Air flooded the mask. Her lungs inflated in one blast and her head shot back. Light poured into her eyes. Another breath. She threw her arms out and coughed, the air dry in her parched lungs. Another breath, panicky, feeling her heart beat again, feeling blood hammer in her temples. And another. Flailing blindly, the equipment gauges, the emergency sports valve bobbing around her like tentacles as she righted herself in the water. In Wellard’s panic he’d pulled her along the bottom. Silt had come up and was billowing around her like smoke. She hung limply in the milky water, letting him bump her along the wall.

Mum?

But the water rushed past her and all she could hear was Wellard’s frantic voice screaming into the communications panel. ‘Are you there, Sarge? Answer me, for Christ’s sake.’

‘I’m OK.’ She coughed. ‘You can stop dragging me now.’

He let go the tension on the line abruptly and she came to a halt. She floated face down, still holding the bail-out toggle, staring into the place where Mum had been. The water was empty. It had been another hallucination.

She began to tremble. She’d been close. She’d broken the HSE’s rules, she’d cocked up an emergency procedure and the whole team had heard her going into narcosis. She’d even bloody wet herself in the process. She could feel it running down the inside of her thermals.

But it didn’t matter. It really didn’t matter. She was alive. Alive. And she was going to stay that way.

3

Bristol ’s Major Crime Investigation Unit was dealing with one of the most notorious cases it had ever known. Until a few days ago Misty Kitson had been a B-list celebrity, known only to the nation as another footballer’s wife who’d put enough cocaine up her nose to destroy it from the inside out, collapsing the septum. For months the press had been scrambling to get pictures of her nose. Now they were scrambling to find out what had happened to her on the day she’d walked out of a rehab unit on the other side of Somerset, never to be seen again.