You’re losing it, Mower told himself, as at last he heard the faint sound of approaching police cars. You’re finally going round the twist. Seeing one girlfriend murdered might be regarded as an unfortunate. Suggesting another might have gone the same way was a sure means of being referred to the funny farm by over-solicitous trauma counsellors. When the knock on the door from his uniformed colleagues finally came Kevin Mower showed them in mutely and waved them towards the bathroom.

“I’d arranged to see her this lunch-time. She didn’t turn up so I came looking,” he said by way of explanation. “She’s in there.” And he let the investigation swing into gear around him as he sat slumped on Donna’s sofa, his eyes glazed and his head whirling with disconnected thoughts, in a posture that he knew his colleagues would put down simply to shock. But the shock had passed, to be replaced by a bitter anger as Mower watched the uniformed officers go through their routines. He had not the slightest shred of evidence to support his conclusion but he was nevertheless sure that Donna’s death was the climax of the campaign of violence on the Heights. He knew there was something profoundly wrong with the way Donna had died and by the time he left the flat, dismissed by the uniformed inspector in charge just as Amos Atherton lumbered in, gasping from the long climb up the stairs, he had convinced himself that she had been murdered.

For a long time he sat in his car outside the flats watching the rain stream down the windscreen and reluctant to do any of the things he knew he now had to do. Eventually he started the engine and eased the car into gear but only travelled the few hundred yards down the hill to the Project where, he thought, the worst of his obligations awaited him. The reception area was milling with youngsters when he arrived, some of them leaving Joyce Ackroyd’s class for remedial readers and some of them arriving for Donna’s three o’clock group of computer beginners which had evidently not been cancelled.

“Donna won’t be here this afternoon,” Mower shouted across the chatter of teenagers coming and going. “Sorry kids, the class is cancelled.” Cheers and groans greeted that news in equal measure and within a couple of minutes the Project had fallen silent as its clients disappeared in to the damp gloom outside. In the classroom doorway Joyce Ackroyd stood with one supporting hand on the handle and the other on her walking stick.

“What’s happened?” she asked sharply, evidently reading the expression in Mower’s dark eyes. “It’s not the drug squad messing us about again, is it?”

Mower shook his head silently and took her arm, leading her to one of the battered armchairs, still stained with red paint.

“Sit down,” he said gently. “This is bad news.”

“The worst?”

“The worst,” Mower said.

For a long time after he had told her what he had found at Donna’s flat, the two of them sat quietly, Mower with his arm round Joyce’s thin shoulders, Joyce clutching his hand as if to prevent herself drowning in grief.

“I can’t believe it,” she said quietly at last.

“That she’s dead?”

“No not that. You don’t have to reach my age these days to know death can come out of a clear blue sky. But I learnt early, any road, losing my man in the war. No, I mean I can’t believe that she killed herself. I can’t believe she’d ever do anything to hurt Emma, and what could hurt her worse that this?”

Mower nodded, relieved that someone else’s reaction was the same as his own.

“She had nothing to do with the heroin, did she?” he asked carefully. “I haven’t got that wrong?”

“Of course she didn’t,” Joyce said angrily. “She detested the drug dealers. She’d have done anything to clear them off the estate.”

“Maybe that’s it then,” Mower said. “Maybe she’s got too many powerful people annoyed with her campaigning, the Project, helping kids get clean. It’s not what the drug dealers want, or the men behind them, bringing the stuff in.”

“You want to look at that computer of hers in there,” Joyce said. “She’s been spending hours on that just lately, when the kids have gone home. Learning to use the Internet was what she said she was doing. Does that make sense?”

“It might,” Mower said. “Which one does she use?”

“The big one on the teacher’s desk in there,” Joyce said, indicating the classroom behind them. “It’s newer than most of them we’ve got, the cast-offs we’ve begged. We managed to get one new one by pestering the retailers in town. That’s the one she’s been on non-stop since all the fuss started about the redevelopment. When I asked her what she was doing she just said she was working on the campaign. But she was printing reams of stuff, I do know that. Kept it all in a drawer but when I tried it, looking for some Sellotape, it was locked.”

“Show me,” Mower said. But the drawer was no longer locked and apart from a few office sundries, it was empty.

“She had a lot of paperwork in there,” Joyce said obstinately. “And those disc things. A box of those.”

“Could the drug squad have taken them?”

“I didn’t see them taking paperwork. Why would they be bothered about the campaign for the Project?”

Mower switched Donna’s computer on briefly and gazed at icons on the desktop as if willing them to reveal their secrets. He glanced at his watch.

“I need to go into the nick,” he said. “But there may be files in her machine that will tell me what she’s been looking at. I don’t think it’s safe to leave it here. Donna may have taken her paperwork and hidden it somewhere, or it may have been stolen. If it’s been stolen, someone’s going to realise that the machine itself may have information in it.”

“Take it with you, Kevin,” Joyce said firmly. “Do whatever you have to do.”

They loaded the computer into the boot of Mower’s car and he drove Joyce back to her bungalow.

“Will you be OK?” he asked, as he helped her to the front door.

“I’ll ring Laura to tell her what’s happened,” Joyce said. “I dare say she’ll come round later.

“If Donna was killed, I’ll have them,” Mower said.

“Aye, I’m sure you will lad,” Joyce agreed as she opened her door. “But it won’t bring her back, will it? Nothing’s going to do that.”

Half an hour later Mower found himself back in Michael Thackeray’s office for his third uncomfortable session with his boss in less than that number of days. This time Thackeray was not unsympathetic. He had already been told about Donna Maitland’s apparent suicide when Mower arrived from making a statement about finding her body but he did not hide his scepticism when Mower began to question whether the cause of death was as obvious as it seemed to his colleagues and, apparently, to Amos Atherton.

“There’ll be a post-mortem, of course there will,” Thackeray said. “But off the record Amos says he can see no signs of foul play at this stage. It’s a bloody difficult suicide to fake without signs of violence on the body. She’d have to be semi-conscious at least to allow herself to be dumped in the bath without a struggle. Were there signs of a struggle, blood stains anywhere else …”

“Nothing I could see,” Mower said. “But she told me she was going to take something to help her sleep. She could have been semi-conscious … Has Amos any idea when she died?”

“He’s only guessing,” Thackeray said. “The water had gone cold but there’s no way of knowing how hot it was to start with. Anyway, the body wouldn’t cool at the normal rate.”

“She could have been there hours,” Mower said angrily. “Since last night, even. She had pills in the flat. If she’d wanted to kill herself why not just an overdose? Why cut your wrists if there are easier ways?”

“Kevin, you’re letting your imagination run away with you. I know you must be shattered by this …”

“But don’t go over the top again? Is that what you’re saying?” Mower asked angrily. He got to his feet slowly, as if every limb was heavy.