Last Orders

by S.J. Butler

Genres: Crime Fiction; Political Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

London in the early nineties is a hotbed of political activism and intrigue, prey and predator, and times are changing fast - too fast for DCI Rick Bailey, who is starting to think he cannot keep up. But then a young woman goes missing in the run-up to Christmas, and he's convinced Alice's disappearance is related to an unsolved murder that has haunted him for the last three years.

He stumbles upon a suspect connected to all the clues, among them a care worker facing betrayal and abuse, a cemetery worker hearing music that does not play, an activist running from himself and a blind man who sees more than anyone else.

Who will lead them to Alice before the church bells ring?

_____

Praise for S. J. Butler:

'S.J. Butler writes like a dream and tells tales from the stuff of nightmares . . . This is high-octane crime fiction' TONY PARSONS

'Class warfare in all its glory or goriness' TONY MILLINGTON

'⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ This story gets hold of you and makes you shudder. Five stars'

'⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ An extraordinarily fantastic literary thriller. A huge five star read for me'

'⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Plenty of twists to keep you guessing! Just brilliant'

'⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Gritty, well written, a real page turner'

'⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Gem of a debut'

'⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Great twists and turns . . . Can't wait to read more of S. J Butlers books!!'

An addictive and nail-biting crime thriller from the author of Between the Lines and Deadly Lesson. Perfect for fans of Biba Pearce, Robert Bryndza and Patricia Gibney.

Release date: February 1, 2024

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 400

Sample

‘Sir, any leads you want me to follow up on? I mean, anything new?’ she asked insincerely.

Young, attractive, a career-climber with a propensity for insubordinate sarcasm, DS Sophia Summers had administered another dig at her aging boss’s slow progress in wrapping up another unsolved case.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Are you sure you’re fine?’

There it was again: the kind of line of enquiry which could be interpreted as: well, everyone else knows you’re not – grandad.

‘Yes,’ he replied with as much authority as he had left. ‘You can go.’

‘OK, sir.’ She smirked as he lowered his eyes to his paperwork. ‘You mean, work with DCI Parsons?’ She just couldn’t resist undermining him.

‘Of course,’ he replied flatly, dramatically shutting the green file in front of him as she simply nodded and headed out the door, throwing her eyes to the heavens as she went, her swagger confident, cocky and provocative.

DCI Rick Bailey or Old Bailey as he was dismissively known had just passed sixty. Turning down numerous recommendations from his superiors that he should perhaps retire, he had stubbornly continued, choosing to ignore the plethora of younger DCIs like Stuart Parsons who sniggered and joked at Old Bailey’s obvious decline, both psychically, mentally and professionally.

‘Honestly, he stinks of urine – has used, piss-smelling coffee cups everywhere in his car. I just can’t drive with him any more,’ Summers had moaned on more than one occasion as Parsons reclined on his chair and chortled about how that was why Bailey had moved his office closer to the gents.

When he’d reached his sixtieth birthday, Bailey’s enlarged prostate had decided to make more of a permanent impact on his lifestyle. Regular peeing throughout the night and day had dribbled onto the scene, making his life hell at times as he struggled to stem the leaks. It was why he preferred to work alone and allow the sharing of DS Summers with the cocky pup Parsons to become more one-sided. Anyway, he was hardly at the forefront of major murder investigations any more. He knew (though it was never implied) that he’d been given the go-slow-slush-pile of unsolved cases to ponder over until his eventual retirement in two years’ time when some faceless superior would get up and say what an amazing career he’d had and how he was one of a dying breed of good cops. Sadly, he’d be there alone at the table as the gush poured over him like bitter corked wine.

Divorced at forty, no kids, deceased parents, Rick Bailey was totally alone in the world, though he did have a brother in Margate, who didn’t keep in touch – probably due to being a prominent trade unionist and being a little embarrassed at having a cop for a brother. Wendy, his ex-wife (seven years his junior), had remarried pretty much straight away, moving up to Scotland with her new man, Duncan, who was a successful CEO in a telecommunications company. In the early years, they’d been happy, but when children didn’t come along they just drifted apart; there was nothing left in their lives but them. Miraculously, Wendy fell pregnant as soon as they arrived up north and Bailey, although pleased for his ex-wife, was left devastated and feeling totally worthless.

