'Cocky bastard,' Ashley said when she told him. 'Not enough to be ahead of the game, he has to let you know.'

'Why me, though? Why not you? You're in charge.'

Ashley laughed. 'Mallory's way of thinking, not worth getting out of bed to put one over on old jossers like me. But you. You're sharp, bright, on the way up. A woman, too. If he can intimidate you a little, then he will.'

'I don't see what he stands to gain.'

'Right now? Aside from pumping up his vanity? Control. Leverage, some time in the future. Who knows?'

She looked at him keenly. 'You think we've let him get away with something, don't you?'

Ashley shrugged. 'This time, I honestly don't know. But I did my time in the Met, before opting for a quieter life. Coppers like Mallory, old school, they've been getting away with stuff for years. Big, small, more often than not just to prove they can. It's what gives them a buzz.'

Thinking about the way Mallory had materialised almost silently alongside her and the sly superiority of his smile, Linda shuddered as if someone had just stepped close to the corners of her grave.

14

It bit into him, like a tick that had infiltrated beneath his skin. No matter where he went, what he did. The routines with which he'd bolstered up his life since moving west no longer seemed enough. Each day he made a point of listening to the radio, scouring the papers for news.

On page 2 of the Telegraph, mid-December, something caught his eye: the investigation into two deaths in a police raid carried out a little over two months before. The paper's crime correspondent, claiming to have seen a leaked copy of the report, forecast a positive outcome to the official inquiry carried out by Superintendent Trevor Ashley and officers from the Hertfordshire Force.

Alongside, two columns wide, there was a photograph of a smiling Detective Superintendent George Mallory, taken outside the Old Bailey, his DCI, Maurice Repton, standing several paces behind, almost squeezed out of the frame. At the time, we were reminded, Mallory's commanding officer had been quick to attest to the professionalism with which the raid had been planned and carried out. A further paragraph referred to the tragic death of Detective Constable Paul Draper, a small head-and-shoulders shot rendering him almost impossibly young. If it had not been for Superintendent Mallory's quick thinking and resolute action, more lives might have been lost. Nothing about Draper's young widow and child.

Two pages on, a single paragraph near the foot of the page attested to the fact that the investigation into the death of Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch was still ongoing and that no arrests had so far been made.

Let it alone, Frank, he told himself. Let it be.

After yet another restless night he rose early, made coffee, walked down to the coast path to clear his head, rang Robert Framlingham and caught the London train.

Paddington station was thick with travellers, the natural hubbub and bustle overlaid with the saccharine wail of poorly amplified voices wishing them all a merry little Christmas. As Elder crossed the forecourt, a Big Issue seller with tinsel in his hair and two extravagant sprigs of mistletoe tied either side of his head like horns, lurched towards him, puckering up rouged lips.

The Underground platform was dangerously crowded – delays on the District, Circle and Bakerloo – and, when it arrived, the first train was near impossible to board. At Oxford Circus there was a five-minute queue to get out of the station.

In daylight, the skeletal snowflakes and reindeer that hung high above the street looked ugly and incomplete. Shop windows burgeoned with tawdry and expensive imprecations to buy, and Elder, hating it, hating every bit of it, felt nonetheless guilty he had neither bought a present for Katherine nor thought of one; had, in fact, bought nothing for anyone.

The restaurant was on one of the narrow streets that ran between Regent Street and Great Portland Street, home, for the most part, to small clothing wholesalers, their windows sprayed with fake snow. A sign on the door wished Elder Merry Christmas in Italian and inside red and green streamers looped cheerily along the walls.

Framlingham was already seated at a corner table, tucking into an antipasto of tuna and fagiolini. He was wearing a tweed suit that reminded Elder of damp heather, a cream shirt and a mustard tie.

Levering his tall frame out of his chair, the Chief Superintendent held out his hand. 'Frank, how long?'

'Seven years, eight?'

'And since you and I were the scourge of every bully-boy and malefactor in Shepherd's Bush?'

Elder smiled. 'Thirteen or so.'

A waiter took his coat and pulled out his chair.

When Elder had first moved down to London with Joanne, Robert Framlingham had been his immediate superior. Now, after one or two high-profile successes, his standing, as head of the Murder Review Unit, was growing. He had a house in Chiswick that he'd had the foresight to buy against the boom, and a cottage in Dorset, near the coast. Sailing was his passion.

There was a wife whom Elder had met no more than once or twice; three children, the youngest still at university, the others out in the world, paying back, no doubt, their student loans.

'You and Joanne,' Framlingham said once they'd settled. 'I was sorry to hear things didn't work out.'

Elder shrugged.

'Still see much of her?'

'Not a lot.'

'And the girl – Katherine, is it? – Frank, that was a terrible business. Nothing worse.' He broke off a piece of bread and wiped it round his plate. 'Coping, is she?'

'I'm not sure.'

'And you?'

Elder said nothing.

Framlingham leaned forward. 'All this kowtowing to civilised values and decency is all very well, but, cases like that, left to me, the bastard would've been given a taste of his own medicine and then sent for the long drop off some nice corded rope.'

The waiter, a sprig of holly pinned to his red waistcoat, had reappeared, smiling, at the table.

Oil ran down between Framlingham's fingers. 'Calves' liver's good, Frank. Sage and butter, nice and simple.'

Elder nodded, looked quickly down the menu and plumped for lamb cutlets with rosemary, saute potatoes and spinach.

'You'll have some wine, Frank? Red or white?'

'Red?'

Framlingham ordered a bottle of Da Luca Primitivo and some mineral water and for ten or so minutes they allowed themselves to gossip about half-remembered colleagues. Framlingham's liver leaked blood, pink across the plate.

'What I have to wonder, Frank, this current business, Maddy Birch, why it matters so much? To you, I mean.'

'I've told you, we worked together.'

'Come on, Frank, it's got to be more than that.'

Elder shook his head. 'I knew her, liked her. That was all.'

Framlingham poured more wine. 'More than fifteen years ago. Around the time Katherine was born, a little after? You were tupping her, Frank, no great disgrace. Times like that, it happens. Feeling a little trapped, I shouldn't wonder. You looked around and there she was. Young, available I dare say.'

'It wasn't like that.'

Framlingham laughed. 'For Christ's sake, Frank, spare us the holier-than-thou. We've all been there. If we're lucky seen it slip between the sheets and out of sight, no one any the wiser.'

Elder bit into a piece of lamb. Well done was what he'd asked for and well done was what he'd got.

'Admit it, Frank. You had her. Once, twice, half a hundred times. That doesn't matter.'

'No.'

Framlingham read the seriousness in his face.

'It's worse then. You didn't have her, Frank. Just wanted to. Fancied her and most likely she fancied you. But somehow you let her get stuck inside your head. She was the one you pictured when you were screwing your wife or jerking off in the shower.'