t believe a single word that comes out of your mouth. Do you know how many hours we put into all those cases, all the pressure we were under, all the victims that we had a responsibility to? And yet it was more important that you get your ad sales sorted.”

Liv felt her tolerance running out and couldn’t even bare to breathe the same air as this woman. She rose from her seat and left the room. Collins was waiting in the corridor.

“We’re going to need to find someone to handle this who can at least remain impartial,” Liv suggested, knowing that now was not the time to pursue personal grudges.

“Well, that’s going to be a tall order, considering that almost all of us have been tarred by her dirty brush,” the superintendent muttered as he helped himself to a cup of water, though he was probably wishing it were something stronger.

“At least you now know that what happened with Nikki’s daughter wasn’t your fault,” Liv assured him. “It was all down to that devious little bitch.”

Collins nodded slowly, trying to believe it but not quite there yet, though it was clear he appreciated the sentiment. “I just can’t believe she was under our noses for this long.”

“This probably would have gone on for a lot longer if it weren’t for PC Shaw,” Liv noted, remembering how Andrew had come to her with his gambit to rat out the leak. He’d had his suspicions that it might be Katie, but he had hoped that he was wrong.

“That lad definitely has a bright future ahead of him,” Collins muttered with a glimpse of a smile. “It’s good to know that something has come out of this mess.”

“So, where do we go from here?” Liv asked, knowing that even though the leak had been taken care of, the information already exchanged still left them vulnerable. And that’s assuming we know everything she traded to her editor.

“Well, we need to find someone neutral to handle this, otherwise, our conduct is clearly going to be more personal than professional,” the superintendent declared. “We are going to need a full report of every piece of information that’s been shared with her. And then we’ve got to speak to the editor to find out if we’ve got any more bombshells lined up for us. At the very least, we need to make sure there’s nothing on the horizon that could compromise this current investigation.”

15

Liv and Archie drove to the office, both trying to rein themselves in.

“I’d say, ‘don’t lose it’ is the best course of action at this point,” DS Elmhurst articulated in his precise manner. “But somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”

“We will have to,” Liv muttered as they got out of the car.

“Do you think it’s worth telling Nikki that we’ve found the leak?” Archie asked, knowing that the sergeant would be holding out for that information.

They walked into the office where Greg Dawson was sat behind his desk, speaking into a phone. “Katie, it’s all gone fuck-up. The boys are telling me that Michelle wasn’t anywhere near that house. So, what happened? Did you give them the wrong address? Look, just call me when you get this, all right?” He hung up the phone and looked up from his monitor to see DI Austin and DS Elmhurst moving towards him, his eyes wide with shock.

“What?” Liv quipped, stopping in front of the desk. “Not the copper you were expecting?”

“We know that you had PC Katie Gibson sent into the station as an undercover journalist,” Archie added, taking a seat to make it clear they weren’t going anywhere.

For a man who’d just been caught out, Greg recovered remarkably quickly. “Well, this is certainly a turn-up,” he stated, trying to look casual in the face of their scrutinising looks. “I always knew there was a risk of her getting caught out. Didn’t think it would happen like this.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” Liv exclaimed, anger boiling over. “Did you give no consideration to the cases that you might have compromised?”

“If any cases did get messed up,” Greg retorted, giving a serious look, “that’s only because you lot couldn’t muster the brain cells between you to do your jobs properly.”

“So your response was to print every single perceived mistake?” DS Elmhurst asked.

“In a way, you should be thanking me,” Greg insisted, stunning the two into silence before Olivia burst into laughter.

“Oh, wow,” she roared. “That is some logic! You turn investigations into scandals, and somehow, we’re supposed to be thankful to you? Do you want to run that logic by me?”

“The police are always making errors, misplacing evidence, convicting the wrong people, letting the right people slip through their fingers,” the editor explained sanctimoniously, leaving the pair wondering how long he’d been preparing this speech. “If you didn’t have people like me around to point out the errors, how would you honestly know to make any improvements?” He then made a little shrug. “And of course, it makes for headline news. You know the rule; if it bleeds, it leads.”

“Practice your speech in front of the mirror, did you?” Liv asked, unwilling to indulge any of his bullshit. “Mr Dawson, you seem to be confusing yourself with an intrepid reporter on a crusade. But I’m going to tell you now, you’re not Woodward and Bernstein. You’re just an opportunist who has obstructed several investigations and endangered several lives. You realise that last month—because of the story you ran on the case were were working—a small child almost lost her life. That would have been on you.”

They hoped that he might try for some remorse. For all of her flaws, Katie Gibson had at least had the decency to act like what she’d done was a bad decision.

But Greg Dawson looked completely nonplussed by what he’d unleashed. “Firstly, I didn’t have anything to do with abducting that kid. That was her dad’s doing. And I haven’t reported anything that hasn’t been untrue. So, if you think you’re going to come after me with a libel case, I can promise you, you are going to be in for a very long battle.”

“Oh, don’t worry, we’re not going to be coming at you from that angle,” Liv assured him. “I was thinking more obstruction of official police investigations.”

“Well, you won’t get very far in that case,” the editor boasted confidently, wrong-footing the two a little. “Under the Official Secrets Act, while the disclosure of private information from the police to the press is considered unethical and grounds for disciplinary action, it isn’t illegal. And yes, I’ve read up on my law.” I bet you have to, you sleazy bastard.

“Then you’ll also be aware that protection from said illegality would only really apply if she was actually a police officer and/or the information involved matters of national security,” Archie chimed in, returning fire with his own legal knowledge. “But I’m sure, being a learned man, you’ll be familiar with the clause that talks about impairing the investigations of a serious crime.” He turned to Liv. “And do you think it’s possible to make a case for misconduct in a public office?”

“Hard to say at this point,” Liv muttered knowingly, relishing Greg’s now-worried look.

