Wednesday, 2 January 1985.
One of the coldest days anyone could remember.

The radio that morning had gone on about “arctic blasts” and “record lows,” but none of that really captured the way the cold felt on Karen Carter’s skin as she walked along the towpath — like something sharp and clever trying to get inside her coat wherever it could find a gap.

The canal had frozen into a stretch of black glass. From a distance, it looked solid, almost beautiful: a long, dark ribbon under a pale sky, with white rime tracing the edges of the frozen water. Up close, you could see hairline fractures veining out from the brickwork of the lock, white-frosted and dangerous.

Karen pulled her second-hand duffel coat tighter around her. The toggle at the top had lost its string, so it gaped annoyingly at her throat, letting in spears of icy air. Her scarf — one her mum had knitted, still smelling faintly of washing powder and cigarette smoke — was half twisted up over her chin. She adjusted it with gloved hands, breath ghosting into the freezing air.

Smoke curled from the narrowboats moored along the bank, rising in thin blue ribbons that faded into the colourless sky. Each boat was a tiny, self-contained world: some windows steamed up, some painted with flowers, some cluttered with plant pots and logs. Karen’s gaze snagged on one in particular — Rod’s boat, tucked between two others like it was shy.

The sight pulled a warmth through her that even this cold couldn’t quite kill. Christmas on that barge had been the best thing that had ever happened to her, and that wasn’t saying much for the rest of her life.

She could still feel the memory in her bones: the little stove glowing cherry-red, the metal sides creaking with the temperature change; the smell of coffee and cheap whisky; Rod behind her, arms wrapped around her waist in that narrow bed, both of them laughing as the boat rocked slightly when a barge had gone past outside.

“Not very romantic, me nearly falling out of bed,” she’d said.

“Depends what you call romantic,” he’d murmured into her neck, and she’d gone hot from her scalp right down to her toes.

She smiled now, despite the cold. It had felt like the start of something. Not just with Rod, but with life. She’d finally enrolled on those A-level courses at technical college. Biology, Psychology, and English. The big three that the careers adviser had said would look good on a nursing application.

“Do you know how many people say they want to be nurses and don’t do a bloody thing about it, Karen?” the adviser had asked.
“Loads,” she’d admitted.
“Well, you’re not going to be one of them, are you?”
“No,” she’d said. “I’m not.”

She wasn’t. She was doing it. Slowly, nights and weekends, piece by piece. She just needed the wages from Riddles for now. Just until she could afford not to.

The distant toll of the town hall clock cut through her daydream.

She stopped counting at seven.

“Oh, you are joking,” she muttered.

She’d meant to leave earlier. She’d overslept, then spent too long looking for a clean pair of tights, then had to scrape the ice off the inside of the flat’s windows because the condensation had frozen overnight. Now she was paying for all of it.

The towpath under her boots was hard and slick, a thin smear of ice over frozen mud. She tested a faster pace, almost a trot, and felt the sole of one boot skid a fraction. No good. The path was too narrow, the canal on one side and the steep embankment on the other. One careless step and she’d be in the water, and the water would be merciless.

She swallowed. The news was full of people falling through thin ice that winter.

“Just walk properly,” she told herself. “You’re not a kid.”

She considered going up the embankment to the lane. The slope shimmered with frost, looking less like grass and more like sugar glued to a sheet of glass. One slip halfway up and she’d slide right back down.

She glanced at her watch. She was going to be late anyway. But the lane meant traffic, and she’d have to cut round the long way. She weighed one risk against another and chose the one she knew.

The towpath it was.

The world seemed muted. No birdsong, no dogs barking from the gardens backing onto the canal. Even the usual clank and groan from Riddles Mill’s machinery was absent at this distance. The only sound was the faint, rhythmical crunch of her own boots. She tucked her chin down and walked faster, trying to ignore the way the silence made her feel watched.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered. “Nobody’s watching you. You’re just late.”

She could see the faint outline of the mill gates in the distance, a rectangular smudge through the haze. For a moment her mind skipped forward, imagining the shift supervisor checking his watch, the row of timecards, the narrowed eyes.

One more late clock-in and that would be it. She’d be out.

No wages. No rent. No college.

Her stomach flipped.

“All right,” she told herself. “Run.”

Carefully at first, she picked up the pace. Short steps. Centre of gravity low. The path felt less treacherous when she moved with it. She gained confidence, rhythm. She could do this. She could get there, clock in, apologise, joke about the cold, and—

Her foot hit the patch of invisible ice at Lock Gate 5.

It wasn’t a dramatic slip. No flailing arms, no cartoon skid. One second her boot had contact with rough frozen mud; the next it met something glass-smooth and treacherous. Her leg shot forward. Her balance vanished. Her body went sideways.

The real violence came when her head struck the paving stone.

A crack that felt like lightning inside her skull. Bright white pain. A flash of light that wasn’t light at all, just the brain protesting.

