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I was now realising that my wife wasn’t who I thought she was.

Not because of her not having told me about being a suspect previously.

And not because of anything she had said, or how she’d reacted to any of the questions.

Hell, it wasn’t even because of how she’d attacked me.

It was because of that look in her eyes when she’d stared at me, with her arm pushing down my throat.

That wasn’t Fran. That was someone else, someone I absolutely did not recognise.

By the time I had finished cleaning the carpet and listening to the entirety of some dull talk show, I decided to go into the station. I wasn’t going to stay here and wait for Fran. It was killing me.

I grabbed a piece of paper from my book and wrote a note.

I’m sorry. This was a stupid fight. I shouldn’t have asked you that…

I stopped writing halfway through. I wasn’t sure about Fran any more. I wasn’t sure who she was. This wasn’t an ordinary argument; this felt cataclysmic. I scrunched up the piece of paper and tossed it in the bin, then began writing a new note.

I’m at the station if you need me. Please let me know if you’re home, okay? My phone is fully charged.

I gave Mep another cuddle, unsure whether it was for his benefit or for mine.

Then, in what was now the early hours of the morning, I made my way to the station.

The place was usually a busy and bustling hubbub twenty-four hours a day, but as I made my way through the building, it began to get quieter and quieter the closer I got to the CID.

I sat down at my desk and placed my phone smack bang in the centre.

If Fran rang, I would hear it straight away.

More than anything, I just wanted to know if she was okay.

I also wanted some clarification of what kind of fight we’d just had.

Had this been a verbal shouting match that got really out of hand, or was this the kind of thing where you took a trip to a family law solicitor to see what your options were?

The more sickening realisation to me was that I knew I couldn’t just let it go. If Fran had killed someone, she needed to be held accountable. The law was the law, and there was no bending it just because your wife was the suspect.

Or maybe she was protecting someone. Maybe she was being blackmailed or threatened, and that was why she wasn’t thinking straight. Could Angus be involved in this somehow?

I opened her report on my computer and went back to scanning over the selection of documents on my screen.

I felt like, maybe from the beginning, I had known deep down she might have had a part to play in this.

The cryptic notes on her phone, her unease at the mention of O’Neill, maybe now it was all beginning to make sense.

I heard the office door creak and my head shot up, foolishly expecting that I might see Fran. But unless she had undergone some pretty radical physical changes in the last few hours, including but not limited to male pattern baldness, the person I saw was definitely my colleague Steve.

He looked tired, exhausted even, with big black bags underneath his eyes and his hairline seeming to have jumped back a few inches since I had last seen him. Oh Lord, I hoped mine would never look that bad.

‘Hey, Gareth,’ he said, in a monotone.

‘Hey,’ I replied apathetically, before returning to focus on my wife’s questioning report on my computer, making sure Steve wasn’t positioned at an angle where he could see my screen, full of confidential emails that Cis really shouldn’t have given me access to.

‘Toddlers, you know?’ Steve said, replying to a question that I’d not asked. Reluctantly and arduously, I raised my head to meet his gaze, finding only dead eyes that seemed to show no spark of life. ‘Single dad life? Yeah, it’s hard,’ he continued, again answering his own question.

Just a few days ago, I would have been elated at the idea of Steve initiating a conversation with me.

However, given the current circumstances, the last thing I wanted was to engage in any kind of dialogue, especially with someone who had been at the very least an accomplice in discarding my lasagne.

So, with a tilt of my head that silently conveyed a dispassionate ‘well, what are you going to do?’ I sought to politely conclude any kind of conversation.

I lowered my head again beneath the cubicle divider, attempting to re-immerse myself in whatever else I could find out about Fran.

‘Umm, hey, Olive, my wife – well, my ex-wife actually – gave me some coffee and walnut cake,’ Steve said, timidly approaching my desk as he tenderly unwrapped a tinfoil package. ‘Would you like to share some with me?’

Screw your cake. That was what I wanted to say.

I didn’t say it, of course. For whatever reason, Steve was actually trying with me.

Maybe Cis had told him to play nice, or maybe even Vivian had given him a slap on the wrist. I checked just to make sure it wasn’t actually a piece of faeces he’d squeezed out, wrapped up and was presenting to me.