“Look, we really don’t need to take it that far,” the editor offered, rubbing his throat as though being strangled. “It was Katie who was the one who grassed on you all, not me.”

Olivia shook her head in contempt. “You really have no shame, do you? Regardless of how we feel about her, we all know that the only reason she was in that situation was because of you. And given that you sent a few of your reporters out to find a witness who is in protective custody, we could make the point that you were endangering her safety as well.”

Greg went silent, his silver tongue having finally gone rusty. “So… where do we go from here?” he asked, clearly not at the point where he was going to outright beg them to go easy on him, but Liv could tell he wasn’t far off.

“Well, for starters, you can disclose to us any piece of sensitive information that has been shared between you and your informant,” Liv requested, wanting to the matter solved.

“How will I know what’s sensitive?” Greg asked, a little uncertain.

“We’ll be the judge of that,” Archie retorted, unwilling to give the editor any wriggle room. “And also, we know that there will be other people you involved in this unsavoury process, so we are going to need the identities of everyone involved in printing these stories, starting with the photographers you sent out to harass Michelle Ferguson.”

“You’ve got to be joking,” he exclaimed, looking like he’d just been asked to donate a kidney.

“Not really, Mr Dawson,” Liv replied, glad to have the advantage after months of being tripped up. “Even if you didn’t ask them to disclose the information elsewhere, the fact that they are still in possession of sensitive information pertaining to ongoing investigations means we’ve got to round them up.”

“You realise that I have an obligation to protect my sources!” Greg insisted, now losing full control of the situation. “If word got out, no one would work for me again!”

“That’s a risk we’re willing to take.” Liv replied, though there was a part of her hoping that this wouldn’t take up too much time.

The three went through a load of emails, documents and transcripts that had been shared, including drafts of stories. Olivia felt a gut punch with every single headline ridiculing her colleagues.

Next was looking at all of the publication’s staff and those who’d had any kind of contact with the material, even briefly.

Even though a few cases had been leaked to the media, Liv was taken aback by the level of information they’d been able to attain since Katie Gibson had been positioned in the station. If it were our absolute goal, could we look any more incompetent?

“Where are the photographers now?” Liv asked, knowing that while Andrew’s gambit might have paid off, chances were there was a family unsettled by the appearance of scandal-hungry paparazzi.

“They’re out on a break, I’m guessing,” Greg replied, clearly in no rush to call them back to the office.

“Do you have that list of all the staff members?” Archie asked, and when the editor hesitated, he added, “We could come back with a warrant and make it official.”

Sighing heavily, Greg opened up his computer and printed off a list of all of the staff members, their photographs and various functions.

Liv was browsing through the list of photographers almost absentmindedly when she stopped in her tracks. The paper drifted to the floor.

“Liv, what is it?” Archie asked, pulling himself away from the task and looking at the paper. He held it up, unaware of why she’d reacted like that. On the page was a photograph of a man Liv hadn’t seen since she first arrived in Newquay, part of the first major case she had cracked.

16

“Who the hell is that?” Archie asked, staring uncomprehendingly at the picture.

“It was before you came to Newquay,” Liv explained, holding up the photograph.

“Ronnie?” Greg asked, glancing at the photo. “He’s one of our more recent additions. Very eager to please.” I’ll bet he is.

Liv suddenly needed to get out of there. She did not want to be having this conversation in front of the editor and giving him even more ammunition against them. “This isn’t over,” she told Greg curtly before walking out of the room, taking the image with her.

Once they were outside, Liv tried breathing deeply, to Archie’s growing concern. “Liv, can you please tell me what the fuck is going on?”

She held up the image and pointed to it.

“His name is Samuel Mercer,” Liv explained, choosing to ignore the very different name given on the document. “He was the first case I worked down in Newquay. He was involved in the abduction of a young woman, his ex-girlfriend. He was possessive and kidnapped her, and it was only down to me and Dean that we were able to find them in time before he made off with her.”

“Surely, he’d still be in prison by now?” Archie asked, knowing that the charges of false imprisonment and resisting arrest were taken very seriously by a judge.

“They might have let him out for good behaviour,” Liv suggested, looking at the photo and remembering her and Dean wrestling with the culprit while trying to get the girl out of harm’s way.

“We have to make sure that it’s him,” Archie noted, looking closely despite not knowing the man. “And we still need to establish a motive.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Liv asked, glancing back at her partner. “He’s doing this to get at me. The bitch, the attack on Michelle, it’s all him.”

“Liv, there are plenty of people who’d probably want you dead,” he retorted quickly, before realising what he’d said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like….”

“No, don’t worry,” she replied with a laugh, feeling a bit of levity was needed. “I’m sure there’s an exhaustive list of people who hate my guts.”

Archie returned a smile before quickly turning serious. “I’m used to hearing the words ‘I’ll get you for this’ two or three times a week, but you expect them to be empty words. You never actually think someone’s actually going to follow through. Not to mention, with everything being done with luring Hart, getting Michelle over to Newquay, and tracking down Blakely, that takes a lot of work. Do you really think he’s capable of something like that?”

Liv remembered how she’d sat across a table from the man while questioning him on Ella Hebden’s disappearance and how he’d been convinced that he was the golden boy who could do no wrong in anyone’s eyes.

“We need to find out a bit more information before we go any further,” Liv suggested, heading back into the office.

Greg Dawson looked like he’d aged ten years in the ten minutes they’d been absent, and he was looking even more exhausted at the prospect of facing the two detectives for even longer.

“This man,” Liv insisted, pointing to the picture of Samuel Mercer. “How long has he been working here?”

“About three months, give or take,” Mr Dawson replied, clearly not seeing the urgency. “He came to us offering to work as a freelancer. It was pretty clear that there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for a bit of cash. If he’d come onto the team even sooner, it’d be him I was hiring for the undercover role and not Katie.”

