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‘I was hoping someone would be in the office.’

‘You know what it’s like. Home, office, we don’t switch off. What can I do for you?’

She was glad someone who ticked all the socially acceptable boxes of marriage and children felt the same way she did. It wasn’t just her loneliness that made her work all hours. When you had the bug, you had it – natural coppers, the pair of them. He clicked his shoulder back, massaging it slightly, before tapping his mouse.

Jane showed DI Baxter images of the bank notes from evidence.

‘These are the evidence notes from two of my murder victims,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sorry, do you want a tea or coffee?’

‘No, thank you.’ He didn’t know about her mother obviously and it felt good to be treated just as a professional for a few moments. She hated pity.

‘This is the triple murder suicide thing? You closed the case though?’

‘Yes, I got my killer, but there are a lot of questions I need answers to. Starting with these notes. Mark Burrows was an informant and I want to know if these bank notes came from us.’

‘You’re new here, right?’

She nodded.

‘OK, so brief history lesson. We had a massive issue with budgets, like all police forces. Some journo did a Freedom of Information thing and got hold of how much cash was flowing out of the station and the Lancs Constabulary on police expenses. Some of the most contentious issues were how much money we were haemorrhaging on sick leave, compensation, informants and especially undercover operations. Top brass got spooked, wanted a better auditing system. If money was being given to police officers, they wanted it all logged: every banknote serial number.’

‘We did something similar in the Met.’ It was why she had known what to ask DI Baxter. The plan had been successful in London, so it had no doubt been rolled out. Jane had been lucky enough to be part of a case that meant she knew what very few other police officers did.

‘So, you’ll understand then,’ he said appreciatively.

‘If a whole load of these bank notes ended up being discovered somewhere they shouldn’t be, then we’d know someone had purposefully broken the system.’

‘Precisely.’ DI Baxter took a swig of 7UP Zero, crushing the empty can and tossing it over Jane’s head into a wastepaper basket. ‘Still got it,’ he said smugly. ‘I’ll have to retrieve that and recycle it in a bit.’

‘When we ran this operation, it was discreetly done, to test a few officers we suspected might be corrupt,’ Jane explained. ‘Nobody knew this operation was being carried out, except a handful of senior officers. How widely did this system get shared up here?’

He grinned at her, revealing surprisingly even teeth.

‘Same discretion up here. My team of three, plus a few very senior officers. There are three of them across the whole of Lancashire who know this was implemented, all signed off by the Police Crime Commissioner for Lancashire.’

‘So everything was business as usual for everyone else. Only it wasn’t.’

‘Yes, it really wasn’t.’

DI Baxter clicked again on his screen. This time another number appeared under the serial numbers that were already there. A shorter number. Police ID.

‘It’s anonymised, so this number you’re seeing now has been run through an algorithm that switches it up. Anybody looking at this screen or these files won’t be able to tell which officer the cash was given to. For that you need the master file, which only my team have access to. That translates these dummy ID codes into the real ones.’

DI Baxter clicked away as Culture Club started playing in the background, tapping his keyboard to the rhythm of the song. Jane felt relaxed here, able to breathe. It felt so normal, the world carrying on at pace. So what if her mother had died? Shit happened, no one cared, life went on. All the clichés. She felt a sharp pang of grief: her mother really was dead.

‘OK, so if I run these serial numbers …’

Jane handed him her phone and waited patiently as he typed them in.

‘You don’t have to check all of them,’ she offered.

‘Allow me, please,’ he said, enthralled by what he was doing.

The silence between them was broken by DI Baxter’s typing, his computer beeping, and the best of the eighties filling her head. She remembered these songs, the soundtrack to her childhood. When ‘I Should be So Lucky’ started, she nearly bounced off her chair, remembering how she and her mother had danced to it during Top of the Pops.

The memory cut deep, she had to stifle an unbidden sob that threatened to break.