He banished the thoughts immediately and pulled Gill’s warm body closer to him. She responded, pressing her breasts into his side, and gradually the kiss became more comfortable and erotic. For the first time, Patrick felt that he had his wife back.

‘I’ve missed this so much,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ve missed you.’

Gill put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him again. ‘I’ve missed you too, Pat.’

After a few minutes, Gill’s hand slid down his torso and inside his jeans. He groaned with pleasure. He was so turned on that he thought he would come then and there, as soon as Gill’s probing fingers touched his flesh.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ he whispered, standing up with difficulty and holding out his hand to her.

She smiled properly at him then and he was reminded again how beautiful she was. He had forgotten how her nose crinkled when she smiled; how her eyes magnetised him when she looked at him like this. He hadn’t looked at her properly for two years, had averted his gaze since that terrible day when he came home and found her sobbing – here on the stairs.

He froze, plunged back in time for a moment, his ardour ebbing away.

‘What’s wrong?’ Gill whispered, but he shook his head, unable to answer. He led her up the narrow stairs, stepping over the step where she’d sat, shoving away the memories. As they reached the landing, Gill stumbled and ricocheted off Bonnie’s bedroom door. They both froze as they heard Bonnie stir and mumble in her toddler bed, but after a few moments all fell silent again and they tiptoed into their bedroom.

Patrick was glad it was dark. It felt too weird being back in this intimate space together. Trying to bring himself back to the moment, he gently pushed Gill onto the bed on her back, and lay down on top of her, pressing himself into her as they kissed again. He relaxed again, lost in the moment, trying not to think about how long it had been since he’d had sex, fighting back the urge to crack a joke about having forgotten what to do.

He worked Gill’s skirt and knickers down over her hips and, as she unbuttoned her shirt, breathing hard, he kissed her there, between her legs, the smell and taste of her and the way she gasped so familiar but so strange. He moved back up the bed, trailing kisses across her belly. She pushed him onto his back and straddled his thighs, unbuckling his belt and helping him pull his T-shirt over his head, tracing his tattoos with trembling fingers.

‘Oh God, Pat, you don’t know how much I thought about this when I was . . . away . . . I used to construct this fantasy about what you’d do to me in bed; it was all that would keep me going. I dreamed about you all the time. Shall I tell you what my fantasy was?’

Her voice snapped him out of the zone. No. He didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to talk, to listen to the desperate, strained note in Gill’s voice, like she was only saying all this to please him. He shook his head, said, ‘Just kiss me,’ and she did, leaning forwards, bare breasts pressing against his chest. It felt good; she felt good; so why couldn’t he fully relax?

Because when she ran her hands over his torso, he saw them shaking Bonnie.

When she wrapped her fingers around him, he pictured those fingers encircling their daughter’s throat.

He must have made a noise in his throat because Gill stopped kissing him and sat up, staring at him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

He tried to smile, to say, ‘Nothing.’ He was still hard, his body so starved of this, so desperate for fulfilment that nothing, no images, no doubts, could stop him. He rolled Gill over onto her back and, with eyes closed, entered her, concentrating on the feeling, the pleasure. Pushing away the pictures in his head.

‘I love you,’ Gill said, and he was sure he said it in return. Because he did. He still did. And this had to get easier, didn’t it? They just needed time.

Chapter 16

Day 4 – Wendy

Wendy sat at her desk in the half-deserted office, one of the strip lights flickering in a way that made her glad she wasn’t epileptic, and wondered what DI Lennon was doing right now. Snuggling up on the sofa with his wife, probably. Or reading his little girl a bedtime story. She knew all about Lennon’s wife and her heart went out to the poor cow. She hoped he was kind to her . . . Actually, she couldn’t imagine him being anything but. Despite the tattoos, the hair that needed cutting and that serious face, he was, well, he was lovely.

Lovely and gorgeous. The kind of man who was sensitive and empathetic but strong enough to be protective and sexy.

Jesus, listen to her! Sexy? She laughed, drawing a curious look from Martin two desks down, and reminded herself that it was a bad idea – a bloody terrible idea – to have a crush on her superior officer. Especially one who was married. Wendy’s dad left them after a younger woman he worked with tempted him away, moving to the other side of Wolverhampton, and Wendy would never, ever be a homewrecker. Never be like that scutter who made her mum bawl her eyes out for months. Not that she was the type that men left their wives for. She hadn’t even had a boyfriend for three years. Not for the first time, she cursed the fact that she had the body of a teenage gymnast – flat as a pancake, straight up and down, like an ironing board, and only five foot two. Twenty-five years old and she still got ID’d any time she tried to get into a club, and pretty much every time she bought drinks in a pub. It was deeply irritating. Unless she wore a ton of make-up – and often even then – she looked younger than her fourteen-year-old sister, Lucy.

Her latest attempt to appear her age was to have all her dark hair chopped into the shortest of pixie cuts because most teenage girls had the obligatory long, artificially straightened curtain of hair, but it hadn’t made a lot of difference. Pat – as she’d heard Carmella call him, not that Wendy would dare to herself – hadn’t appeared to even notice that anything was different about her.

Wendy really wanted to impress him, and the best way she could possibly do that, she thought, would be to find the bastard who had killed those two poor girls.

She gazed again at the photo of Rose Sharp on the whiteboard across the office. Even if it wasn’t about gaining Pat’s admiration and respect, she’d do anything to get the scumbag murderer off the streets. This was her chance!

Rose reminded Wendy of her little sister, Lucy, who still lived at home. Lucy actually thought OnTarget were a bunch of twats, preferring Jake Bugg and cooler indie music, spending her weekends hanging around the horse statue in the city centre with the alternative kids. Lucy thought that her older sister was ‘well sad’ for being into pop music, though she would happily join in with a game of Just Dance if none of her friends knew about it. Lucy would laugh her socks off if she saw what Wendy was doing now: signing up to the official OnT forum. She had chosen a picture of Shawn looking dreamy as her profile picture, with an animated GIF of the band on stage as her signature, and she decided on the username ShawnsCupcake.

As well as signing up to the forums she had also set up a new Twitter account, and had joined Tumblr and StoryPad. She didn’t bother with Facebook because OnT fans didn’t congregate on there, mainly because Facebook was seen by teenagers as a place for mums and grans.

Then she had spent an hour catching up with the latest OnT news and gossip, searching for the OnT hashtag on Twitter and seeing what the fans were talking about at the moment. Predictably, the deaths of MissTargetHeart and YOLOSWAG were hot topics, but so was Blake’s new tattoo and rumours that Zubin was seeing Trixie from Love Bomb. There was a disturbing amount of vitriol aimed at Trixie, which reminded Wendy of how much she’d hated any girl who was linked with Lee from Blue. For two years she had been convinced she was going to grow up to marry Lee, had longingly stroked the posters of him on her wall, sketched his face a thousand times, though his nose always came out wonky and his lips not quite kissable. She closed her eyes and remembered how that had felt – the rushing hormones, the deluded certainty that if the object of her rampant affections met her, he would see she was special. That she was The One. She recalled, too, the pain she’d experienced when Mandy Briggs told her she didn’t like Blue anymore and was switching her allegiance to McFly.