Kitty Reilly has a front page exclusive on the Sunday papers. She knows people in her profession who have grafted all their lives, who she freely admits are better journalists than she is, and still have never even gotten close to this. She went to the printers in the depths of last night to watch it flying off the rollers. Paper goes in blank, spooled off huge bales like confetti for God in heaven, is pressed under great black rubber cylinders and comes off covered in words. Her words, on this occasion. She brought a whole bundle of them home. The workers down there seemed to know why, and looked at her with benevolent, appreciative smiles. Everyone's been so bloody nice.

Except, of course, around the office. Kitty hears things, whispered in corners or cut off as she walks into the room. Things like 'lucky' and 'jammy bitch'. Things like, 'What'd she have to do to land that?', muttered in voices that aren't implying she had to work hard and investigate and really push herself.

And do you know what? For the first time maybe in her life, Kitty could not give the tiniest shit less what they say. The feeling is incredible. After all these years, it feels like freedom. All week, she's been looking around them all, and she just does not care anymore. When she was a little girl, she didn't want her mother to think she was a tomboy. When she went to school, she didn't want her classmates to think she was a geek. When she went to uni, she didn't want anyone to think she was frigid. Starting work, it was all of that and incompetent too, and all at once. Now, finally, she's free of all that.

As Sunday dawns, Kitty is sitting low in her armchair. Her feet are propped up on her bundle. And yes, maybe fifty papers is self-indulgent, but that doesn't matter. She has a pretty, delicately patterned tea cup and saucer by her side. Despite the fact that it's breakfast time, she is enjoying several delightful, pastel macaroons, pink and green and an incredible sunflower yellow. She lets the light come up naturally into the room, and lies there still. No longer even daydreaming, Kitty's mind just drifts, happily afloat on this most wonderful of mornings, on having everything she wants for just a moment.

Occasionally, very occasionally, just a little wave to rock the boat very slightly, she wonders where Rich is. He never came back. Didn't answer his phone again either. But he hasn't turned up dead anywhere. She's a little sorry, just a little, that she couldn't protect him. More than likely, that's why he's run, why he wouldn't come near her again.

She just wonders where he is. Maybe now that publicity has given him some safety she'll see him again. I mean, he could at least say thank you, couldn't he? She's yet to hear that from him.

At ten o'clock, the phone calls start. In beaming sunlight she lazily picks them up and like a spot of darkness absorbs all the love and light that comes down the phone to her. Her editor, and her mother, her Aunt Liz, family, friends, uni pals, colleagues (though only from the other papers she's worked at in the past, no current ones). They are, as a rule, uniform declarations of praise and pride. It all just washes over her.

Then there's a slightly different phone call. It comes about midday, but she doesn't doubt that the man on the other end of the line has only just gotten to read the papers; his voice is hoarse with hangover, thick with the memory of last night.

"Hello?" she mumbles at first, smiling expectantly, still thinking it's going to be like all the rest.

"Miss Reilly?" he says. "Miss Kitty Reilly? Have I got the right number?"

"Depends," she says. Her back crackles when she tries to sit up, and she's slunk so low that physics won't quite allow it. She folds forward against her knees, just to feel a little more alert. This doesn't sound like the rest. "Who's looking for her?"

"Harold Dunlop, over here at the Post. Read your story."

Harold Dunlop. Kitty knows the name. He's the bloody senior crime staff writer at the biggest tabloid in the country since the News of the World folded, of course she knows the name.

Oh my God, she thinks. Oh my God. Oh my God. If the newsagents opened at 10, given it's a Sunday, and it is (she checks the clock) twelve-twenty-three, it has been two hours and twenty-three minutes since her story reached the public and oh my God, she's being headhunted, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God… "Did you now?" she says, with casual nonchalance and no idea where she manages to dig up casual nonchalance from. "And thought enough of it to find my home number, I see. How'd you manage that, by the way?"

"Details, details… You ought to have that all worked out, though; you're good at details. Very good at details… Listen to me, Miss Reilly, I'm suffering really rather badly this morning. Self-inflicted of course, but I just wanted you to know, I may call you back sometime this week and ask you to meet me for a quiet, private lunch, alright?"

She tries to sound more like she's rolling her eyes than shaking all over. You can, I wager, guess which one is the truth. "Well, thank you very much for the advance warning."

"I'm looking forward to calling you back, Miss Reilly."

She puts the phone down, maintains her shocked composure for a moment, then throws back her head and laughs like a teenager, half-screaming at the ceiling until her upstairs neighbour slams his heel to the floor a few times. After that she flops back in her chair and giggles, grinning, rapt with it all.

Kitty holds up her joined hands like a praying nun and says to no one who would be listening to her, "You lying bastard, bless your empty little heart! Thank you, Sherlock Holmes. Bless you."

Somewhere after that, in that same flippant high, Kitty drifts off. Staying up to go to the printers, the sugar crash, the lack of breakfast, the caffeine wearing off, she leaves half a cigarette just burning in the ashtray and her eyes slowly close. Her dreams are the same colours as the macaroons. Pastel pink and pistachio green and glorious, basking, sunshine yellow. She's floating on the Dead Sea. She did it once when she was young, on a family holiday she hardly remembers. But she remembers it now, and the dead sea is sugary, pistachio green. The sky is sunshine yellow, because the sun is shining. And across it flies a pastel pink Icarus, who she could warn, but she doesn't. His wings melt and he plunges, and hits the water not with a splash, but with the ringing of urgent bells.

