The Man Assigned to Guard Her

Esther Mayhew noticed that sixty-one flats paid their rent in cash, in round sums, and were never once late. She walked five of them. They were empty. Twenty-two months later she is the prosecution’s key witness against the men who own them, and on a February morning someone leaves a photograph of her swimming under her windscreen wiper.

Aled Pryor has spent fourteen years in police protection being the man nobody remembers. He was in the inspector’s office for forty minutes before she saw him. He gives a reason for every decision, asks permission out of habit, and has one rule of his own: he cannot hear her evidence. If she starts to tell him, he will leave the room.

For the three weeks until she goes into the witness box he decides where she sleeps, which windows she may stand at and whether she may see her mother. Esther, who reads the habits of money, writes it all down and asks him what that makes him. He knows. So he gives her terms, and his inspector’s direct number, and the right to have him moved without saying why.

In a farm cottage in Somerset and a flat above a shut bakery, she reads his whole life off a petrol receipt, and every conversation has to go round the case, so they talk about everything else. But on the duty rota she read upside down on her first afternoon, he was down for four nights, and he has not done one. Anything between a witness and her officer could hand the defence the argument that the police shaped her evidence. And the one person she most wants to tell is the one person who is not allowed to hear it.