“Did he come with good references?” Archie asked, figuring that a man capable of bringing together people from different walks of life wouldn’t have much difficulty faking a CV.

“Yeah, and they all checked out,” he replied, as if to say he did have some credibility. “Why? Is he supposed to have done something? If you want to, I can always phone him up and get him to come back here.”

For a moment, Liv was exasperated by the man’s complete lack of loyalty to his colleagues. But then again, if it were possible to get Mercer back to the office and stop this before it went any further, she’d be a fool not to take that chance.

“Yes, contact him, and see if he’ll get back to the office,” Liv commanded as the editor took out his mobile.

“Does this mean that I’ll be off the hook for my trouble?” he asked, never one to miss an opportunity to let himself off the hook.

“Just get on with the bloody call,” Archie snapped.

Sighing reluctantly, Greg dialled the man’s number and held the phone to his ear, miming to Liv that he would put it on speaker phone.

“Hello?” the voice came through, and Liv felt a chill strike through her. Even though it’d been three and a half years, his voice was coming back into focus, and she could remember him declaring how he and his captive had sworn their love to the stars.

“Ronnie?” Greg asked, trying to keep himself calm. “Just calling to find out how it went at the house by the seafront.”

“Complete waste of time,” the man grumbled on the other end of the line. “Just another family in there. Your girl clearly fucked up and made a mistake.”

“Well, it happens. You can’t get everything right,” the editor declared, locking eyes with the detectives in a burst of resentment for exposing his source. “You might as well get back here now.”

“Can’t do that, boss, I’ve got a lead I need to follow up,” the man responded, and Liv tried to mime for him to do something to keep the man on the phone.

“Listen, I want you here now so we can talk strategy,” Greg demanded. “I’m your editor, and I need you to do as I—” But the phone had already gone dead.

He looked defeatedly at the pair. “Not exactly an Oscar-worthy performance there,” Archie noted dryly.

“I want every single piece of information you have on this guy,” Liv demanded, feeling like they were in a race against time.

“Well, I’ve just got off the phone with the prison governor,” Superintendent Collins told them, looking winded. “Apparently, Samuel Mercer was released from prison about five months ago… for good behaviour.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Liv exclaimed, unable to comprehend how that monster had been let back out into the world.

“We can put out an alert and see if anyone spots him,” Archie suggested, realising how pessimistic he sounded. “Greg Dawson said he will keep his ears close to the ground and see if anything comes up… though he’s only helping us just to save his own skin.”

“At this point, I’ll take it,” Liv replied, thinking back to the confrontation earlier in the day. “There is something we could consider. Katie Gibson would have run into him. Maybe she will know something.” She thought back to the young woman’s proclamation that she wanted to make things right. At the time, she saw it as a desperate move to save herself. But now, Liv was wondering how earnest the journalist was in making it up to them.

“How do we know we can even trust her?” Collins asked, and it was clear that of all the people in the room, he’d taken her betrayal the hardest, having been living with the guilt of his own judgment for a month. “It could just be another lie. And besides, if she knew anything worthwhile, she would have pointed it out sooner.”

“That may be the case,” DS Elmhurst chimed in. “But we’ve got a man on the loose who is for want of a better word, a ghost. Throughout this entire investigation, he’s done a good job of hiding behind people, always staying one step ahead of us.”

Collins weighed it up in his mind, trying to think of a better option, only he had none. “All right, you contact her and speak to her. But I don’t want you giving her an inch. She’s still the woman who dragged this station’s reputation through the mud, and nothing is going to change that. If Nikki were here to see this, she’d be giving us a right bollocking.”

Liv wasn’t feeling in a charitable mood, and knew that Nikki wouldn’t be either. But this guy isn’t just out to kill me. He’s out to hurt me.

17

Samuel Mercer had known that his boss was setting him up for a fall within seconds. The beauty of being a champion bullshitter was being able to pick up on when everyone else was lying. Samuel already knew based on the botched visit to the safe house that the police were onto the leak. He should have known he was playing with fire as soon as he found out from Greg Dawson that there was a journalist planted on the team, but he decided to make the most of the opportunity and sort all the pieces together.

It’d been three-and-a-half years since he took Ella Hebden, determined to pick up where they had left off in their whirlwind romance. While he could have any woman he wanted, he knew that she was his soulmate. Clearly, it would have taken time for her to come to the same conclusion, but deep down, he knew that one day, she would respond to his feelings. She just needed to spend enough time in his company. Love overcame all…

…at least it should have done, were it not for the intervention of Detective Inspector Olivia Austin who’d ruined his chance of a happy ending and seen him carted off to prison, Ella forever out of his reach. While inside, he went through the five stages of grief in quick succession, denying that Ella could ever possibly hate him, anger at the interfering bitch, writing letters to Ella in the hope she might respond—they’d been sent back to him unopened—and despair that he could never return to the life he once knew… He was still working his way through the acceptance stage. He told himself that even if he approached Ella now, far too many people would have poisoned her against him.

Instead, he found himself a new target for his emotions. But while he’d previously been spurred on by love, now he was operating on pure hate.

He made Olivia Austin the centre of his world, knowing that if he could do some serious damage to her, the likes of which she would never recover, then he could go to his grave a happy man.

So while in prison, he kept his head down. He didn’t get involved in any disputes with the other prisoners, and he maintained a friendly relationship with the guards. He took online courses to show them he wanted to do something worthwhile with his life when he got out, putting on the show of a model prisoner so that when he went up before the parole board, they would struggle to find reasons for why he shouldn’t be released early. Granted, he had to put on a show of remorse and pretend that Ella no longer meant anything to him, that he realised he could never be forgiven for what he’d done to her, and knew the only thing left to do for her was give her peace from him.

