“Bloody hell.” Longley had sunk into a chair, breathing heavily, while he took in the implications of this news.

“Did you inform the parents?” he asked eventually.

“You’ll have to check with Val, but I don’t think so, no. Mrs. Adams took off for the hospital before the search was competed, apparently, leaving the cleaner to lock up the house. They probably don’t know yet.”

“A small amount, you say?”

Thackeray had reached into his desk drawer and handed Longley a plastic evidence bag containing some screwed up paper which Longley opened and sniffed suspiciously.

“Not much doubt about that then? Though you’d have difficulty making a charge of dealing stick,” he said.

“Maybe.” Thackeray did not try to hide the challenge in his eyes and eventually Longley looked away.

“I’ll keep this,” the superintendent said, putting the bag into an inside pocket. “If the lad snuffs it, it won’t have any evidential value any road, will it? If not, we can think about what to do about it when he’s in a fit state to be interviewed. Right, Michael?”

“Sir,” Thackeray had said, wondering what sort of a slippery slope Longley was threatening to slide down and determined he was not going to slide down it with him.

“A close friend, is he? Grantley Adams?” he ventured.

“He’s not a bloody friend of mine,” Longley said angrily. “Just a bloody acquaintance at the Lodge. But they’ve invited me to sit on this committee looking at the regeneration of the Heights, so I don’t want to queer our pitch there. It seems like a worthwhile thing for the Force to be doing, wouldn’t you say? Opportunities to build in security, consult on policing, community-minded, all that?”

“I’m sure it’s all of those things,” Thackeray conceded. “Though there’ve been more schemes to regenerate that estate than there’ve been modernisations of the Force. Pulling the whole lot down, like they said they would, might be a better bet.”

“Aye, well, that might be on the agenda, as I understand it. But never mind that. What about the bloody Carib Club? It might have been better to concentrate your efforts there, rather than going for a couple of respectable families who seem to be the victims rather than the villains in this mess, wouldn’t you say?”

“Perhaps,” Thackeray said. “Val Ridley and DC Sharif are down there now, as it goes.”

Only slightly deflated, Longley had departed, leaving Thackeray in a foul mood which was not improved by the mountain of paperwork which he tackled for the rest of the afternoon. According to the new management jargon, he was now Bradfield’s “crime manager” and it was not a job he thought particularly suited him. By five o’clock, with dusk settling over the square outside, he was sitting in his car deciding to make one last call before going home and it would be as unannounced as he had determined his officers’ raids had been earlier in the day.

Unannounced and unofficial.

The boss was in his office at Foreman Security Services when Thackeray arrived. With barely a nod of greeting, Barry Foreman crossed the room to the cocktail cabinet and waved a bottle of Scotch expansively in his visitor’s direction with a hand heavy with gold rings.

“You’re off duty by now, I take it?”

Thackeray shook his head, certain that the offer was intended to rile. Foreman was as tall as he was himself, though perhaps without the rugby-player’s breadth, but he dressed with a style and at a cost which Thackeray could only marvel at. If proof was needed that Foreman had interests which went far beyond the modest security company which was his only ostensible source of income, his vanity provided it. Those rings, the Italian suit, the hand-made leather loafers on which he padded across his thickly carpeted office, the silk tie that Thackeray knew he should recognise as the signature of some designer or other, all spoke of money and plenty of it. There was a new breed of criminal abroad - and the DCI had no doubt Foreman was a criminal although he had failed so far to prove it - computer literate and intelligent enough to keep well clear of the dirt that supported their lifestyle. While Thackeray assumed that it was the drug trade which funded Foreman’s extravagances, he admitted that it could just as easily be people trafficking, or some financial scam which bridged the gap between legitimate and illegitimate business worlds. He had trawled the man’s record with inexhaustible patience, wasting his own time as well as the police force’s, but Foreman had no criminal record and he could find no evidence apart from the vaguely circumstantial, to implicate him in any illegal activity.

Foreman was waiting for his answer, a faint smile on the thin lips, the eyes offering a chilly challenge, the bottle still poised.

“Not for me,” Thackeray said. Foreman shrugged and poured himself a large one.

“That little gypsy scrote with the shot-gun got sent down, I see,” he said as he dropped a couple of ice cubes into the drink and tasted it. “Didn’t even call me as a bloody witness in the end.” The faint note of complaint suggested that he would have enjoyed taking the stand.

“He pleaded guilty, but they don’t look kindly on fire-arms offences,” Thackeray said. “How are Karen and the babies?” The two men had not met face-to-face since the day Foreman’s girlfriend and her twin girls had been besieged briefly by the boy with a shot-gun though the security boss had seldom been far from Thackeray’s thoughts. Foreman shrugged again and Thackeray wondered if he had imagined the flash of anger in his pale eyes.

“She buggered off, didn’t she? Took the kids with her. I can’t say I was sorry. How am I ever going to know who’s kids they are?”

“You didn’t have the tests done then?” The paternity of Foreman’s children had been thrown into doubt by the doctor who had helped the couple conceive them.

“She wouldn’t have it, would she? Scared of the results, I dare say,” Foreman dropped heavily into his swivel chair behind an extensive desk unsullied by paperwork and waved Thackeray into an armchair. “Stupid cow.”

Thackeray watched as Foreman sipped his drink. The heavy, bland face gave nothing away and as Foreman told it there was nothing to give. But Thackeray had never glimpsed a spark of humanity behind those normally cold blank eyes.

“So what can I do for you, Chief Inspector?” Foreman asked eventually.

“The Carib Club,” Thackeray said. “Do you look after the doors for them?”

“Nope,” Foreman said. “Nowt to do with me that place. They make their own arrangements, as far as I know. Keep themselves to themselves, those black lads, don’t they? I heard they had a bit of trouble the other night. Just shows, they might be better off using FSS, mightn’t they?”

“You must hear a lot of things in your line of work,” Thackeray said mildly. “What about the supply of Ecstasy? Your lads hear anything about that lately?”

“At the Carib? Or generally?”

“Whatever?”

“There’s a lot of it about, I’m told. Kids can’t have a night out without it. I’d tan their backsides for them if they were mine. As to where they get it, I can’t help you there, Mr. Thackeray. As I think I’ve said to you before, I know nowt about the supply of drugs, and if any of my lads give me as much as a whiff that they’re dealing they’re out. Ecstasy, hash, crack, Charlie, I’ll not tolerate it. More than the company’s reputation’s worth.”

Thackeray smiled with as much sympathy as he could muster for a man who, in his book, had a reputation so fragile that it might shatter if a breath of wind disturbed it. But it had to be the right breath of wind and so far he had not managed to generate even an echo of the hurricane he believed Foreman and all his works deserved.

“You’ll keep me informed if you hear anything,” he said. “Anythmg at all.”

“Of course, Mr. Thackeray,” Foreman said, knocking his drink back and getting to his feet. “Anything I can do to help.”