Hesitating for a second, he fingered the top of the slush pile to his left. Making sure that Summers wasn’t going to amble back into the room, he slid a file from the bottom, swishing open the green flap to the now-too-familiar case where he’d scribbled to be solved if it kills me across the front page. Roughly underlined in red ink, it was almost as if it had been written in his own blood. In a sense it had. It had been a labour of excruciating pain on his part, the only case from his past that haunted him to the extent of mocking him every time he pored over it obsessively. A little too often, he’d still visit the river walk where the victim Kelly Watson was last seen.

The path along the side of the river was a regular route for dog-walkers and joggers. It was hardly an isolated area, surrounded by houses and a whiskey distillery where gentle plumes of smoke rose day and night to the hum of a generator. The road that ran along the side of the path was busy enough and hardly an area where you’d feel unsafe. (Well, wasn’t that the case with all places?) In the run-up to Christmas three years ago, the footpath was busier than usual, though that didn’t stop the joggers who were out in the crisp lunchtime air. Kelly Watson, who worked part-time as a secretary at the distillery, had been one of them, making the most of the dry weather.

Sighing deeply, Bailey turned to the next page where a prosaic account of the evidence so far lay like a shaky synopsis to a crime writer’s debut novel. Resisting the urge for what would have been a disappointing pee, he took a chance, pressed his hands between his legs and read on:

Female identified as Ms Kelly Watson, 27 years old, last seen being dragged into a white Volvo. Reg not recorded. Seen at a distance by an old lady walking a dog and another runner who’d passed the car before he’d realised what had happened. A blind man was also reported to be in the location. Neither of the two witnesses were able to identify the abductor – only that he was wearing a donkey jacket and jeans. The person’s face was hidden – we are unable to put together a photo-fit.

Hearing a sound from the adjacent custody suite, Bailey briefly looked up as a couple of constables walked by deep in conversation, followed by another who was handcuffed to a young man with a bloodstained football shirt. Chelsea versus Millwall, thought Bailey as he brought his finger down the page to something which he’d drawn a circle around.

The body of a woman was found dumped in an industrial bin close to some warehouses. Clothes intact, her limbs mangled and bent in various contortions. Forensics believe a hammer was used to break the bones. Examination confirms that there was no sexual contact. Watch and rings remained on the body. Only her ‘running shoes had been taken’.

It was the only vital piece of information he could cling to, hence the hasty, desperate quotation marks. With no firm leads to go on, Bailey had been stumped. His mind racing, the only person he hadn’t been able to locate was the unidentified blind man and he obviously wouldn’t have been a reliable eye-witness.

‘Shit! Shit!’ cursed Bailey, a visible wet patch expanding on his crotch. Standing with urgency, he grabbed his raincoat off the back of his chair and headed for his second home in the gents where he managed an on-off morse-code stream. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he cried, feeling like an abandoned, scared child. Finishing up and knowing it would be back just as quickly to torment him, he pulled on his raincoat to cloak his wet pants and the shame that was always there.

‘Sir.’

It was DS Summers again, smiling knowingly that he’d been caught. He quickly wrapped his coat around his misdemeanour as he shuffled to one side, pretending that he was on his way out, now edging with trepidation towards the door like the old man he was becoming.

‘Yes?’ he managed irritably, knowing how much she was enjoying his embarrassment.

‘DCI Parsons wants to know if he can keep me for the next two days for the Davidson case – needs all hands on deck,’ she added, knowing that Bailey needed none and that the comment would hurt him.

‘Tell him I can spare you this once,’ he managed sternly as he ditched the shuffle, stopped and stiffened to his six-foot-two height. ‘Just a bit more notice next time,’ he managed ironically as they both looked to the mounting pile of sad cases on his messy desk.

Waiting for the click of Summers’ heels to cease as she reached the end of the corridor, he returned to his office, carefully taking off his raincoat and sitting back down at his desk. Staring blankly at the Watson case file he’d previously placed on top of the pile, he wondered if he should have another look. Dismissing the idea, he touched the warm radiator behind him and contemplated turning full circle and drying his crotch. Knowing DC Summers was still flittering about, he quickly abandoned the idea, flicking on the local radio station instead. In his experience as a copper, you learnt a lot from local news – even the mundane stuff. Annoyed he’d missed most of it, he managed to catch the last two items: one on the rise of knife crime among teenagers and the other about antisocial behaviour and in particular the increase of under-age drinking in the local park.