“Bloody hell—” she tried to say, but it came out a raw breath.

The world tilted. The sky slid sideways. The black canal wall loomed, then retreated. For a moment she couldn’t work out which way was up, whether she was lying flat or floating.

She realised, after a while, that she was on her back. The cold from the stones seeped through her coat into her spine. She tried to lift her hand to touch the back of her head and found that nothing moved.

Her fingers might as well have been carved from wood.

Panic surged. She tried again, harder. Her brain screamed the command. Her body refused. A low whine of fear started in her chest and stuck there, unable to get out.

Her breath sounded too loud in her ears. Thud, thud, thud. Her heartbeat. She clung to the sound as proof she was still here.

The sky above her seemed unnaturally bright, but everything at the edges of her vision blurred into grey smudges. She blinked. Pain throbbed behind her eyes. She tasted metal.

You’re fine. You just need a minute. People fall. They get up. You’ll get up.

Time stretched, weird and unreliable. She had no idea whether seconds or minutes passed before she heard it.

Boots.

Crunching through frost.

Not running. Walking. Slow, steady, deliberate.

Relief flared. Someone was coming. They’d help. They’d see her lying there like an idiot, ask what had happened. She’d be embarrassed, but alive. Saved.

She tried to call out, to make a noise, even if it was just a little croak. Her mouth opened. No sound came.

The boots drew closer.

Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.

She could feel the vibrations of each step through the ground, tiny shudders beneath her skull. She willed her eyes to focus, to tilt just enough to see who it was.

The footsteps stopped beside her.

A shadow fell across her.

Karen’s heart hammered. Say something. Move. Anything. Please.

Nothing.

The last thing she ever heard was the quiet, almost thoughtful sound of boots shifting on frosted stone.

Then silence.

Detective Sergeant Georgie Ellis had spent most of her early days in the police dreaming about big cases. She’d imagined blue tape flapping in the wind, search teams in fields, suspects sweating under interview room strip-lights.

She hadn’t imagined a cold case. And she certainly hadn’t imagined this cold case.

The Towpath Murders.

Even the name carried weight. Ask any older officer and they’d go a bit distant, like they were peering back into a fog. Six women gone. No bodies, no arrests, no closure. Just fear and rumours and the old grainy news footage they sometimes used in training.

She hadn’t even been born when the first girl disappeared.

Now here she was, heading to a remote hotel with a brand-new Cold Case Unit to dig it all up again. She tried to play it cool, even with herself, but the truth was: she was buzzing.

Her BMW Z4—silver, low, completely impractical for most of the roads it had to endure—hummed smoothly through the edges of Holme Hill. Terraced streets gave way to half-built estates, then patchy fields and scrubby woodland. Frost clung in the shadows where the sun hadn’t reached yet.

The car felt blissfully quiet.

No Tiggy, for a start.

Her elder sister was safely married to Tristan Bishop. Her beloved flat was now her own once more. No more chaos in the form of half-finished art projects, mismatched mugs, and those two appalling children. Georgie loved her, of course, but she also loved her own space.

The place was unnervingly quiet. Last night, lying in bed under the whir of the boiler, Georgie had realised she could hear the fridge humming. That was how quiet it was.

Now, with only the road noise and the engine, her brain had room to wander. It wandered straight to Don May.

He’d fought to get her on this unit. She was sure of it. Samson might have signed off on the promotion to Detective Sergeant, but it was Don who had spotted her in the first place. Don who’d given her the gritty jobs, the messy ones, the cases other sergeants had quietly shifted onto juniors they didn’t rate.

“You’ve got a brain, Ellis,” he’d said once after a particularly grim robbery went to court. “Use it.”

She smiled, remembering, then checked her speed and eased off a touch. No point arriving at Grimshaw Hall with a speeding ticket.

She thought about the flat again. When the silence got too loud, she sometimes found herself wishing there was someone there—someone whose shoes would be kicked off by the door, whose coat would hang next to hers. Tiggy liked to tell her she’d ‘meet someone when she stopped trying so hard,’ as if men fell out of cupboards when you weren’t looking.

Georgie wasn’t convinced. Men she met on jobs were either criminals, victims, or witnesses. Men she met in bars were… well, not her type, mostly. And anyway, work came first.

Always had.

A sign for Grimshaw Hall Hotel flashed up on the roadside, pointing down a narrow lane. She turned in, tyres crunching on gravel, then mud, then something that might once have been tarmac. Trees pressed close on both sides, their bare branches clawing at the sky.

As the lane curved, the house came into view.

“Wow,” she said aloud, before she could stop herself.

It loomed from the landscape like a bad mood. Blackened stone, high windows, chimneys like watchtowers. Gargoyles perched along the roofline, jaws open, eyes empty. Someone had tried to soften it — shrubs, a gravel drive, a ridiculous ‘Welcome to Grimshaw Hall’ sign — but the place resisted it.

‘Superior executive residence,’ Charlie Riggs would call it, half impressed, half resentful.