After he was released, it occurred to Samuel that he’d spent so much time pretending to be a model prisoner that he could actually grasp any life he wanted… within the limits of his conditions for parole. But he’d spent far too much time learning everything he could about DI Austin, learning about all of the traumas that’d marked her life: the abuse of her brother, his disappearance into the Flock of Eden, and losing the love of her life in a brutal attack, to say nothing of everything that’d happened to her ever since she’d taken up her post in Newquay.

Samuel figured that a woman like that had such a strong grip on reality, if she it let go even for a minute, she would hurl herself into the abyss—and he was happy to give her a little push.

He targeted the disgraced teacher first, figuring that her death would stir up bad memories for Olivia and she wouldn’t be able to look at the case straight without dealing with the personal angle. He also figured that the police probably wouldn’t look too hard at the death of a convicted sex offender. He was sure that if he came forward and confessed to the murder, he’d be getting a pat on the back for his trouble.

He’d kept close track on her movements over her last few days, watching her try to make some desperate peace with DI Austin’s brother, only for that to fall flat. And when he saw her later in the bar, he made sure she had drink after drink plied with Xanax so that she would be helpless for what he had planned next.

When he laid her down on the plastic sheeting and sliced at her tendons, he expected her to cry and beg, and she did give a muted cry from the pain—at least as much as the drugs would allow. But she didn’t have anything to say, as if she knew this was the end for her, and in the end, she tried to accept it with some dignity. He wasn’t sure how long before that dignity gave out as he throttled her.

After depositing the body back in her house to avoid suspicion, he returned his attention to one of his earlier tasks. He’d done a lot of digging into her partner Rhys and looked into some of his previous convictions. It was just a matter of finding someone disgruntled enough to do his dirty work for the chance of revenge. It hadn’t taken much to get Ian Blakeley on board. It’d taken slightly more effort to get Michelle Ferguson down to Newquay. He knew exactly where to take her and figured that if he took her alive, he could lure DI Austin into a trap and make sure she spent the last few hours of her life in torturous agony.

But the stupid bastard had botched that job and got himself incriminated. Luckily, he didn’t know enough about Samuel to tell the police. The man knew that if the police got so much of a whiff of his involvement, then he’d be straight back to prison, and there was no way his ruse would work the same magic twice.

But he couldn’t pull out of his job. When he was given the assignment of heading out to talk to the witness at the safe house, he figured he had to take the risk. When the team realised they had been duped, he knew it’d only be a matter of time before the police came knocking on the editor’s door, with DI Austin leading the charge as ever.

When Greg called him up asking him to come back to the office, he knew that something was up. Greg would never pull him away from an assignment.

He was beside himself with anger that he’d been caught out. He thought that he could possibly flee from Newquay, try and make a run for it. There wouldn’t be much life as a fugitive, but as far as he was concerned, too much effort had gone into making DI Austin pay. If he left now, all that hard work would be for nothing.

Luckily, he’d been watching Olivia’s family very closely over the last few days, and he knew exactly how to hit her where it hurt.

Mills had just finished making a cup of tea and was sitting down enjoying the quiet of the house. Max had protested leaving her alone while she was heavily pregnant, but she insisted that she wasn’t an invalid. And little Ru was over at a friend’s house on a playdate, so she was glad to have the place to herself, if only for a few hours.

She knew she wouldn’t enjoy much peace and quiet when the baby came. Mills rubbed her stomach, imagining the beautiful life growing inside of her. She thought back to her earlier memories with Ru, the first time she’d held him, when she had to get up in the middle of the night to feed him, when she was constantly fatigued running around trying to manage a household, a husband, and a newborn baby… But after that little reflection, she was looking forward to doing it all over again.

Ru was looking forward more and more to the idea of having a little sister to play with. Once again, he’d tried to make his new sibling feel welcome by climbing up and rearranging a special place in the cupboards for all of the foods that the little one might like to eat. Even at such a young age, he was already a considerate child.

She put the tea down and started fumbling for the remote. When she found it wasn’t in arm’s reach, she hauled herself up, walked over to the other side of the living room…

…and caught a glimpse of someone standing on the other side of the street.

They weren’t doing anything and didn’t seem to be waiting for anyone. They just remained in the same position… looking at her house. At her.

Mills tried to make a show of fumbling with the remote, hoping that if she ignored it, he would go away. When she made a show of finding it, she looked up briefly…

…only to see that the man was now gone.

Gulping heavily, Mills rushed over to the living room and locked the door, trying to think of any other possible points of entry while she fumbled with her mobile to call her husband—no, her sister. The only person she could possibly trust to help her.

She took out the phone and tried to maintain calm for her child’s sake, keeping one hand on her belly in a show of protection.

Chapter

PC Andrew Shaw entered the room where Katie Gibson had been left sitting. She said nothing as he walked in the room and took a seat opposite her.

“I can’t believe you set me up,” she muttered with her arms folded.

“You really think you can take the moral fucking high ground on this one?” he asked disbelievingly. “Or did you honestly think you were so clever that you were never going to get caught?”

“If I told you I’m sorry for all the damage that’s been done, would you honestly believe me?” she asked, thinking back to all the moments of camaraderie they’d shared. Sure, she was faking them for the sake of blending in, but she realised how much she’d enjoyed the PC’s vibrant sense of humour and easy-going nature. To see him look at her with such scorn was disheartening.

“You realise that there’s going to be a full investigation into all this?” he noted, knowing that Collins was already pulling his hair out trying to find out exactly how much sensitive information she’d been privy to.

“Does this mean prison time?” she asked, looking a little nervous.

Andrew couldn’t say for sure, and he didn't want to risk giving her false hope.

Olivia entered the room, prompting Andrew to stand tall. “Great work earlier, PC Shaw,” she declared proudly, thinking about how far the young man had come since she first met him.

