As she crested the brow and saw the next hill unfurling for a mile ahead of her, and wide open farmland to either side broken by just a few solitary trees and mesh fences, she could see no sign of Nero. A strong breeze was blowing, bending the rape and the long green wheat sheaves. She cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted, ‘NERO! Come on, boy. NERO!’

After a few moments she saw a wide ripple in the rape, something zigzagging through it – Nero seemed incapable of ever running in a straight line. Then he broke cover, and came bounding towards her, holding something white and dangly in his mouth.

A rabbit, she thought at first, and hoped at least the poor thing was dead. She couldn’t bear it when he brought a live, wounded one and plopped it proudly at her feet, wriggling and screeching in fright, which he was fond of doing.

‘Come on, boy, what’s that you’ve got there? Drop! Drop!’

Then her own mouth dropped.

A shiver rippled all the way through her as she took one nervous step forward, staring down at the motionless white object.

Then she began to scream.

Roy Grace did not enjoy holding press conferences. But he was well aware the police were paid public servants, and therefore the public had a right to be kept informed. It was the spin that journalists put on everything that he hated. It seemed to him that journalists weren’t interested in informing the public; that their job was to sell newspapers or attract viewers or listeners. They wanted to take news and slant it into stories, the more sensational the better.

And if there wasn’t anything sensational in the story, then why not have a pop at the police themselves? Few things grabbed the public’s attention better than a whiff of police negligence, racism or heavy-handedness. Car chases going wrong had been a particular hobby horse in recent years, especially if members of the public were injured or killed by reckless police driving.

Like yesterday, when two suspects being chased in a stolen car had crashed off a bridge and drowned in a river.

Which was why he was here now, standing in the Briefing Room, facing a open-centred rectangular table with not enough chairs for all the press present, his back to a large, smart, curved board bearing an artistic display of five police badges on a blue background, with the www.crimestoppers.co.uk number printed prominently beneath each of them.

He guessed there were about forty media people crammed in here – newspaper, radio and television reporters, photographers, cameramen and sound recordists – most of them familiar, among them some young fresh-faced ones working for the local press and stringing for the nationals, hoping for their big break, and some old, weary ones just waiting to get out of here and into a pub.

Flanking him, more to show that the police were taking this seriously than to actually contribute much to the conference, was the Assistant Chief Constable, Alison Vosper, a handsome but hard-looking woman of forty-four with blonde hair cropped short, standing in for the Chief, Jim Bowen – away at a conference – and Grace’s immediate superior, Gary Weston, the Chief Superintendent.

Weston was a relaxed-looking thirty-nine-year-old Manchester man with charismatic charm, with whom Grace had been mates when they were both beat coppers, and they remained good friends now. Although almost the same age as Grace, Weston had played the politics, cultivated influential friends, his eyes firmly set on a chief constable career path – and with his abilities, maybe even the top job at the Met, Grace thought frequently with a tinge of admiration but no envy.

Being politically astute, Gary Weston was keeping quiet today, letting Roy Grace do all the talking, seeing whether the Detective Superintendent was going to dig himself even deeper into the murky brown stuff.

An acidic young female reporter whom none of the police officers had seen before got her question in: ‘DS Grace, I understand that a woman was injured in a car accident in Newhaven, then an elderly gentleman was injured in an accident on the Brighton bypass, and a few minutes later a police officer was knocked off his motorbike. Can you explain your reasons for permitting the chase to continue?’

‘The accident in Newhaven took place before the police began pursuit,’ Grace responded, choosing his words carefully. ‘The accused persons hijacked a Land Rover immediately following this accident. They then rammed a Toyota saloon driven by an elderly gentleman in a tunnel and hijacked his vehicle. We knew that at least one of the accused was armed and dangerous, and that an innocent member of the public’s life depended on us apprehending them, and I took the view that the public were more endangered by letting them go, which is why I made the decision to keep them in sight.’

‘Even though that ended in their deaths?’ she went on.

Her tone infuriated him, and he had to hold back the very strong urge to swear at her, to tell her the two who had died were monsters, that drowning in a muddy river was better justice for all the people they’d wronged and harmed and killed than being given some pathetic jail sentence by a bleeding-heart liberal judge. But he also had to be very careful not to give the assembled company something they could twist into a sensational headline.

‘The cause of their deaths will be established in due course by an inquest,’ he said, far more calmly than he felt.

His response provoked an angry murmur, a flurry of hands in the air and about thirty questions all at once. Glancing at the clock, relieved to see the minute hand had clicked forward, he stood firm. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that’s all we have time for today.’

Back in his small, almost brand new office, in the huge, recently refurbished two-storey art deco building which had originally been built in the 1950s as a hospital for contagious diseases and which now housed the headquarters of Sussex CID, Grace sat down in his swivel chair. Like almost every item of furniture in the room it was almost fresh out of its box, and didn’t yet feel familiar or comfortable.

He wriggled around in the chair for a moment, played with the toggle levers, but it still wasn’t great. He had liked his old office down at Brighton police station much better. The room had been bigger, the furniture beat-up, but the place was in the centre of town and had a buzz. These new premises were on an industrial estate on the edge of the city and felt soulless. Miles of long, silent, freshly carpeted and painted corridors, office after office filled with new furniture, and no canteen! Nowhere to get a cuppa apart from a do-it-yourself or a bloody vending machine. Nowhere to even get a sandwich – you had to walk across the road to the Asda hypermarket. So much for design committees.

He stared fondly for a moment at his prized collection of three dozen vintage cigarette lighters hunched together on the ledge between the front of his desk and the window, and reflected that for weeks his work schedule had prevented him from pursuing one of his favourite pastimes – something he used to share with his wife, Sandy, and in which he now found great solace – trawling antique markets and car boot sales in search of old gadgets.

Dominating the wall behind him was the large, round wooden clock that had been a prop in the fictitious police station in The Bill, which Sandy had bought in happier times at an auction, for his twenty-sixth birthday.

Mounted in glass beneath it was a seven-pound, six-ounce brown trout he’d picked up at a stall in the Portobello Road. Its location beneath the clock was no accident – it enabled him to use a tired old joke when briefing new detectives about patience and big fish.

The rest of the floor space was occupied by a television and video player, a circular table, four chairs and piles of loose paperwork, his holdall containing his crime-scene kit, and small towers of files.