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Chapter One

Leek Wootton Police Headquarters, Warwickshire, 10 June, 9.30am

DCS Kat Frank ground her new heels into the old carpet as she strode towards her boss’s office. Chief Constable McLeish didn’t care who you were: a senior politician who’d taken months to secure an appointment in the diary, or a colleague who’d spent all day on a train just to see him—
if you were even five minutes late, you’d be sent packing. And Kat was a whopping thirty-six minutes late.

‘I’ll reschedule, shall I?’ his PA whispered.

Kat glanced at the firmly closed door. A couple of years ago she’d have said yes and made a swift exit while her eardrums were still intact. But after everything she’d been through, a bollocking was the least of her worries. Ignoring the PA’s gasp of dismay, Kat gave the door a sharp knock and walked right in.

Chief Constable McLeish sat behind his desk in front of a large, bright window, forcing any visitors to squint against the sun as they tried to read his face. He didn’t rise, nod or speak. But he didn’t tell her to get out.

Kat endured his unblinking silence. There was no point telling him about the blue-haired hitchhiker with a handwritten sign that might as well have said ‘murder me’. Despite her appointment, Kat had pulled over before any would-be murderers could oblige, demanding to know who the hell hitchhikes in this day and age? (Apparently eighteen-year-old girls from Poland on their way back from a music festival do, if some ‘really cool guy’ says you could ‘definitely’ get a job picking fruit on the farms in Warwickshire.) And now, after driving the girl to a strawberry farm with crap pay but good people, here she was, half an hour late for the meeting she’d planned on being at least half an hour early for.

But McLeish wasn’t interested in excuses. She also knew he used silence as a weapon—few could resist rushing to fill it, giving him an advantage that was hard if not impossible to win back—so Kat held his gaze as she studied the man she hadn’t seen in over a year.

McLeish had been her second boss, her first mentor and—she liked to think—was one of her oldest friends. Even when he gave her a bollocking, it was only because he thought she could learn from it—which she did. Kat had made a lot of mistakes in the early days, but she never ever made the same mistake twice. Her colleagues envied the way she could ‘read’ him, as if he were a particularly cryptic crossword puzzle. But to Kat, it was all quite simple. When he was annoyed, his face turned purple. When he was pleased, he’d say a few gruff words that could lift her for days. But when he was silent, the jury was out, and it was yours to lose.

‘How are the kids?’ she finally ventured.

His face softened. ‘Knackering. Honestly, thirty years ago we just chucked the boys outside, fed them their tea and whipped them soundly to sleep. But today our wee girls aren’t allowed out unless they’re on a bloody “play date”. And they expect me to read them a bedtime story every night, would you believe?’

‘Cheeky buggers,’ Kat said, smiling. Just before his sixtieth birthday, McLeish had surprised everyone by remarrying and embarking on a second family. And why not? Look at him. He was happy.

‘Aye, at least I know better than to hope it’ll be any easier when they get older.’ He heaved himself out from behind his desk and headed towards the black leather sofa in the corner of his office, indicating for her to follow.

Kat sank into one of the armchairs, fighting the ridiculous rise of pleasure at his silent forgiveness. Honestly, she was forty-bloody-five, not a schoolgirl.

‘How’s Cam?’ he asked. ‘Wasn’t he doing A levels this year?’

‘Yeah, we’re just waiting for the results. Which is why I asked to see you.’

‘You’re bored and you want to come back.’

It wasn’t a question. He knew her too well. She nodded, but before she could go on, McLeish frowned.

‘Are you sure you’re ready, Kat? It’s barely been six months since—’

‘I’m sure. Cam needed a lot of support at first. But he’s doing well now. He’s off the meds, his therapist signed him off, and he’s hoping to go to university in September.’

‘I didn’t ask about Cam. I asked about you.’

‘I’m fine,’ Kat said, flushing. ‘Or at least, I will be once I’m back at work.’

‘I understand.’

Of course he did. He always had.

‘So, what are you looking for?’ The leather sofa let out a soft hiss as McLeish leaned back into it.

‘Before I took a career break, you said I should be thinking about applying for exec level posts—
head of department, maybe, or even Assistant Chief Constable.’

‘And you said you’d rather chew your own toes off than do a desk job.’

‘That was before.’ Kat paused, remembering that other woman who couldn’t comprehend why someone might want to pound a keyboard rather than the streets. ‘Look, I promised Cam that if I came back to work, I’d do something safe. He can’t afford to lose me as well.’

He rubbed a hand over his bare scalp. ‘I know. But the thing is, there aren’t any exec vacancies coming up, and even if there were, you’ve been out of the force for a couple of years now. A lot has changed.’

‘So why did you agree to see me then?’ She couldn’t keep the annoyance out of her voice. It wasn’t his style to toy with people.

McLeish leaned forward. ‘Because I have actually got the perfect job for you. Have you met the new Home Secretary?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, because of course she hadn’t. ‘She’s nice enough, but totally deluded. Thinks there are “efficiency” gains that have somehow evaded all her predecessors.’

Kat shrugged. All politicians made bold promises to cut police numbers and ‘waste’ before their feet were under the ministerial table. But once they’d been hauled to the House of Commons to account for some appalling rape or murder, they were soon arguing with the Treasury for more ‘bobbies on the beat’.

‘This one’s different,’ said McLeish, reading her face. ‘She’s got a background in IT, and she’s convinced that the solution to rising crime is not more police, but more AIDEs.’

‘More what?’

‘AIDEs. Artificially Intelligent Detecting Entities.’ He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘Basically, some sort of glorified Alexa that can crunch data and allegedly solve more crimes at a fraction of the cost of a real copper.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I’m afraid she’s deadly serious.’ McLeish stood up, crossed the room and picked up a report off his desk. ‘According to a study the minister commissioned, a person goes missing every ninety seconds in the UK, generating over three hundred thousand cases a year. That takes up a lot of police time—fourteen per cent, to be precise—at an estimated cost of two thousand five hundred pounds per case. That’s four times more expensive than the average burglary. This report concludes that a lot of the grunt work in missing persons—reviewing interviews, records, CCTV, phones and whatever—can be done by AIDEs, leading to “significant” savings in police time and costs.’

Kat snorted and rose to her feet. ‘That’s complete bollocks. Maybe AI can help with data collection, but they can’t make judgements, they can’t be detectives. Crime is a human act. How can a computer even begin to understand what motivates a person to go missing, or what it’s like to be left behind? Jesus.’ She shook her head, remembering some of the doors she’d had to knock on in the past: the broken families inside. ‘And the cost of a missing person isn’t just financial. Those families need tact and sensitivity. They need a person not a computer.’