CHAPTER 48
I was home, in several different ways, including the return to my flat in Cardiff. Mam and Dad understood, just as they could see how I was healing, and why. Each day was a reminder of how the way my work is depicted on large and small screen is so completely wrong.

It isn’t boring, though it sounds like it should be, for it involves an awful lot of reading, inwardly digesting and cross-referencing. I imagined Sean’s boys felt much the same, and the closest experience I can give as an example is in solving a particularly complex cryptic crossword. Everything is there; you just need to find out why.

CHAPTER 46

The roast was a little overdone, but the roast potatoes and other trimmings were spot on. It was almost like a Christmas dinner, as after arguing on the shop about what would actually go on the plates we had simply agreed to do everything.

Dad liked it, from the way he cleared his down to the pattern on the china, so I counted it as a success. Mam cleared the dishes away, leaving them to soak, and we settled down in our usual places on armchairs and settee. Dad broke the comfort of our well-fed silence.

“You look a little out of sorts, son. What’s up?”

CHAPTER 44
I didn’t notice, but Barry had fumbled his mobile out of his stab vest pocket.

“Yeah. Barry, Traffic, Yeah. Can you get up the greasy? I think one of yours needs taking home”

He then just sat and held me till Sammy was there, with Blake and Candice, and I wondered what had bloody happened to ‘Police, Professional’ as the team blonde walked me into the ladies’.

CHAPTER 42
I didn’t make it back to the courtroom as I spent quite a bit of time on my knees, trying to throw up my breakfast along with all the years of hate and fear. So many hackneyed images still hold truth in them, and mine was that of pushing against the locked door, which opens suddenly, and collapse is inevitable.

I could still feel his eyes on me, and the worst part of it all was that he didn’t seem to recall me immediately. I could almost read his mind: ‘Which rape was that one? Oh, yes. All coming back to me now’.

CHAPTER 40
It got almost routine after a while popping round the various support groups and clubs to leave cards, leaflets, posters and so on. It was the evenings that got interesting, as I encountered more and more of a world I had never really understood or, if I was truthful, suspected actually existed, despite all the times I had dabbled in it with Bridget. She was gay, in the same sense, I assumed, as was Elaine, a sort-of-straight. Both women were absolutely not into men, but in every other way they were as conventional as my parents.

CHAPTER 39
I had texted her in advance, of course, so she was waiting in the little café down the street, still acting in that filtering, shielding role I had recognised. That said, there was real warmth in her greeting to me.

“You got news for us, girl?”

“Oh yes! Best sort. He got nicked on Friday, after we had finished the trials and stuff with the other lot”

“Oh, we saw that on the news. Not what I’m asking, is it?”

“What are you asking, Deb?”

CHAPTER 37
I must admit I have had many evenings a lot worse than that one, and very few better. By the time I got home (by way of the all-night shop for a tin of cocoa, of course) my laughter had toned itself down to smiles, but only just. Whatever Deb was doing was working. Only a few of the girls had given me any idea as to what had happened in their past, but they were all transgender and each one had been hurt,

CHAPTER 35
She led the way back to the terrace, but instead of taking me to the front door she took me down the back alley between the two terraces, squeezing past a big white van, which she introduced, with a grin, as her ‘Tranny van’. I noticed that she used three keys to get through the door to the back yard, and the wall was topped with barbed wire, two cameras visible either side of an upstairs window. The actual back door was just as secure, and when we came through into the little lobby, I noticed a couple of steel bars ready to brace the door. There were also three fire extinguishers standing against the wall. I raised my eyebrows in query, and she shrugged.

“Some people don’t like us. What can you do but follow the Boy Scouts’ motto, and be prepared?”

CHAPTER 33
That was a phrase that had lived in my mind ever since two men had visited me in a hospital bed. I thought it through for a while, looking at Elaine. She didn’t let me down, and I knew then, if I hadn’t before, that she never would. The hint was taken.

“Bev?”

“Yes, Elaine?”

“We do have another way into this one, one I am keen to follow rather than the usual way”

“You mean?”

CHAPTER 31
I looked down at his hand, and then at his eyes, trying to hold my courage close and tight so that it couldn’t escape. Blake just nodded, and turned to my parents.

“Baby steps at the moment, Mark, Dot. Di’s the one in the driving seat”

That gave me something else to talk about, which I urgently needed.

CHAPTER 29
We settled down to sorting out more of the shitstorm of paperwork, and I caught Blake looking at me, which destroyed my concentration. I could remember everything from the night before, including the hand-holding, but I was sober now. Let it ride, DC Owens, let it slide, and he’ll do the same. Booze and stress, that’s all it was. Sammy ruined that plan.

“Di? Blake? Could you two do a run up to the greasy before we sort out the charging? I need cholesterol, and I need it now! Couple of dog rolls for me, and I’ll shout for whatever the others want”

CHAPTER 27
“Good morning Mr Evans, I am DC Owens, and this is DC Sutton”

Evans jerked his head, and I realised he was trying to see out through the doorway, probably checking nobody else was there. When we sat down, he was clearly sitting as far back as the chair would allow, even though it was fixed to the floor. Not good.

