Echoes Never Fade

A body in a haunted hall. A victim they know all too well. A killer hiding in their own ranks.

When a body is discovered in a bedroom at the historic Washington Old Hall following a midnight ghost hunt, DI Grimshaw and DS Chloe Harper are pulled into a scene that is chillingly deliberate. But the real shock comes when the victim is formally identified as Steven Tate, a meticulous digital forensics officer from their own CID floor.

With no obvious signs of trauma, the investigation quickly spirals from the paranormal to the deeply personal. Simultaneously, an external review team from Durham descends on Washington Station to audit a closed, high-profile conviction involving a manipulative cyber-criminal, a case Tate himself helped build.

As Grimshaw and Harper dig into Tate's final days, they uncover a desperate breadcrumb trail left by their fallen colleague: a fully encrypted hard drive, a burner phone, and a fragmented positional cipher concealed inside his pet reptile enclosures.

They soon realise Tate wasn't just murdered; he was silenced with a rare, highly lethal toxin. Tate had uncovered an internal conspiracy and died trying to build a fail-safe to expose it.

Now, Grimshaw and his team must race to decode the dead man's puzzle before the architect of the cover-up destroys the evidence.

But how do you catch a killer when the rot is coming from inside your own station?