“You’ll pardon me if I don’t really feel like celebrating,” he muttered, looking back at Katie, who couldn’t return his glance.

“We’ll catch up later, okay,” she offered, patting him on the shoulder. “Right now, I’m going to need the room.”

“I hope you don’t plan on going easy on her,” Andrew noted with an air of bitterness, and Katie reeled back as though she’d been slapped in the face.

“He really doesn’t like me, does he?” she asked after he’d left the room.

“Can you blame him?” Liv asked, sitting down herself. “He’s a good copper, and right now, they’re hard to find.” She tried to pace herself for what she was about to share. “We want to ask you questions about one of your colleagues, the man you know as Ronnie Barber.”

“What about him?” Katie asked, looking too preoccupied with her own fate.

“I want to know if you had any kind of contact with him at any point in the three months since he started working there.”

“What difference does it make?” the young woman asked, not seeing the connection.

Liv didn’t like the idea of volunteering more information to a journalist, but she needed to find Mercer now. She couldn’t afford to wait. “We believe that he’s been operating under a false name and that he’s a dangerous criminal responsible for the crimes that have taken place over the last few days.”

Now Katie had her full attention. “Shit. Why?”

Olivia swallowed heavily. Please don’t let me regret this. “We think that these crimes are being committed as a way of targeting me. I arrested him when I first arrived in Newquay.”

“Fuck me,” the journalist whispered, slumping back in her seat. “That all makes sense now.” She looked up. “I think I might be able to help with that.”

Liv waited for her to strike a deal, to try and see if it would be too much for the Crown Prosecution Service to dismiss any charges with a gentle nudge from Liv.

But Katie instantly launched into it. “He always had questions about you. I saw him whenever I was in the office giving updates. You often came up in conversation.”

“In what regard?” Liv asked, wondering how much effort it would have taken for Samuel Mercer to swallow his hatred and maintain his professionalism.

“He said that I had to be careful when I was on assignment, that I couldn’t risk slipping up. He said that you were good, the one I’d really have to worry about,” the PC explained, though Liv couldn’t help seeing the irony that this young woman had been feeding information completely under her nose with her none the wiser. Now’s not the time to swallow humble pie.

“Did he mention anything else about me?” Liv asked, searching through her past for anything that could be used against her.

“He was saying that you were basically a powder keg waiting to blow up,” Katie continued, and Liv wondered if the woman’s insight extended to anything more than barbed comments. “He said that sooner or later, you would slip up.”

“Did he say anything else?” the inspector asked, trying to see if he might have let slip any possible targets.

“Not that I can think of.” The journalist nodded, conscious that this was not the answer she wanted to hear. “He seemed to be all about studying you from a distance.”

Probably because he knew that if he got close to me, he’d end up being recognised and, that would be the end of it.

Suddenly, Liv’s phone started ringing. She half-expected it to be Dean, as it was getting towards the end of their shift. But it was Mills. Is something up with the baby?

She held the phone to her ear and listened closely. “Mills, is everything okay?”

“Liv?” her sister breathed down the phone in a surprisingly hushed tone. “There’s someone by the house.”

Liv bolted from her seat. “What?”

“I saw somebody standing outside… and then he disappeared, and I have no idea where he is. But I think he might try and get into the house.”

Oh, my God, it’s him. It’s Mercer.

“Mills, listen to me, make sure you lock all the doors and keep yourself hidden. I’m going to stay on the line until we get there, okay? Is Ru with you?”

“He’s staying over at a friend’s house,” Mills answered, with Liv allowing herself a moment’s relief for her nephew’s safety… but only for a moment.

“I’m going to get over there as soon as I can, I promise,” Liv assured her, unwilling to let the line go dead. “I’m going to be right there with you, I promise you.”

“It’s him, isn’t it?” Katie asked, getting up from the seat, looking frantic.

“He’s after my sister,” Liv stated, holding the phone to her chest. “That’s his endgame. She’s alone in the house, and she’s due to give birth in a few weeks. I’ve got to get down there.” If anything happens to her and the baby, I’ll never forgive myself.

“I’m coming with you,” Katie insisted, heading for the door.

“Absolutely not,” Liv retorted back, trying to keep her ear next to the phone. “You’re not even a real police officer.” She marched out to the corridor, keeping the phone on, while Katie followed closely behind her.

“I know you well enough to know that you won’t wait around for procedure and protocols,” Katie replied, walking alongside the inspector as she spoke, finally putting her research to good use. “I’ve dealt with difficult suspects before. Right now, I’m here, and I want to help.” When Liv still didn’t so much as look in her direction, Katie added, “Do it for your sister’s sake, if nothing else.”

Liv looked around the corridor, hoping that there was somebody she could bump into to call to come with her, but no one came into view. She certainly wasn’t going to come away from the phone while Mills needed her. She was terrified that if she hung up now, it’d be the last time she ever spoke to her sister.

“I know him. We both talked about you. It was the only time we were being genuine with each other. Maybe I can use that to distract him,” Katie suggested.

“All right, you can come,” Olivia replied, far too stressed out to put up any kind of resistance. She picked up the pace and started running towards the entrance. The sun was setting on the horizon, which would incidentally be giving Mercer perfect cover for—

Suddenly, there was the sound of something smashing followed by a scream Liv instantly recognised as her sister’s voice. “Mills? Mills, tell me what’s happening?”

The phone hadn’t gone dead, but there was no answer on the other end of the line.

She sprinted to the car, silently praying she wasn’t too late. Not Mills! Please God, not Mills…

They pulled out of the car park and tore down the road.

18

Mills had hoped that the years of having a copper for a sister would prepare her in case of danger. But as she saw the locked kitchen door buckle against a force from outside, she nearly jumped out of her skin. She was petrified for her child and prayed that Liv would hurry up and save her.

