The bell rang. She’d turned to follow Shawn with a studied nonchalance when the sound of a car braking fast made her look back. It was a dark green Volvo, like her dad’s – no, it was her dad’s. As she made out his face through the tinted glass, she saw that he was motioning to her. What was he doing here, before school?

She started towards the car slowly, aware of the second ring of the bell, of the play yard emptying behind her. As she neared the car she realized there was a second person in the passenger seat, a woman, and for a moment her heart flared in wild hope.

Then her dad reached back and swung open the rear door, and she saw that the woman was not her mother, but someone she had never seen before.

“Want some coffee, guv?” asked Doug Cullen, popping his head into Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid’s office. “I mean real coffee, not that slop,” Cullen added, nodding at the mug on Kincaid’s desk.

Kincaid grimaced at his sergeant and laid down his pen, stretching the stiffness out of his shoulders. “You just want an excuse to get out, and we’ve not been here an hour.” They’d come in early the past few days, catching up on accumulated paperwork, and the warren of cubicles that made up Scotland Yard’s CID had begun to seem more like a prison than an office.

“Guilty.” With his thatch of straight blond hair and wire-framed spectacles, Cullen looked more like a schoolboy than a detective sergeant. But in the year since Kincaid’s former partner, Gemma James, had been promoted to detective inspector and posted to the Metropolitan Police, he had learned to work well with Cullen, respecting the younger officer’s intelligence and dogged persistence when faced with a problem.

Not that Cullen or anyone else could truly replace Gemma as a partner. Although he and Gemma had been living together since the previous Christmas, he found he still missed working with her.