Her bloody phone again, waiting her out of it. That's what the bells were.

"Yes?" she sighs this time.

"Kitty." First she recognizes the rush and pop of a long distance call, like talking in a tunnel. Then another sort of distance. She can't quite put her finger on it at first. Then, finally, out of her sleepy brain, she recognizes the voice.

"Miss Kerr?" Gracie. Rich Brooke's keeper. The first source. All these little factors drop into place in Kitty's head, very quickly, and wake her up. Finally, maybe she'll get her thank you out of Rich. Much as she would have liked to snooze on a little, there are definitely worse things to wake up to. "Where are you?" she asks. Then, more important, "How's Rich?"

"That's what I called to tell you." Kitty straightens, smiling, waiting. But what follows is not what she was expecting. "Richard Brooke is dead."

"…I beg your pardon."

"And Holmes too, any minute now. If you're fast you'll be the first on the scene."

Now the first question becomes important again. "You sound very far away."

"Do I? I suppose that's one way of putting it."

"No, I mean, we don't have the best connection."

"Oh. Yes, well, for my sins and my stupidity, I am in Paris." She doesn't sound right. The voice is perfect, yes, absolutely fine, but there's something different in the way she talks. A hard edge, a brutality unbecoming of a secretary. "The bodies," either the line or the voice cracks, "you will find at St Bart's Hospital."

The line dies.

There are ways to waste time. Kitty could try and call her back, ask for more details. She could call her editor and give this to him, or call Harold Dunlop and start her bargaining.

But Kitty's learned a lot in these past weeks. She simply stands up, ignoring the aches of her long apathy, in last night's grubby clothes and grabs her bag on her way to the door. In the car along the way she calls that pap photographer, the one who gave her all those helpful hints. Asks him if he wants to stop snapping up the skirts of the rich and wasted, give himself a chance at climbing the ladders.

As it turns out, he gets there before Kitty. He gets a picture that will go on to be iconic, of Holmes standing on the edge of the building. He gets a picture of the falling that the papers are all too coy to use, but he sells it to the Americans and they lap it up.

Kitty arrives just as he's getting pictures of John Watson being torn away from the body. Pure tabloid gold. As Kerr promised, she's the first one there. She gets the quotes from the eyewitnesses before the police can arrive to disperse them. She gets names and numbers, people who are willing to let her get in touch again. She sees the ideal shot, the broken mobile phone on the pavement next to a spatter of blood just small enough to be tasteful, and makes sure there's a picture taken of it before the phone goes as evidence.

Then, when the police arrive and they are moved along, Kitty sneaks herself and her photographer into the hospital at the ambulance bay and heads for the roof, to investigate the rumours of 'gunshot' she heard running through the crowd. She hasn't seen anybody else heading for the roof either.

She liked Rich, of course she did. And not just because he was giving her his story. He was just a nice person to have around. But the words 'discovered the body' get stuck in her head (they are pastel pink words) and she can't get rid of them. Isn't sure she wants to.

And well, they discover the blood certainly. The pool is uniform and glossy, ragged on only one edge where his head must have landed in it.

"Must've took the body down to the morgue," her photographer friend mutters. "I wouldn't worry about it. I'd say we've got more than enough here."

Kitty nods, but she can't take her eyes off the blood. There's something wrong about it. It bothers her all day thereafter, while she's writing up tomorrow's story. All the other papers have to catch up what she exposed today and then add this on. Kitty can afford to spend a bit more time on it. Nobody knows this case like she does. Her editor told her that. She, he said, is what's going to make these pieces really special. She had the inside line.

And Kitty is comfortable with that.

But the blood, the blood, there's something wrong about the blood.

It's only that evening, when an official verdict of suicide is released for both the corpses involved, that it strikes her. She calls up the camera again. "Send me the picture you took of the roof." He does. Mere seconds later, it's on her computer, and she pulls in close on the dark, totally uniform, totally liquid pool. "…If you were going to shoot yourself-"

"In the head," he says, without hesitation. "It's the only sure way. Besides, that's what it says on the preliminary coroner's report."

"You have that?"

"I know someone who does."

"Get that for me. But…" But if you shot yourself in the head, surely there would be more than blood on the concrete. Kitty doesn't like to imagine too vividly, but something darker than blood, and thicker, something more viscous, surely? Pieces. And right there at the hospital, where both bodies could be spirited away directly to the morgue… Surely there would be more than blood on the concrete.

But it makes sense. Rich topped himself. Holmes, realizing that left him no recourse, did the decent thing. Or Holmes tries to blackmail Rich into staying Moriarty, saying all of this was another elaborate game, and Rich's suicide was his only option. The only sure way. Yeah. It all makes so much sense if you don't question it too much.

Those pictures of Holmes, the ones no one will by, his skull is still awfully round for a man who just took a header down all those storeys, isn't it?

But it already makes sense. Why should Kitty force deeper and deeper conspiracy on it? She thinks of Rich in her flat. She thinks of Harold Dunlop at the Post. She thinks of Leon Coxcroft, and leaving him behind at his nowhere, tabloid newsdesk.

"But what?" her snapper prompts.

"Nothing," Kitty tells him. "Never mind. Thanks anyway, and get me that report." She hangs up, and goes back to writing tomorrow's front page.