She took tentative steps into the kitchen, seeing the outline of a man on the other side of the glass trying to boot the door in, showing no signs of tiring.

“Mills, we’re on our way,” her sister’s voice came through on the phone. “I promise you, it’s going to be all right. Just hang in there and stay hidden.”

Mills forced herself to move towards the knife block and took out the biggest blade she could find, clutching it tightly and rushing as fast as she could up the stairs and towards the bathroom. Just as she yanked the door open, she heard the sound of the backdoor smashing… and heavy footsteps entering the house.

She locked the door, trying to fight off the panic gripping at her chest. “Liv?” she pleaded, eyes watering. “If you can hear me, please come quickly.”

She heard the steps marching through the house and thanked God that neither Max nor Ru was in harm’s way. She tried to make herself as quiet as possible, covering her mouth with her hand.

The steps were now on the top floor, moving back and forth, softening as the intruder moved onto carpets and off again, crossing the rooms off his list one by one until he found…

The footsteps stopped for a moment, and Mills listened out for any possible movement. Had he just stood still? She wondered if she could climb out the window, but that idea was definitely out of the question. She couldn’t do anything that would risk her baby.

Then, the silence was shattered when he began pounding on the door, causing Mills to once more nearly jump out of her skin in fright. She fought the urge to scream, knowing it wouldn’t do her any good.

She stood up as the door buckled behind each blow, and slowly, it began to splinter… She began to see what it was forcing its way through the panels. It wasn’t a boot… it was a sledgehammer.

Suddenly, it found its way through the door.

“Mills! What’s happening?” Liv’s voice came through on the phone. “Listen to me, we’re almost there…”

But Mills was too petrified to respond or even listen, fixated on the blunt instrument forcing its way through her bathroom door.

As it was yanked backwards, she got a glimpse of the man on the other side. He was looking at her with pure venom. Mills imagine what she had done to deserve such anger, but she knew that it was only a few seconds before he could bring that sledgehammer down on her.

He looked her up and down, catching a glimpse of her belly, and it did seem to give him hesitation, but then he broke into a wide smile, as though thrilled at the chance to administer even more pain.

She knew that there was no point in pleading for mercy from a man who had none.

His hand reached through the door to get to the handle… and she immediately slashed at his forearm with the knife, prompting him to reel back in pain.

“You think that’s going to keep me out of there, bitch?” he spat, clutching at his wounded arm, which unfortunately, wasn’t enough for him to drop the weapon.

He moved forward, ready to try again… when Mills heard the sound of a front door opening.

“MILLS!” Liv called out and the woman felt a wave of relief wash over her.

“Liv, I’m up here! Be careful! He’s got a sledgehammer!” Mills called out, prompting the man to turn his attention to her.

Liv rushed up the stairs, and Mills could see her through the cracked bathroom door. “Mercer, let her go. Your problem’s with me, all right? Just let her go.”

Mills could also see another woman, this one much younger, standing by her sister’s side, clearly trying to think of what to do.

“I see you brought her with you,” Mercer noted, looking at the other woman with contempt. “You know, just because you’ve been playing the part doesn’t mean you have to act it. They found you out, remember? Why are you even helping her, Katie?” His face contorted in a quizzical manner. “You really think she’s going to go easy on you? The woman’s like a bloodhound. Once she gets someone in her sights, she does not let them go, and believe me, I know.” He was clearly thinking of her dogged search for Ella.

“I knew you weren’t her biggest fan,” Katie muttered, daring herself to step forward. “I knew there are things you were keeping close to your chest, but I didn’t think this was who you really are. Threatening pregnant women?”

Mercer briefly hesitated, looking from Mills sitting in the bathroom to the two officers. “She took everything from me that night,” he muttered, his hatred bubbling with each word. “If it weren’t for you, me and Ella could have enjoyed a life of our own,” he spat at Olivia.

“And what kind of life would that have been?” Liv asked, remembering the young woman’s fear when she was being rescued, how Liv had had to coax her to freedom. “Keeping her locked up, not letting anything into her life that isn’t you? That’s not love.” She tried to keep him talking, thinking that if his attention was on her, then at least it wasn’t on Mills. All throughout the investigation, she wondered what she must have done to someone to make them target her so specifically. And now it turns out it was just the result of me doing my everyday job.

“All of this, killing Delilah…” No matter what, Liv refused to feel any sympathy for the woman who’d abused her brother. “Luring Michelle to Newquay…” She deliberately omitted Mercer’s attack on Mills in case that put her back in his crosshairs. “...just to get at me?”

“I wanted to make you suffer for what you took from me that night,” Mercer replied, terse in his speech, looking at Liv with burning hatred.

“And what about Ella?” Katie suddenly jumped in, taking charge of the conversation. “I never met her, but she sounds like a good woman. The kind of person you’d definitely go to the ends of the earth for.”

“She was,” Mercer replied with a smile, looking back on what he clearly saw as fonder times. It’s just as well Ella isn’t here to contradict any of that.

“So, if she were here, what do you think she’d make of all this?” Katie queried, gesturing to all the carnage around them. “What do you think she’d make of you?”

Suddenly, all the years of separation, of acceptance that he and Ella were never going to have any future together, ebbed away, and Mercer felt his grip slackening.

That was when Katie rushed forward to grab the weapon, but he gripped onto it at the last minute, refusing to let go, causing a struggle between the two. “Get to your sister now!” Katie demanded as Mercer tried to regain control.

Not needing to be told twice, Liv rushed through the freshly made opening towards her sister, who was sitting on the floor petrified. “It’s okay, Mills, I’m here,” she pleaded, putting her arms around her sister.

Mercer finally wrenched the sledgehammer free and smacked Katie in the shoulder with it, causing something to loudly shatter. He pushed her back, and she felt herself going over the railing… but just before she fell, she wrapped her arm around Mercer’s neck, taking him with her.

