Kate Miskin and Piers Tarrant begin an affair after years of mutual attraction held in check by professional rivalry and Kate’s determination not to risk her career. The change is decisive not because the scene promises a settled future, but because intimacy briefly reaches a part of Kate that work, disappointment, and self-protection have hardened. In the morning, a suspected murder summons her away from that new private happiness and back into the precise routines of her job.

Before the Invitation

For Kate, the flat where the affair begins represents more than a place to sleep. Long planned and prudently mortgaged, it is her home, refuge, and security, made solid in bricks and mortar. She has never invited a colleague there. Her first and only lover, Alan Scully, left for America; although he wanted her to go with him, she refused, partly from fear of commitment and chiefly because her job came first. That history makes the new invitation a crossing of boundaries she has guarded for years.

Piers’s call arrives unexpectedly at Kate’s office early on Monday. He asks her to dinner on Friday. Since leaving Adam Dalgliesh’s Special Investigation Squad for the anti-terrorist branch, Piers and Kate have not spoken. They had worked together for years, respected one another, and shared a half-acknowledged rivalry that Adam Dalgliesh had made use of. Their disagreements could be passionate without becoming acrimonious. Kate has found Piers one of the most sexually attractive men she has worked with, but attraction alone has never overcome her practical objection: an affair between close colleagues could jeopardize their competence, and one of them would have to leave the Squad. Her job had helped free her from Ellison Fairweather Buildings; she would not casually endanger what she had achieved.

From Dinner to the Flat

At dinner, conversation becomes desultory over the puddings. Piers remarks that he dislikes coffee soon after fish; Kate says that she needs to sober up after the wine, though she knows she has not drunk enough to lose control. When they consider going to a flat, Piers accepts Kate’s suggestion that they go to hers. He briefly stops at his own place on the way, while Kate remains in the car; twenty minutes later they enter her sitting room together.

The flat looks different to Kate with Piers there. Its modern furniture, absence of mementoes, and lack of visible family history make it seem as impersonal as a carefully arranged show flat. Piers does not pause to inspect it: he goes straight to the windows and out onto the balcony. From inside, Kate watches him against the black, heaving Thames, its surface scored with silver, with the illuminated buildings on the opposite bank beyond him. She stays in rather than joining him. Later, she grinds coffee beans, prepares two mugs, and heats milk from the refrigerator. Seated together on the sofa, they finish their coffee; Piers leans forward and kisses her gently but firmly. Kate recognizes that the evening has been moving toward this moment from the first instant in the restaurant.

Intimacy and Its Effect

Piers says that he would like to shower. Kate laughs at his matter-of-factness and directs him to the bathroom. The intimacy that follows surprises her not through any display of expertise but through its ease. She had expected an experienced lover; she had not expected their lovemaking to feel so uncomplicated and unstressed. They lie down with laughter as well as desire. Afterwards, in her double bed, she hears his breathing and feels his warmth, and his presence seems natural rather than intrusive.

That ease matters against the strain Kate has carried into the encounter. Her self-mistrust and defensiveness have accumulated alongside resentment and a sense of betrayal after the Macpherson Report. Piers is more cynical and politically sophisticated than she is, and he has shown little patience with her distress. Adam Dalgliesh, by contrast, has tactfully, sometimes without words, persuaded her not to resign. Kate remains valued and competent, and likes her work, but her original dedication and naïve enthusiasm have slowly drained away. She has become wary of emotional involvement and of what life can do. The night with Piers does not erase those injuries; it makes her aware of an almost forgotten joy and of a hard core of defensiveness beginning to soften.

The Morning Call

The morning after, Kate stretches in bed beneath the pale-blue sky, hearing the kettle, a cupboard door, and china clinking in the kitchen. Piers is making coffee. Alone for the first time since they came to the flat together, she reviews the previous twenty-four hours with amazement rather than regret. The quiet domestic sounds give the new intimacy a brief, ordinary shape: he is not only the colleague she desired, but someone moving through her home.

That interval ends when the telephone rings. Kate answers, says that it is a case, and explains that the team has a suspected murder on an island off the Cornish coast. The assignment requires a helicopter; she must leave her car and meet Adam Dalgliesh’s team at Battersea Heliport. She is already moving, thinking through what must be done and in what order, and notes that her murder kit is in the office so Adam Dalgliesh can have it put in the car. The shift from shared bed and coffee to logistics is immediate. The scene establishes the affair as a genuine opening in Kate’s guarded private life while leaving its future unsettled: what it shows clearly is both her renewed capacity for joy and the force of the professional duty that continues to organize her choices.