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10.55 A.M.

It wasn’t only the police team that was uncomfortable with Frost’s presence in the squad room. She herself wasn’t exactly chilled about it, and the mention of Ryan Douglas had done little to relax her.

It was a name she’d worked hard to forget over the years, and just hearing it had transported her to the darkest time of her life.

She had been seventeen when she’d fallen for the charms of the twenty-one-year-old man who had seemed both sophisticated and worldly to her young mind. He had a good job in software programming, a nice car and his own flat. She’d just dropped out of college and was struggling to exchange one civil word with her mother. After exactly five dates, she’d moved in with him, and very grateful she was to have done so. At first.

Initially, she’d ignored the subtle hints about her not contributing to the bills, and she’d tried to stick to the many rules he imposed.

No food in the car.

No shitting in the en-suite bathroom.

All opened food in the fridge in Tupperware.

The rules went on and on, and sometimes she’d had a hard time keeping track of them. And then one day she failed.

The first time she broke a rule, he started calling her Peggy and asked her to limp less when out with him in public. The second time, he pushed her against the fridge, and the third time, he punched her in the jaw.

There hadn’t been a fourth time because she’d packed her bags and left the following day. Her mother had refused to have her back, and after sofa surfing for a couple of months, she’d landed a job as general dogsbody at the Dudley Star and managed to rent a room for a hundred quid a month.

It had been the darkest, most lonely time of her life and not a period she chose to remember. But a small voice kept nagging at the back of her mind. Could he be behind this? Was he planning to use them in some way to rustle up more business? But why now? He’d probably made a killing during the pandemic. He owned the company, so he couldn’t need the money, but could there be some other motive? He’d been an arrogant, controlling dickhead when they’d been together, and she had no idea if the intervening twenty years had altered that.

She pulled herself back to the present and focussed on the job at hand. The man had taken up enough of her time.

Even though she was under strict instructions not to speak, which was hard for her, obeying the instruction not to listen was even harder. She didn’t really want to be privy to the inner workings of a police investigation though.

She understood the irony of that fact given that she was a reporter and many of her colleagues would sell their granny to be in her position, but she was unable to use anything she saw or heard for fear of her life. Even if she had been able to use her observations, she still wouldn’t want to. It was like sausages. They tasted good, but you didn’t want to see how they were made.

Like regular members of the public, she too wanted to believe that the greatest minds in the country were in these offices, solving crimes, catching bad people. She wanted to hold on to that image so she could feel safe in her bed.

She also wanted to be able to criticise the police for poor performance when she felt it was warranted. That was harder to do with pictures of one of them running off in search of a potential missing homeless person and the other wracking her brain trying to solve a puzzle. They weren’t images she needed in her head if she was to remain objective.

And all this because she had brought it to them. She was responsible for pulling four officers away from their weekends, and she could see the seriousness with which the investigation was being treated.

What if she was wrong? What if it was all a hoax? Her life wouldn’t be worth living if she was responsible for sending the team on a wild goose chase.

To make up for that possibility, she’d been busy doing what Stone had instructed and had so far trawled back a month or so, going over every article she’d written in detail to see if she could establish why she’d been chosen. There were other local reporters at other local newspapers. She’d not covered anything that seemed remotely connected.

And what of the article she was supposed to write?

Something from her was supposed to appear online by noon. She had exactly one hour to find an angle, write the article and get it authorised by her boss.

Not one of those things was as easy as it should be for a reporter.

Before she wrote anything at all, she had a phone call to make.