CHAPTER 25
Another twenty minutes saw our prisoners separated and stuffed into the backs of a number of vehicles for the return to the nick, Chris long gone in the ambulance as a paramedic stayed with us to look after one of the five who had apparently met Elaine’s asp face-first.

She was a strange mixture of nerves and seething rage, and as we sat in the car I took the risk and squeezed her shoulder. She simply laid her hand on mine and squeezed back before taking her mobile out and once more switching it to speaker mode. As Blake finished calling out recovery for the other vehicles and the van, she rang Control.

“Hi Jan, Inspector Powell here. Can you call the duty Super out? I’ll need a word. And the on-call CID Inspector”

CHAPTER 23
I wish I had known those people years before, or people like them, who could have brought my parents out of the pit along with me. What I was learning, in the end, was that it wasn’t about individuals as such but about a way of thinking. We had English, Welsh and French there, all together and smiling. It sort of flew in the face of so much of my experience of policing, and then another thought struck me, no doubt triggered by the kids in wheelchairs and leg braces we had just shared dinner with.

CHAPTER 21
We made our way round the series of right turns Annie had advised, finally ducking down a back street behind the church we weren’t staying at, oh no, and in the dusk saw a small sea of canvas, a lot of which was glowing from within as people used torches or lamps to sort their bedding out. That had always been one of my favourite parts of camping with Dad, where I would walk back from the toilets or a shower, usually in rain, it being North Wales, and our tent would be glowing in just that way, a little jewel of warmth and shelter that was so much more than a bag of cloth hung on a framework of sticks.

CHAPTER 19
I collared Mam in the kitchen after the two men had gone out for the supplies.

“What are you up to, Mam?”

“He’s one of the good ones, love”

“You’re trying to fix me up, aren’t you?”

CHAPTER 17
She was straight off home after the shift, wife to unchain, dragon to feed, as Alun cheekily suggested. We had sat at our little tables all bloody day without budging, it seemed, as Chris bustled about with cups of tea and coffee, plates of biscuits and so on, at lunchtime taking everyone’s order for a run up to the canteen.

I could see what he was doing as a support worker, but it was more than that. I don’t think it was a cynical ploy on his part, but his comment about goats and arriving late came to mind. Get involved with us, become part of the team, and we’d feel more inclined to be punctual when it was needed. Whatever his reasons, he did help us markedly through the day.

CHAPTER 15
I slept surprisingly well, despite a few sudden wakings as something unspecified but nasty crawled into the back of my mind. Mam, as usual, had a fuller-than-full breakfast waiting, and I wondered how she always managed to be up before me, even on the earliest of shifts. Some sort of Mam-radar, I suppose. She sat with me as I ate my sausages and swallowed my tea, with a Look on her face that warned of something being grilled besides the sausages.

“Di, love?”

“Yes, Mam?”

“It’s those two pieces of filth again, isn’t it?”

CHAPTER 13
I was lost in my own thoughts for the first part of the journey back, only returning to the world about me when Rhys nudged me at some lights.

“You OK, Di? Bit quiet there”

“Ah, mate, just thinking. That lad’s in a bad way”

I could read his mind as he stared at me while the red light sat before us. She’s talking rubbish, it’s not the lad, must be more, leave it for now.

I tried to fill his silence.

CHAPTER 11
Alun snorted at that, for he had one of those stupid cartoon picture ties on.

“Um, Alun Benson. I’m with CID here in Cardiff”

A skinny, butter-wouldn’t melt blonde. “Candice Warren, sort of attached to ASBO admin, out by Porthcawl. I do the antisocial order background stuff”

CHAPTER 9
I saw Adam quite regularly after that meeting. Not in a ‘seeing him’ sense, not over pasta with a cheeky little red or anything like that, just in passing. Once he had been pointed out to me, it seemed, my radar kept track of his whereabouts.

Alun was another whose face kept popping up in my line of sight as Dai and my other beat colleagues kept pushing me through more and more new experiences, some of which I wrapped up in my memory to giggle over later, some of which I am not ashamed to say came back a few times in the small hours to stand at the foot of my bed demanding my undivided attention.

CHAPTER 7
“Who the hell are you?”

What a lovely welcome.

“Diane Owens. I’m on secondment here”

“Ah! The fresh meat! Kettle’s over there; white, two sugars for me”

CHAPTER 4
He was a big man, and I thought I recognised him from somewhere, but my mind wasn’t working as he slid sideways in the car, pushing the door open and then reaching round it to take another handful of my hair.

I found myself almost spinning on the spot as he dragged me backwards through the now open car door. Something poked the back of my neck, and he was breathing hard, but his voice was under full control.

“Get your legs in and shut the fucking door. Do it now or I cut you”