Mark Kingdom grew up in the quiet sprawl of the countryside, a place where silence wasn’t peaceful so much as formative. With no neighbours and no siblings to dilute the solitude, he learned early to entertain himself. Mostly outdoors, mostly alone. School was the first shock to his system. He discovered he was brilliant, and brilliance is a lonely currency. His peers didn’t admire him. They resented him being better than them. He didn’t make friends. He kept distance.

Oxford changed that. For the first time, people were interesting enough to study up close. He took Clinical Psychology because it felt like a natural extension of what he already did instinctively. Dissect people and their characters. Derrick Ridley became his first real friend. He was extrovert, ambitious, obsessed with serial killers and the glamour of profiling. Mark learnt to party, drank more than he should, pretended he enjoyed the chaos. Derrick thought he wanted to join the police as a profiler. Mark hadn’t really decided.

Then Gemma appeared, and everything else fell away. She was the first person who didn’t feel like a puzzle to solve. She felt like oxygen. Mark became softer around her, more attentive, more human. She wanted to defend the vulnerable. He wanted to be whatever she needed. He drifted into counselling traumatised officers with the London Met. It was a job he respected in theory but despised in practice. Too many fakers, too many time‑wasters. He exposed them and made enemies. Eventually he took an opportunity with Reading Police force training to be a profiler. It was his forte, he became the man they sought to get into the minds of the unworthy.

Derrick’s career took off in a direction Mark hadn’t anticipated: MI5.  The revelation stung. Mark’s grades were better, his mind sharper, but Derrick had lineage, connections, a grandfather who whispered the right names. Aptitude, they called it. Mark swallowed the jealousy and moved on.

He and Gemma bought a house in Guildford. She talked about children. He pretended he wasn’t terrified. Then came the tumour. Nine months from diagnosis to death. After three months of Mark drowning himself in alcohol.

He made mistakes, professionally, personally, sexually with colleague’s wives. They suspended him. AA saved him or at least stopped the freefall. His supervisor told him the truth: his goodwill was gone. Time to move on, get a transfer.

Manchester Met offered a reset. Mark rebuilt himself with obsessive precision: running, clean eating, total abstinence. He became the worst kind of reformed addict. Evangelical, disciplined, judgemental. But his sexual appetite didn’t reform with the rest of him. Manchester nightlife offered endless distraction, and he took it, carefully avoiding colleagues’ wives this time.

Then Becky happened. A blond on a hen night, drunk and incandescent, literally falling into him in the hotel lobby. She wanted air; he went with her. In the cemetery she kissed him, and he didn’t hesitate. It was reckless, stupid, intoxicating and catastrophic. Becky was the Chief Constable’s daughter, under surveillance. Some officer watched them and didn’t intervene.

The Chief gave Mark a choice, be fired publicly, or leave quietly with six months’ gardening leave. Mark took the exit.