‘It’s a disgrace,’ Councillor Jim Mathews was saying, ‘that the police don’t have regular patrols in the area after dark when it’s a known fact that young people are drinking there. Twice this month, flower beds have been uprooted and fencing vandalised. The running track at the back of the park seems to be used as a party area, littered with discarded cans and drug paraphernalia. Only last week a child picked up a syringe full of blood.’

Hearing enough about how it was all the fault of the police, he switched it off, sighing deeply, as if doing so would somehow help lift the gloom in which he’d now chosen to wallow. Glancing at his wet patch, he wished he could roll up in a ball under his desk and cry.

Sitting in the middle of a dilapidated running track as dusk reared its ugly grey head, they could have been a couple. The only sounds were the birds circling the park as they made for their beds and the odd distant cry of ‘Oi!’ and cackles of laughter.

‘There’s no running at night; this isn’t Crystal Palace,’ said the man.

‘No floodlights,’ slurred the young woman, taking a long drag of her almost burnt-to-the-filter cigarette.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Alice,’ and I’m not bothered what your name is, she thought, trying to focus on his changing expression, which seemed to fluctuate between indifferent and intense.

‘Old-fashioned name.’

‘Someone has to have it,’ she laughed, reaching for the battered plastic bottle of Bulmers. ‘You want some? The cider, I mean,’ she rasped.

‘I don’t.’

‘What? Drink or shag – or both?’

‘Drink.’

‘Well, good for you, Joe. You don’t mind if I call you Joe?’

‘Sure, why not?’

‘J-Joe, J-Joe,’ she practised.

‘Do you need help?’

She didn’t answer straight away. Her mood seemed to have temporarily darkened, as if a passing thought had irritated her.

‘Oh, piss off. What do you care?’

‘I was watching you. You seem alone – lost.’

‘Yeah, so fucking lost!’

‘Another cigarette?’

As if returning from her altered state, she smiled. ‘Sounds romantic, doesn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Offering someone a cigarette – like a film,’ she said, greedily snatching and lighting it, then forgetting his, which hung limp between his lips.

‘I suppose.’

‘So, what about you, Joe – you a fucking do-gooder looking out for hopeless cases?’

He didn’t answer, lazily gazing off into the distance as he blew a ring of smoke in its direction, as if doing so was enough.

The greyness of the early evening quickly began to smudge and darken as nighttime made an impromptu appearance. The last bird made its final tweet and the park fell into silence.

‘The beauty of nothingness,’ said the man.

‘You a poet, Joe?’

He smiled, now sitting cross-legged. ‘Not really.’

‘You hear that?’ she said suddenly, sitting up from her slumped position and screwing tight the top of the Bulmers bottle as a tap! tap! tap! could be clearly heard.

‘No.’

‘There. Listen.’

Tap! Tap!

It appeared to be getting nearer.

‘Not a thing,’ insisted the man, his expression now blank and a little agitated. ‘Nothing.’

Straining to hear more and questioning her own sanity, she cupped her hand to her ear, just catching the fading sound as the beat at last lost all semblance of rhythm, disappearing altogether as if it had lost direction entirely and passed them by.

‘Well, ain’t that a funny thing, Joe?’ She laughed, slumping back down onto her elbow and supporting her heavy head with her hand.

‘Funny? How?’

She’d experienced weird shit before and the funny and the how? had been delivered in a pressurised, almost nasty way. It was more an order than a question. He was looking at her differently now, and she didn’t like it. Grabbing the handle of her hastily packed rucksack tightly, she considered making a run for it, but knowing that the drink would drag her down she waited.

‘Just,’ she began.

He didn’t pursue it any more, only surveyed her in a curious kind of way as if she were a puppy he’d been playing with and had tired of.

The silence between them was deafening as Alice Sinclair sat up, almost mirroring the man’s cross-legged position. Examining the sun emblem on her cigarette lighter, she tried to distance herself from the strangeness engulfing them, as if the object itself held a clue and a way out.

Her mind made up, she managed to clamber to a crouching position, hovering above the ground as if she was about to pee. ‘I think I better be going.’

