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Reid was back in a taxi now, and this time was heading straight back to London. It was going to cost him a fortune, but by the time he’d made it out of Trinity College he’d barely been holding it together enough to stand, never mind navigating onto the right train.

He’d had to argue with the porters about going to hospital, and eventually persuaded them that it was more important to check the room Roland Frankland was using. But when they’d forced access, it had been to find the place empty of life, a fact that hadn’t surprised Reid at all.

He’d made a few desultory checks for signs of restraints or other indications that Anna might have been held there and then called DC Kav Rohin at Finsbury Park and asked him to look into the whereabouts of Roland and Kit Frankland.

‘Is this a live investigation?’ Kav had asked.

‘I’m pretty sure it will be,’ Reid had told him. ‘If you can kick off, I’ll bring you up to speed once I’m back.’

But for Reid to make the investigation live he was going to have to find evidence that Anna could realistically be in London. And at the moment he wasn’t even sure that she’d been here at the college, though the idea that he might have missed her by minutes made his heart squeeze.

He’d left the porters with false promises of going to A&E and instructions to check if anyone in surrounding rooms had seen or heard anything.

‘I need CCTV for the whole site for the last twenty-four hours, too.’

The two male porters who’d arrived at the lodge after their rounds had looked at him with something between concern and irritation, but Trish had settled in at the computer to get to work.

Reid had felt profoundly glad that she’d been on duty tonight, even if he’d had to argue with her over treating his injuries first.

He’d pulled Anna’s phone out again the moment he’d made it into an Uber, and forced his alarmingly blurry eyes to focus on the screen.

Give me something , he thought. If not something to point to where you are, at least a definite excuse to take this to the Met.

But instead of finding that, he’d been hit by the double gut-punch of Cordelia’s words about him and Anna’s conclusion that she might have been right. And as angry as it made him to be judged so harshly by his ex-girlfriend, some part of it rang a deep and resounding bell within him.

He had put his vision of right and wrong ahead of Anna.

Not once, but repeatedly. He remembered other occasions when she’d told him with excitement about a story and he’d reacted with dislike over a sensationalist element.

Times when they’d worked together and she’d suggested doing things her way and he’d shut her down.

Other moments when he’d become angry with her for an action he’d seen as crossing a line.

It made him feel unanchored and dizzy to wonder why he’d done it all. What it was about those small rules– not even laws, but his little definitions of right and wrong– that had been important enough to make him hurt her.

And here he was, genuinely worried about procedure, when Anna’s life was in danger. When she might be injured or worse than that already.

He looked down at her phone, and said, ‘Fuck it,’ just loudly enough that the Uber driver glanced at him in his rear-view mirror.

He called Kav Rohin again and said, ‘Can you do a phone trace for me, too? Urgent one,’ and reeled off Anna’s burner phone number.