‘All right,’ I said, recognising that what lay in front of me was indeed a visually unappetising, but nevertheless genuine, coffee and walnut cake. Feeling somewhat defeated in my attempts to dodge the conversation entirely, I acquiesced, ‘That would be nice.’

Steve smiled and gently placed the cake on the table, cutting a haphazard slice with a crappy plastic knife. He passed it to me using a torn-off piece of foil as a placeholder plate, before grabbing a chair and wheeling it over to my cubicle.

‘So, Angus. Any updates?’ I asked.

Steve took a moment to process, knowing he probably shouldn’t tell me anything about the case, but clearly too tired to resist or care.

‘Not a crumb,’ he said, only lowering his voice slightly. ‘We brought him in for questioning, but he barely spoke a peep. Don’t tell Vivian I said that, though.’ Steve glanced in the direction of her domain. Even when she was absent, her malevolent spirit still lingered.

This was all information I already knew, and did nothing to help get Fran off the hook.

‘Sweat him more, then,’ I stated matter-of-factly.

‘Oh,’ Steve said, clearly surprised by my tone. ‘I mean, I don’t think we should really be speaking about this…’

‘He knows something. So, get him in again, apply a bit of pressure and you’ll get some answers, I guarantee it.

He’ll cave in in a jiff, especially if you raise your voice a few decibels.

’ This was something Fran had told me a few times about Angus.

He was bit of a nervous soul, so it didn’t take much for him to piss his pants.

My current feeling was Angus had been the one to do the deed, but why?

I had no idea. But I knew that whenever Angus messed up, Fran was always there to clean up his messes, and I knew this would be no exception.

‘Okay, Gareth, but do you really think that’s the best way? You’re sounding like Darren at this rate. They’ll ban you from the primary school visits,’ Steve said with an uneasy titter.

‘He knows something, and I bet you and Cis went far too easy on him. Personally, I’d go a bit harder and see what you can find,’ I said, finishing off the cake, rolling up the tinfoil and tossing it in the bin. ‘Trust me.’

I realised I was being somewhat cruel. The moral argument around me telling my colleague to sweat my brother-in-law-who-wasn’t-really-my-brother-in-law was rather dubious. But if applying some extra pressure to Angus meant keeping Fran from life in prison, then surely the ends justified the means?

‘Anything else?’ I asked, my patience draining.

Steve looked tense. His eyes seemed to glance downwards, and he shuffled awkwardly in his seat.

For as long as I had worked with him, I had desperately wanted his respect, to be treated as a colleague, a professional.

Had I realised that adopting a brusque tone was all it took, I’d have been an arsehole to him much sooner.

‘You know, Gareth, the other boys may joke around, but we think you’re all right,’ Steve said, through his last mouthful of cake.

Despite this having been probably the worst night of the close to thirty-odd years I had spent on God’s green earth, I’d have been lying if I said that didn’t make me feel a tiny bit better, just a little.

I was never one for seeing the whole case like a puzzle, as if it would all come together, like a neat painting of a picturesque scene, by the end of the investigation.

It was really more like Sudoku – a big mess that, even when finished and all the numbers were in the right spots, didn’t make any real sense or fit together nicely.

I’d not heard even a peep from Fran, which was more than a little unsettling, but I had spammed her phone with messages and got no response, so what else could I do but keep going?

I waited as patiently as I could for the CID clock to hit 8 a.m., and as soon as the hand brushed past the 8, I hopped back into my car and drove to the address that was still listed in my recently searched locations.

I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing this, if I was being honest with myself.

Chances were, if someone connected to the case didn’t want to talk to you, waiting for a few days wouldn’t really change that, but I had to give it one more try to understand what exactly Fran was involved in.

After managing to miss most of the morning rush hour traffic, I pulled up outside Maeve’s house, hoping she was home so I wouldn’t have trekked all this way for nothing.

I gently knocked on the door and a few moments later, she yanked it open, clearly expecting someone else.

The mysterious David she had mentioned last time, I imagined.

‘You again,’ she murmured viciously, moving fast to shut the door.