The two fell to the bottom of the stairs with a crash. Before Mercer could recover, Katie took out a set of handcuffs and declared, “Samuel Mercer, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder. You do not have to say anything, however it may harm your defence if you may not mention when questioned something you later go on to rely on in court. Anything you do say may be used in evidence.”

Liv could hear the conviction in the young woman’s voice as she said those words.

“Liv?” Mills called out, noticing a wet patch on her dress. “I think my water’s broken.”

“That’s not possible. You’re not due for another few weeks,” Liv muttered, looking down in horror and wanting to believe that the dampness was anything but that.

Suddenly, Mills winced in pain, and Liv knew the baby was coming. “Okay,” she said quickly, helping her sister to her feet. “We’re going to get you to the hospital.”

They moved out of the bathroom, going down the stairs past where Katie was standing over the overpowered Mercer. “Don’t worry, you get her sorted. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Thank you,” Liv offered earnestly. Despite everything that’s happened, she really came through when it mattered.

She moved out of the house, taking her sister to safety. Once they were in the car, Liv turned on the sirens, not caring for procedure, and darted through the traffic.

“I’m so sorry, Mills,” Liv said as she drove. “This is all my fault…”

“Don’t bloody start,” Mills interrupted, rolling her eyes, though Liv wasn’t sure how much of that was from the anxiety. “Copper’s sister and all that. It was bound to happen.”

Liv knew that most people would hold her accountable for what was happening to her sister and gladly tell her to her face. But not Mills. Her sister had never judged her career nor held it against her. She was realising once again what a reassuring presence Mills was in her life. If I’d got there a few minutes later…

Liv shrugged off the thought, once again trying to push back the constant terror that one day, she’d be attending a crime scene, and it would be one of her loved ones staring lifelessly back at her. That day had almost come true.

Taking one hand off the steering wheel, Liv took Mills’ hand and grasped it tightly, refusing to let go until her sister was safe and sound.

“Just hold on, Mills,” Liv pleaded, tearing through the streets. “Just hold on…”

EPILOGUE

It’d been a tough night and several hours of labour, but by the morning, Camilla Austin was resting in bed, having given birth to a beautiful baby girl. Liv had stayed by her side throughout the entire birth, refusing to leave her. When Max had rushed into the room, Liv had half-expected him to launch into another tirade about how she was dangerous for his family… not that she wouldn’t agree with him. But to his credit, he’d been more focused on ensuring his daughter had a steady entrance into the world.

Once the baby was delivered, Liv retreated to the waiting room, finally allowing herself to rest to the point she fell asleep in the chair she was sitting in.

“How are you feeling?” A familiar voice propelled her back to consciousness, and she saw Dean standing over her with two coffees.

“Cheers,” she said, taking the coffee and downing it in one. She then stared down at the empty cup.

“How’s your sister?” Dean asked as he sat down next to her.

“She’s doing okay. She’s sleeping, which believe me, I think she needs it given what she’s been through tonight,” she noted, remembering the state of the house when she’d left it. That was supposed to be their safe space.

“Just so you’ve been brought up to speed,” Dean noted, drinking his own coffee, “Samuel Mercer has been taken into police custody. It’s been decided that Tim and Archie are going to do the interviewing.”

“Just as well,” Liv replied numbly. Normally, she would have jumped at the chance to interview a suspect after they were brought into custody. And in this case, she would have loved to have been there in the room for it to slowly register on Mercer’s face how well and truly fucked he was. “I don’t trust myself to not reach over the table and strangle him.”

“Yeah, that’s precisely why Collins is adamant about keeping you out of it,” he suggested with a shrug. “Having said that, from the way Archie was looking at him, I half-expected him to take a swing. I think everyone is trying to show a bit of restraint after what he did to your sister.”

“How’s Katie?” Liv asked, remembering how the journalist had given her the opening needed to rescue her sister and take down Mercer.

“She’s doing okay,” he told her, looking impressed despite himself. “Been checked over for her injuries. Got to give her credit. She can definitely get down and dirty when she needs to.”

“I don’t know what I would have done if she wasn’t there,” Liv pondered, thinking about her sister and her baby sitting healthily and how Katie had made that possible. Liv sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s any way we can…”

“I know what you’re thinking, Liv,” he retorted, raising an eyebrow, having anticipated this question. “And believe me, I’m grateful she did what she did. But that doesn’t change the fact that she still went undercover as a journalist, she still leaked private information… and she still endangered Nikki’s family.”

Liv conceded that point. After what Nikki had been through in her last major case, she didn’t think there was any good deed on earth that would get her to forgive Katie Gibson. “I’m not saying that we have to sweep it all under the carpet,” she replied, trying to be reasonable. “But if there’s any way we can go easy on her or take this into account… I mean, she insisted on coming with me and putting herself in harm’s way…”

“It’s what we do for a living,” Dean responded. “Every copper takes that risk. And besides, it’s not me you need to convince. Collins is the one leading the charge on that one, or at least trying to find someone fairly cutthroat. And from the way he was talking, he was clearly showing no signs of backing down.”

But for Liv, the fact that she’d still done it meant a lot to her. She shut her eyes, a clear sign that she didn’t want to have this conversation anymore.

“Why don’t you let me take you home?” Dean suggested, turning in his seat. “I can run you a nice hot bath, maybe you can get in a few hours of kip, and then you can come back here refreshed.”

But Liv didn’t honestly think she’d be able to relax without knowing what was happening to her sister.

Max came out of the room, and Liv immediately bolted upright in her seat. “How is she doing?”

“She’s doing okay,” he replied, hand stuffed in his pockets. “The baby’s going to be all right. They’d like to keep her in for a few days because she was delivered a little earlier than expected, but there’s no reason she shouldn’t make a full recovery.”

