31
Wendy couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt so tired. Other than the couple of hours’ sleep she’d had last night in the Premier Inn in County Durham, she’d been running on empty. The long drive up and the even longer drive back had taken it out of her. It had taken just over five hours to drive back, and she was starting to realise she should have gone straight home.
‘There we are. You were wrong,’ Steve Wing said to the major incident room as Wendy walked in.
‘Sorry?’ she replied.
‘Frank had twenty quid on this being a mass exodus. We were going to take bets on who’d be next to go AWOL, but you just came back and spoilt it.’
Wendy was, by now, utterly confused. The tiredness wasn’t helping matters. ‘Sorry, you’ve lost me, Steve.’
‘Well, first of all you disappear off up north