‘Well, I guess athletic tracks aren’t for camping; they’re for running,’ said the man whimsically. ‘Let me help you,’ he said, taking her wrist, ‘to get up,’ he added, tightening then releasing his grip.

‘Thanks,’ she said, staggering and then managing to find her balance.

The zoom of a motorbike and the honk of a car horn in the distance seemed to reassure her as the sounds of normality burst into the present.

‘You seem nice, for someone drunk in a park.’

A double-edged compliment. Unable to coherently relay what she was thinking, she said, ‘Interesting,’ to which he instantly asked: ‘Interesting why?’

He was a type, she decided, someone who couldn’t let things go. Her mother was the same, always pressing, questioning every innocent comment.

‘You think pissed people are bad.’ She would have liked to have put it better. Regrettably, she’d slurred the last part of the sentence and he’d caught it instantly.

‘Well, you said it – the slurred part,’ he added, noting her confusion.

Wanting to perceive it as a joke, she instead asked him if he went to bars, being that he claimed he didn’t drink.

‘Sure – of course. Better the devil you know.’

Through the haze, he almost seemed a regular guy. A little odd. Though, in her own experience, guys who didn’t drink usually were.

‘You have a local, then?’

‘Why wouldn’t I? I’m just normal.’

‘Really,’ she chuckled.

Her head now spun and seesawed with Bulmers.

Please, she thought, let me just get through this.

Too drunk to compute, too pissed to act rationally, she closed her eyes and tried to summon her inner strength.

‘Normal: it’s an overrated word,’ he said. ‘It makes me laugh as well.’

Maybe she was still laughing, though she couldn’t be sure, as she tried to imagine one of her practised neutral expressions and gave up because it was too taxing on her mind when she needed to at least keep up with what was happening.

I bet you’re one of those lonely guys who sits and reads books in bars, she thought as she instead broke it down, and said what she could: ‘You read in bars?’ It came out as a question, which she didn’t intend it to be.

‘Maybe.’

‘I knew it,’ she laughed. ‘I’m a good . . .’ She trailed off, trying to locate the AWOL words. He was enjoying her lost-in-space moment as she eventually reconnected with her brain. ‘Reader of people,’ she said eventually, almost spitting out the words she wished hadn’t formed in her mind at all and that she’d just kept dumbly drunk, quiet.

‘Even when you’re drunk.’

‘OK,’ she said, ignoring the comment and pretending to brush herself down, ‘I think I should go.’

A gentle gust of wind rustled the leaves of the trees above their heads, sounding like shingle being washed by the tide of the sea. It seemed the perfect outro as (in her own mind) she began to float away.

‘Where’s the toilet in this shitting place?’

The regulars in the Duke’s Head only briefly look in Alice’s direction as she struggles with her grimy rucksack.

‘Over there,’ says Chris, giving her a friendly smile as he points towards the entrance to the beer garden, ‘just by the side of it,’ he adds as she goes to stagger in the wrong direction, only to correct herself on his instruction.

Fingerless gloves, short spiky hair, acne-scarred chubby cheeks, ankle-length motheaten overcoat littered with an array of badges, cherry-red Docs on a very long pair of gangly legs, licking a Rizla paper, rolling with one hand, hunched over a pint of orange squash as if it were a real drink, sits Christopher Smith. He doesn’t always reside alone by the jukebox, though he often finds himself there as he likes 15A: ‘Angel’ by Jimi Hendrix, which he plays when he has some loose change. Acquaintances or strangers, they just seem to turn up. His girlfriend Debra says they are magnetically drawn to his friendly eyes.

‘Your smile is warm,’ she tells him on their first date as they hold hands like an old couple at the cinema.

A lot of underage drinkers from the youth club where he helps out whenever there’s a disco or band playing recognise him.

‘Come on, Chris. Get us a pint,’ they plead, trying to pound his palm with coins. Mostly he just shakes his head or reluctantly lets them have a roll-up. ‘You don’t drink, right?’ It’s always the same damning statement, as if it’s an accusation.

