A Mature police procedural. Every named character is an adult, with an age on the page: Cressida Vail 44, Julian Vail 46, Imogen Vail 21, DCI Yusuf Kande 47, DS Ama Boateng 39, Dr Halina Weiss 52, Callum Rylance 31, Sgt Ceri Vaughan 41, PC Aurelia Bengtsson 24, Iona Pryce 35, Debs Okoro 33, Dorothy Lintz 69, Eileen Doherty 74, Christopher Calloway 64, Sgt Marek Drozd 58, Wayne Hardaker 39, Nadia Powell 28, Sandra Ward 54. The youngest is 21. No minor appears in any role, memory, photograph, joke, or future reference. The story contains the death of a 21-year-old woman in a road traffic collision, her recovery from a drainage culvert after eleven days, and the mortuary examination of her body, described plainly as professional work and never gratuitously. It contains a fatal collision in 2021 that killed a man of 32, a file declined in eleven days and never reopened, a professional standards referral of four lines, a conduct referral, a judicial review that finds nothing, a career ended by an honest disclosure, a night shift refused and given to a probationer, a form with five boxes of which the fourth is the one that matters, a signature in the officer's box at 09:20 on Thursday 22 October, and a refusal asked for twice in a corridor and given twice. Sexual content: Cressida and Julian are both adults. In the kitchen on Saturday 17 October each of them says out loud, before anything begins, what they want, what stops it, and the single word that stops it. Both answers are asked for and both are heard, and either person can stop the evening. The scene is written in full, is specific to two people who have known each other's bodies for twenty-two years, and stops part-way through at 23:41 on the word one of them had agreed to beforehand, and neither of them argues. It is not a reward: the hour it occupies is the hour the four lines could have been written, and neither of them writes them. It gates no professional choice and no ending. No slur is written out. No instructional detail is given for any forensic, medical, evidential or legal process. Alderfen City Police, Harker Lane, Marlow Mortuary, Form D/12, file 21/0441, the Fenham Neighbourhood Centre, Calloway and Grimsby, and all figures, correspondence and people are invented. No real person, franchise, or place on Earth. All music is instrumental, vocal playback is disabled, and lyrics are empty. No media is generated, fetched, or bundled with this project.