She smiled, thinking of Charlie. Bless him, he was trying so hard to turn ‘Detective Inspector Riggs’ into a brand. The new haircut. The better shirts. The gym membership. Underneath it all, though, he was still Riggsy, the lad who blushed when witnesses flirted with him.

She spotted his car already parked near the front door.

Of course he was first.

As she pulled up, the front door opened and Don May stepped out, coat collar up, blowing on his hands. He looked like he always did — just slightly rumpled, as if sleep never quite claimed him properly. His tie was straight, but his hair refused to obey.

He lifted a hand in greeting, then turned back inside to grab his bag. Georgie parked next to them, took a breath, and stepped out into the cold.

‘Afternoon,’ she said, locking the car.

‘Georgie.’ Don’s smile was small, but genuine. ‘How’s the superstar sergeant?’

‘Trying not to crash the car on your fancy country lanes, sir.’

‘Don,’ he corrected quietly. ‘We’re off duty. For now.’

‘For now,’ she echoed.

The door swung open again to reveal Riggs, dragging his small suitcase and peering up at the carved stonework like it might detach itself and drop on his head.

‘Bloody palace, isn’t it? he said. ‘You seen the gargoyles? Nightmare fuel.’

‘You just don’t like anything older than your Jaguar’ Georgie replied.

He sniffed. ‘Classic cars are timeless.’

‘So is damp,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t mean it’s nice.’

Don shook his head, amused, and gestured them towards the entrance.

‘Come on. Let’s see what our Chief Constable’s got us into.’

Dame Pauline Philbey stood at her front door with her car keys in one hand and a gin bottle in the other.

“Just a quick one before I go?” she asked Boris.

The cat, a large ginger tom with a flattened ear and a perpetually disappointed expression, sat on the hall table like an ugly ornament. He blinked slowly, disdainfully.

“I knew you’d say that,” Pauline sighed.

She put the bottle back on the sideboard. She’d already had one that afternoon while reading over her notes. Another would be foolish. Not that foolishness had stopped her often in her life, but she had a reputation to uphold now.

Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Sometimes she still thought there’d been a mistake in the honours list. Surely the Palace hadn’t meant her? Pauline Philbey — who’d grown up above a shop in Holme Hill, had done temp work at Riddles Mill, had once snogged a boy behind the cricket pavilion and then cried all the way home because she thought she’d be pregnant?

But then she’d stand in front of the mirror, tilt her head, and catch a glimpse of the woman the papers sometimes printed — serious, sharp-eyed, a little glamorous, if she squinted. And she’d remember the files in Whitehall basements, the things she had done and seen undercover, the secrets she still didn’t talk about, even to Harry.

Harry.

Her husband snored from the armchair in the sitting room, newspaper draped over his chest, glasses halfway down his nose. The sight filled her with a ridiculous fondness. For all the things she’d done in her life, all the strange places she’d been sent, she still sometimes couldn’t believe she’d ended up here — married to Harry Riddles, former factory owner and professional curmudgeon.

She walked in, bent down, and kissed the top of his head. He grumbled without waking.

“I’m off,” she whispered. “Don’t burn the house down.”

He snorted, shifted slightly, and resumed snoring.

Boris followed her to the front door, tail in the air, then stopped at the threshold like he was drawing a line.

“You’re no use to me at all, are you?” she told him, pulling on her coat.

He meowed, a deep, rusty sound, then padded back to the warmth of the radiator.

In the car, she set her leather briefcase on the passenger seat. The folder on top of the papers was plain, thick card. No flashy markings. Just two words printed neatly on the front:

THE TOWPATH MURDERS

Her fingertips brushed the title.

“I remember every one of you,” she murmured.

Six young women, six photographs she could conjure in her mind even with her eyes closed. The case had fascinated her at the time, but she’d been too junior, too peripheral to make anyone listen. Then life had swept her away into a different sort of work, in a different sort of office, where the walls were thicker and the doors had combination locks.

Now everything had turned full circle.

She started the engine, listening to the familiar cough and growl of it catching. As she pulled away, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rear-view mirror. For a moment, she saw not a woman in her late sixties heading for a strategy weekend, but the younger Pauline, hair long and wild, heading for a different kind of trouble with a bottle hidden in her bag and a forged note in her pocket.

“Behave,” she told the reflection. “You’re a Dame now.”

The reflection raised an eyebrow, unconvinced.

Pauline laughed, then focused on the road. There was work to do. Samson might be a terror, but when it came to cold cases, Pauline was indispensable. Don May had said so, in his roundabout way. Even the Chief Constable herself had requested her presence.

She drove out of town and towards Hartley Moor, feeling the old familiar thrill that came when a puzzle waited to be solved.

“Maybe this time,” she said softly to the folder. “Maybe this time we’ll get it right.”

She pressed her foot down a little harder on the accelerator.

And headed towards Grimshaw Hall.