Of course, they don’t believe him when he replies that he doesn’t. They think he’s weird, though they say mad. He’s heard the rumours and mad is fine. He can deal with that: it’s got more street cred than weird. Anyway, they know he works as a psychiatric nurse at St George’s and they seem to think it’s cool, plaguing him for pills. The steady shake of the head, a brief lecture (which is wasted) and his cocoa smile puts paid to any venture into criminality.

‘Come on, then!’ Patting his chest and then opening out his arms as he spills a bit of his lager, regular Paul Cox wobbles on the spot.

‘It’s all kicking off,’ laughs Alice, now returning from the toilets, dragging her bag behind her like a dog, as she brushes past Cox, whose expression has turned nasty. He takes a menacing step forward.

Chris gets to his feet and blocks him, calmly stretching his arms out in front of him and preventing Cox’s lunge. Behind Chris stands a sallow, stocky soul boy wearing a brown sheepskin coat. Generic swallow tattoos spread across his knuckles and a spider web ebbs beneath his collar, looming blue and faded, red, angry and fierce, like his drunk, flushed complexion.

‘Fucking wanker!’ shouts Cox, throwing the remainder of his drink at his nemesis and hitting Chris instead full in the face and chest with it.

‘Yeah!’ spits Spider-Man from somewhere behind the towering Chris as he lifts an empty beer bottle from the counter.

Paul’s smashing of a glass on the edge of the bar doesn’t help matters. He holds the jutted glass aloft, resting mid-air, ready and steady to the left of Chris’s face, pointing menacingly north. Paul is primed and locked within the nasty atmosphere, searching out the piece of shit behind the human wall.

Thank God for pub landlords. Big Mick’s comforting, no-nonsense, singsong brogue tells them to put their handbags down as he casually lifts the bottle-wielding idiot off his toes and bundles him to the waiting exit as the youth does the usual manly retreat of shouting over his shoulder oaths of retribution and death.

‘You sit there!’ growls Mick at Paul who’s now dropped the remainder of his glass, as in slow motion it smashes majestically on the floor into ice candy.

Chris holds on to Paul’s shoulders as he sits and calms himself. ‘Here,’ he says, offering the roll-up he never got round to smoking himself.

Paul says nothing as he takes it. His long-suffering girlfriend, Trish, joins him, placing her pale hand on his twitching knee as she whispers something in his ear, which makes him smile briefly.

Chris wipes the lager from his face with his sleeve, licks the sharp, malty tang from the corners of his mouth, almost relishing the taste. Slowly, he walks back to his table, takes off his wet coat and spreads it to dry across two red velvet stools. He sits and makes another cigarette as the opening verse of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ oozes, warm, spiritual and safe, from the nicotine-stained jukebox. Someone up at the bar says: ‘I like this one.’

Chris has a theory, which he seldom shares, that people who know him tend to start fights when they know he’s in the vicinity. It’s as if they want to make a point about their masculinity without having to go all the way, knowing that he would do his outstretched-arms-wall routine.

Debra also has a theory: that Chris can’t switch off from his job as a psychiatric nurse, that he constantly needs to be at hand to help whoever is in need. It’s as if relaxing is a weakness, a pastime he simply overlooks or sees as overrated.

‘Why do you always have to be the one to stop it? One day you’ll get hurt or worse,’ she says, exasperated. It’s why Debra rarely goes to the Duke’s Head with him any more. The Crown is fine, but the Head just seems to attract psychos. It’s why he’s on his own.

‘I just want a drink,’ moans Cox.

‘We all just want a drink,’ slurs Alice, who’s just finished off the remains of a leftover pint of lager from the bar as she tries to conceal the bottle of Bulmer’s under her jacket, cradling it like a baby.

Gazing briefly at the woman, Chris smiles at the comment.

‘Hey, you: got a fag?’

Without hesitation, Chris hands her the one he’s just made.

‘Have we met?’ he asks.

She merely shrugs her shoulders and gathers up her rucksack, which she’d dropped when trying to hide the bottle.

‘You should drink in the park, mate. You can do what you like there,’ she tells Cox as she brushes past Chris and heads towards the entrance. ‘Freedom!’ Alice shouts back behind her as if her dramatic exit meant something. ‘Sweet fucking freedom!’

Someone lining the bar remarks that she should have a bath and another that she should get a job, which is ironic as most of the customers are professional dole scammers.

Alice has already cancelled out their spineless snide remarks with a generic middle finger as she slams out of the door.

