‘I’m impressed. I thought men weren’t supposed to be any good at multitasking.’

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read,’ Mayson says.

Ptolemy stands and saunters across to his desk. She sees that he appears to have three computer screens working simultaneously, as well as a flimsy laptop balanced on a stack of case files. ‘So what have you got?’

‘Nothing. Yet. But then it’s hardly likely that Mr Gul entered the country using his own passport. And we are only assuming that he flew into Newcastle. Or indeed that he flew in at all.’

A soft ding announces the arrival of an email in Mayson’s inbox, and with that the dialogue is over. Ptolemy returns to her desk, to Severin’s paperwork, a seemingly never-ending series of car registrations and logbooks.

And now Mayson Calvert has started humming again.

EIGHT

Paralysed from the chest down, Vic Entwistle lies in an intensive-care ward while a heart monitor pulses and peaks silently on a wheeled trolley by the bed and fluid from his chest cavity is siphoned into a plastic container. The noise reminds Vos of someone sucking the last dregs of Coke from a paper cup with a straw. The lower half of Entwistle’s waxen face is obscured by the fogged mask over his nose and mouth. He turns his head slightly so that he can see Vos and rolls his eyes in almost good-humoured resignation at his predicament.

‘Got some good news for you, mate,’ Vos says, pulling up a chair next to the bed.

Entwistle raises his hand and pushes the mask to one side. ‘Oh yeah?’ They have only recently removed the tracheal intubator from his throat and his voice is still little more than a rasping whisper.

‘There’s a guy on ward six who wants to buy your slippers.’

Entwistle smiles. ‘Fuck you, Theo.’

‘Actually I just talked to the nurse. She says they’ll be moving you out of intensive care in the next couple of days. And I got Alex to look up C7 spinal injuries on the internet. Apparently the paralysis can sometimes be temporary. The nerves in the spinal cord are traumatized and—’

Entwistle raises his hand again, this time to stop Vos from talking. ‘The good thing about the doctors in here is that they don’t bullshit you,’ he says. ‘I’m fucked, mate. My dancing days are well and truly over.’

‘Jesus Christ, Vic—’

‘You got to look on the bright side,’ Entwistle says. ‘They brought a young kid in here yesterday who’d come off his Kawasaki at a hundred miles an hour. Poor bastard’s dead from the neck down. At least I can still wipe my own arse. How is Alex anyway?’

‘He’s OK – in a nerdy sort of way. I’m still waiting to catch him staggering home pissed or smoking dope in his bedroom like any normal teenager. What was Jules like when she was sixteen?’

‘The same.’

‘What’s wrong with kids these days? They’re all so fucking serious.’

‘I know, I know. Pass me a glass of water, will you?’

Vos fills a plastic cup from a jug on the night stand.

‘How’s the Ahmed Doe investigation going?’ Entwistle asks. ‘Well, we’ve got a name.’

Vos fills him in on all the details. Entwistle listens without interruption, and even as he’s speaking Vos feels a sudden ache in his chest that his friend and colleague is not part of the case, that he’s trapped in his hospital bed, when he should be marching around the Bug House, his mind whirring as he processes all the details of Okan Gul’s murder.

‘There’s something else,’ he says. ‘Gul was a frequent flyer. Mayson’s isolated CCTV footage of him going through border control at Newcastle Airport on six separate occasions, each time using the same false passport.’

A low whistle. ‘Six visits in as many months. And we still don’t know who he was visiting?’

The use of the word ‘we’ is not lost on Vos. ‘The usual wall of silence,’ he says.

‘Well somebody killed him,’ Entwistle says. ‘We find out who hung him from that bridge, we find out who he was working with.’

‘I know, I know. But I’m getting a bad feeling about this, Vic. You see, I can’t think of one single Newcastle villain that a mob like the KK would even think twice about doing business with.’

‘That’s not very patriotic.’

‘Maybe not, but it’s true. We’ve shaken up Timmy Wok and Ma Breaker and half a dozen more of Tyneside’s finest, and when we’ve told them about the Turks they’ve all looked as if we’re talking about space aliens. Even Father Meagher hasn’t got a clue.’

‘So what are you thinking?’

‘I’m thinking that we might just be navel-gazing,’ Vos says. ‘That it’s bigger than we thought. In other words—’

‘You haven’t got a clue.’

Vos laughs. ‘Well at least you can see nothing changes in the Bug House.’

‘Yeah, but we get our man in the end, don’t we?’

‘That’s the theory.’

Entwistle reaches out his hand and grips Vos’s arm. ‘It’s good to see you, mate. I’m going fucking mad in here. I’d swop that morphine feed for a fix of gossip any day. What’s new in the BH?’

‘We’ve got a new girl,’ Vos says, instantly cursing himself for doing so.

Entwistle smiles. ‘A replacement, you mean?’

‘Temporary,’ Vos says. ‘She’s a nice kid. I’ve got her doing leg-work for Sam Severin on the car-ringing job. Breaking her in gently.’

Entwistle raises one eyebrow. ‘Tits?’

‘I never noticed, Vic.’

‘ ’Course you did.’

‘I’m old enough to be her father, for Christ’s sake.’

‘That’s no longer a valid excuse,’ Entwistle says. ‘You’re old enough to be the father of any girl under the age of twenty-six.’

‘Whatever. If you’re interested, I suggest you ask Phil Huggins’s opinion. In any case, she’s married.’

‘You’re no fun any more. So what else is fresh?’

‘I’m under investigation by the IPCC,’ he says. ‘I spent all day yesterday locked in mortal combat with some fat ex-superintendent from South Wales.’

Entwistle frowns. ‘IPCC? What for?’

‘Peel’s people want an inquiry.’

‘Into what?’

‘They’re still claiming I pushed him off that fire escape.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’

‘That’s what I said. But Anderson wants to play it by the book. Hence the grilling. It’s nothing. They’re just fishing to see if there’s any grounds for a full inquiry. But I thought I’d tip you off in case a fat Welshman comes calling.’

‘Let him come,’ says Entwistle. ‘Even if you did push Peel off the fire escape, I wouldn’t tell him. Good riddance to bad rubbish if you ask me. Have they fixed a trial date for Terry Loomis yet?’

‘They’re waiting until they’re sure you’re fit to testify.’

‘Tell them I’m ready, Theo. I want to look that bastard in the face when they send him down.’

Vos nods, but he knows that Entwistle won’t be giving evidence against the man who paralysed him for a while yet. He looks gaunt, shrunken somehow, and there is an ominous yellowish tinge to his skin – the result, the doctors say, of the damage to his internal organs that nearly killed him.

‘Hey, Dad.’

Entwistle’s drawn face brightens as his daughter Julia enters the room. ‘Hey, sweetheart!’

Vos stands and hugs the girl – although she’s no longer a girl. Julia Entwistle is twenty-five years old and about to be married. It seems only minutes ago that he and Vic were getting good and drunk at her head-wetting party. ‘Good to see you, Jules,’ he says.

‘And you, Uncle Theo,’ she says, and although she is smiling as if everything is fine and under control, Vos feels her fingers digging into him as if she daren’t let him go.

It’s late when Alex Vos gets home. He opens the front door and hears the TV and sees lights on in the living room. His father is slumped in an armchair, snoring erratically, a whisky still gripped in his hand. The packet of Doritos he’s been eating has tipped off the armrest and spilled into his lap.