Chapter 50
LAUREN
This cannot be happening.
She’s wrong. She has to be wrong.
The phone is . . . Lauren flails for a possible explanation .
. . the phone is to contact a lover, and how absurd that what would ten minutes ago have been the end of the world is now a best-case scenario, but God, please let it be a lover.
Let Fraser be cheating on her. Let him be a bigamist with seven children and a wife who wants to know everything’s ready for Christmas.
Let it be anything but what’s staring her in the face.
Fraser is part of New Dawn.
Shock sends her into violent shivers, and she reaches for her towel and pulls it tightly around herself, waves of nausea threatening to overwhelm her.
She thinks of Jamie Golding, naively thinking he could bring down New Dawn; thinks of the devastation it’s brought to Nadeeka’s life.
She recalls Fraser’s supportive words as Lauren had despaired of solving a murder when the evidence had already been destroyed.
Lauren picks up her own phone. She has an instinctive urge to call 999. Who should she go to? DI Stratman? The chief constable? Whitty? Her thumb floats over the screen.
Can she trust her comms are secure?
The investigation has been sabotaged by leaks and tip-offs which, she realizes now, must have come from Fraser. Mike Bishop, Alan Ellis, Chris Morley, all conveniently out of the way when the police had come knocking.
Sonya? Bahnaz? Kenric? Matt?
Can Lauren trust them? She’d trusted Fraser, and he has betrayed her twice over: once as her sergeant, and again as the man she’d planned to spend the rest of her life with.
Lauren tries to slow her racing heart. She needs to think like a DI, not a jilted bride.
If this were a hypothetical situation – an exam question; a scenario on an interview board – what would Lauren do?
What would give them the best chance of tracking down the rest of New Dawn?
Of identifying the location of this weekend’s terrorist attack?
Lauren gets unsteadily to her feet. She knows exactly what she has to do.
She has to say nothing.