Cox is on his feet again, demanding to be served, though he’s just been banned for a week and lucky it wasn’t longer.

‘Take this,’ says Chris sidling up to him and casually placing a packet of Old Holborn in his hand. ‘Come on,’ he says, leading him to the brightness of the saloon bar door. ‘Perhaps enough excitement for one day?’ he adds, briefly placing his hand on his shoulder.

Pleased with his tobacco, Paul floats out the door as if on a purple Cadbury’s chocolate cloud, the opening chords of 15A on the jukebox playing, warm and majestic.

‘You shouldn’t get drunk in isolated places. It’s dangerous,’ said the man, blocking her way as she went to turn and walk away.

‘I can look after myself,’ replied Alice defiantly, slightly taken aback and startled by how the whites of his eyes appeared to brighten in the declining light.

‘Not only that,’ began the man, reaching across and gently brushing some dried grass from her shoulder, ‘but drunks, men in particular. They are scary. You know, altered states and all that.’

Flinching at the touch, she tried to disguise her fear, attempting a joke. ‘You haven’t seen the machete in my rucksack.’

It sounded lame – she knew that – but it gave her more time even if it was only a tiny opening.

His silence felt like an elastic band being pulled gut tight between them. Swallowing hard a couple of times and closing her shaking hands into tiny fists, Alice hoped he hadn’t seen her fear and that the fading light would help conceal it.

‘In my experience, you can never be certain of what’s coming next.’

Too drunk to decipher what he meant and clever enough not to ask, she let the comment pass her by.

‘I mean you could be just innocently drifting through life and then, at the flick of a switch, it’s all gone.’ He seemed lost somewhere else, his mind as if on a far-off wind-swept hillside as he placed his hands on his hips and stared at the makeshift stand and the rusting lorry container used as a changing room to their left.

She’d been a lot more drunk before, she reasoned, considering her options. And, anyway, hadn’t she robbed from houses and shoplifted when out of her head on heroin? And then there had been prison – a short sentence of six months for burglary. The police had made a big thing of it. The house had been unoccupied for ages, and she’d only managed to get a hundred quid from it. But the fact she was a known junky didn’t help her case. She was hard, she’d told herself. She’d seen things – bad things.

‘Cut the crap, Joe, or whatever your fucking name is . . .’ she started bravely as she slung her bag over her shoulder and wobbled on the spot.

‘There’s no need for that,’ he protested as he went to grab her arm, and she pulled away.

‘Just fuck off! Fuck off!’

She’d had to act the hard case before. In prison you couldn’t let people push you around; you had to stand your ground if you wanted to survive. That said, she always felt the same: physically sick, emotional and wishing she could just scrunch up in a small ball and hide in a dense forest.

Not turning round, she somehow found a white line on the track, concentrated on its luminosity and headed towards the bend. Like a hundred-metre runner on the final straight, she kept time with the race ahead as she stumbled on with blind purpose. Whether he was behind her or not she couldn’t tell. If she could just reach the far side where the entrance was, she’d be nearer the road and gone.

‘Hey, silly,’ he said warmly. The man must have done a lap in the opposite direction, or she’d come full circle, because he was suddenly in front of her again. ‘You have a flare for short distance,’ he laughed jokingly, placing his arm round her tightly, now comically walking quickly with her. ‘Just like relay partners,’ he mocked, upping the pace. ‘Faster! Faster!’ he cried, clasping her round the waist.

‘Leave me alone!’ she tried. Alice struggled, but he was strong, and she was too drunk.

‘Come on, just another lap,’ he said, now dragging her roughly and making it seem as if he were merely helping her up for a barn dance.

Floating, lost in time, head spinning, she let him take her weight as she dipped in and out of consciousness as if frozen on a fairground attraction as it jerked in one direction and then another.

‘Leave me alone, just . . .’

Were they her words? she wondered as what looked like a winning line became fuzzy in the dusk and then disappeared altogether.

It was that warm, intoxicating, innocent love, that first touch, the electric sensation when he kissed her for the first time: the magic of soft tentative lips hesitating, then opening and closing for a second, searching for the correct formula, enveloped by the fantasy of warm sun on their skins and the distant purr and chatter of summer – all she’d ever wished for.

‘It might not always . . .