Sidonie, who had found something in herself that six years of the dark had not managed to kill, agreed to wear a wire.

No one asked it of her lightly, and no one would have blamed her for refusing.

She had been out of that gatehouse for barely a day.

She was malnourished, traumatized, only beginning to grasp that she was free — and they were asking her to go back in, alone, to sit in the room where she’d been caged for six years and coax a confession out of the man who had caged her, with nothing between her and him but a recorder taped under her sweater and a van two hundred yards away.

Cormoran had made sure she understood she could say no, that there were other ways to build the case, slower and less certain but real.

She said yes almost before he finished.