From the book of the book: Available on 24th June 2026
‘Murder?’ Brian Hermitage breathed the word into his phone. He could feel the blood draining from his face while the device in his hand started shaking. This was an unbelievable first call of the day. He’d barely sat down.
‘You can’t be serious.’ He said this with desperate hope that the caller would take the word back, but with awful resignation that it was his now.
He was incapable of responding as the voice went on. The details entered his head, but only like a recording machine. The true meaning and implications would arrive when he played the message back.
Eventually, after a lifetime of listening, Brian disconnected the call and slumped back in his office chair. He let the springs hidden in the mechanism take his weight and he tipped backwards until his eyes found the ceiling.
A shadow disturbed the stains of the tiles above him, which he remembered when they’d been white.
‘Problem, Hermitage?’ A female voice asked.
Brian Hermitage had been called Hermitage from his first memory. He didn’t mind it, and it was more interesting than Brian. Quite a few people assumed it was his first name, which would be a bit odd. He’d got so used to it that he was known as the surname man in the office, when everyone else was on first-name terms – most of the time.
He tipped upright and saw Gwen Worthing standing above him. He could barely bring himself to repeat the word and, ironically, give it life.
‘Murder,’ he whispered as if saying it quietly would mitigate the impact. ‘Another one.’ That awful addition really drove his soul into the ground, and his spirit sank with it.
Worthing propped herself on the end of his desk, which, despite the situation and her being his superior, he thought was a bit intrusive.
‘Murder, eh?’ Worthing said sombrely. ‘The call came straight through to you?’
‘Wrong man on the wrong phone at the wrong time,’ Hermitage sighed.
She considered the response. ‘Tell me something, Hermitage.’
He managed to lift his eyes to her unnecessarily young face and raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement of the question.
Worthing folded her arms and took a breath.
‘Why are you even on the Murder Investigation Teams?’
Pre-order now:
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com