Hanlon’s mind swam in and out of consciousness, until with a mental jerk, she snapped into wakefulness.
Her head was bowed and ferociously painful. She lifted it up, her surroundings still out of focus through her blurred vision, but slowly her brain began to work again and she started to piece together what had happened.
The first and most pressing feeling was one of agony, from her head and from where she’d been so savagely kicked in the stomach. She retched now and tasted blood in her mouth. She put her head to one side and spat it out. As her chest rose and fell when she breathed, she could feel a sharp pain in her side and guessed a rib was probably broken.
Her legs were stretched out in front of her. She had one shoe on and one shoe off. She glanced down and saw that the stitching on the seam of her tight dress, from her left hip up to her middle ribs, had given way during the attack. For some reason she found this almost unbearable. I really liked this dress, she thought sadly. Now it’s ruined. Hanlon wondered vaguely where she was but her head hurt too much to think. Had she got drunk or something? She had no recollection of where she was.
She closed her eyes momentarily and reopened them, to find herself looking at a pair of legs in black cargo trousers.
‘Hello, DCI Hanlon,’ said Stephen Michaels.