Liv felt her eyes bristling with tears. She’d given so much to this job, and yet it was determined to rid her of the few good things she had in her life.

“Do you want to go in and see her?” Max offered, gesturing to the room.

Liv tentatively got up from her seat while Dean remained sitting.

They stopped outside the door, and Liv wondered if Max was going to go on another one of his anti-Liv rants. At least this time, he’d be justified.

“I could ask about this guy’s connection to you,” Max began, his tone flat. “I could say all this shit…” He glanced over her shoulder at Dean who remained seated and was giving stony eyes his way. “...but I’m trying to focus on the fact that my wife and daughter are in there now because of you. And this guy… what happened says more about him than it’ll ever say about you.” He gasped, looking down at the floor. “What I’m trying to say is, Mills doesn’t blame you for what happened, and I should learn to listen to my wife more often.”

Olivia nodded at this, grateful for the show of support from the man who had every reason to begrudge her.

She opened the door to find Mills sitting upright in bed, the baby nearby. Liv held a hand to her mouth as she tried to hold back the tears. She watched the little chest move up and down, the eyelids fluttering. I wonder if she’s already started dreaming.

“Olivia,” Camilla said softly. “Say hello to Annie Olivia Austin.” Liv looked up at the middle name, prompting a shrug from Mills. “Felt only right to work in the name of her kickass aunt somewhere.”

Liv knew the waterworks were incoming and didn’t know if she could stop them.

“She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Liv stated with utmost sincerity. She looked up at Mills, who’d endured a life-or-death experience and several hours of labour, and yet was still able to hold it all together. “How are you feeling?” Liv asked before realising how stupid the question was given everything that’d happened.

“I’ll be okay once the drugs start kicking in,” Mills joked, lying back in her bed.

“Listen, I’m so sorry for what happened…” Liv began, feeling like she might never earn that absolution.

“If you’re going to start apologising, I’m going to send you out the room,” her sister insisted, taking the same firm tone she’d take with Ru if he ever misbehaved. “I’m a copper’s sister, remember? It was always going to happen. Took a little longer than I thought, but it’s happened. It would have been better if it didn’t happen the night I gave birth. At the very least, when Annie is old enough to be in school, she’s going to have a very fun time telling everyone what happened the night she was born. I can guarantee none of the kids are going to have that kind of story.”

Liv laughed at this just as the door opened and their parents, Alex, Tara, and Ru all crowded into the room.

Despite everything that’d happened to get to that point, the Austin family had never been more complete.

She was getting messages from all of her colleagues at work congratulating her on becoming an aunt, although Liv had to coyly remind them that it was her sister that’d done all the hard work. She’d spoken to Michelle at the hospital, who’d since been discharged, and the two had made plans to meet up again at some point, ideally under better circumstances. Whether this would happen, Liv didn’t know, but at least she and Rhys’ ex-wife were getting to that point where they could be that civil with each other.

Superintendent Collins had offered her some compassionate leave after the events of the last few days, which she gladly took advantage of, and when she was back home with Dean, she climbed under the duvet and held him tightly.

“Thank you,” she whispered as he lay in bed next to her.

“For what?” he asked modestly. “I didn’t really do anything.”

“For keeping me grounded,” she began, thinking that she could list all the reasons why Dean was the centre of her world. “You are always there for me when I need you. You always know how to keep me steady. For always getting me to look ahead instead of wallowing in the past, and for being the best thing that ever happened to me.”

She realised how much she’d been dancing around the idea of a future. Seeing how close her sister had come to death had changed something in Liv. It was like the universe was trying to tell her something, and she was finally ready to listen.

“A few months ago, you asked me a question,” she began, having thought about this long and hard and deciding now was as good a time as any. “And I told you I didn’t have an answer.”

Dean’s face went still as he took it in.

“The truth was, I was happy,” she admitted. “I was happier with you than I’ve ever been in my entire life. A lot of the good that’s come about since I got to Newquay is down to you. And… I was scared of losing that happiness.” She paused. Her heart racing as the words fell from her mouth. “I was afraid if I committed myself to a future with you, that it’d all come crashing down eventually, and I just wanted to spare myself the hurt. But I’m tired of dancing around things. I’m tired of putting life on standby. And I’m tired of not recognising good things when they come my way. So that question you asked me back in May… ask me again.”

Dean took a choked breath as he readied himself. He stared down at her, still processing the words that he’d just heard.

“Olivia Austin,” his voice low, the passion flowing through every syllable. Every word. “Will you do me the honour of being my wife?”

She reached over, unable to suppress the large smile that spread from ear to ear as she reached up and stroked his face.

The touch of his skin sent shockwaves through her body.

“Yes! Yes!” she squealed. “I most definitely will!”

THE END

TO BE CONTINUED…

Find out more in Book Forty-One here: Friends Who Kill

DS NIKKI HARDING WILL RETURN IN HER OWN SERIES:

BOOK 1 - BLOOD LIKE WINE

THE RELEASE DATE WILL BE COMING SOON

Looking for Book Forty-one? Don’t worry, it’s here!

Friends Who Kill - DI Austin Book Forty-One

Want to follow Olivia’s ex-colleague, Detective Sergeant Leah West?

Why don’t you get into my other crime thriller series?

Sins Evoked - DS Leah West Book One

Missed Book One? Don’t worry, it’s here!

Find the Girl - DI Austin Book One

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’ve always had a passion for writing stories and loved being able to create a world and have my characters live inside it. Being able to do this has been a dream come true and I’m so grateful that you could join me on this journey .

I live in the United Kingdom with my Husband and four young children who keep me busy and who I wouldn’t ever be without.

I hope you enjoy reading my books and please feel free to join me on social media where I love to interact with my readers!

mrsrobertswrites@hotmail.com