Stress? Of course he was suffering from stress. A life like this, how could it be anyway else? But fifty was something he did want to see. It wasn’t altogether off the cards that he and Eileen might want to start a family.

Terry lowered himself into the water gradually-none of those bravura dives off the pool edge for him-and began the first of thirty slow, laborious lengths. Not so very long from now he’d be back out and across the road, sitting in the market cafe with a strong tea and a sausage cob.

Resnick got into the station that morning late and less than happy. His own car was in for what might prove to be its last ever service and the Vauxhall he’d borrowed had recently been used for a spot of undercover observation and smelled of hastily bottled urine and too many Benson Kingsize. Halfway along Lower Parliament Street a corporation bus driver had ploughed into the back of a Burger King delivery truck and the consequent brouhaha had blocked the traffic both ways from the Theatre Royal to the Albert Hall and Institute.

‘Bit of a lie-in?’ Millington asked when Resnick finally pushed his way through the door to the CID room, the smile edging its way, ferret-like, from beneath the sergeant’s moustache. ‘Deserved.’

‘Last night’s files on my desk?’ Resnick asked, barely breaking stride en route to the partitioned-off section that was his office.

‘Likely need a bit of an update by now.’

‘Tea, Graham,’ Resnick said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cup of tea?’ Coffee was his preference, but experience had long since taught him that within the confines of the station the cup that cheers was the safer choice.

‘Kev,’ Millington called, head inclined towards the far corner of the room.

‘Boss?’ Telephone in hand, Kevin Naylor peered round from his desk.

‘When you’ve a minute, get kettle on, mash some more tea.’

Naylor sighed, spoke into the receiver, made a mark alongside the list of names and addresses on his desk and got to his feet. He glanced across at Lynn Kellogg as he passed, Lynn sitting impervious at her computer, strolling through the county data base detailing offenders with a penchant for carrying firearms with malicious intent. That’ll be the day, he thought, when anyone dares ask her to make the bloody tea in this team.

Leaning over the shuffle of folders and papers that covered his desk, Resnick scanned through the outline of the previous night’s events. Three men had been arrested and held in the cells overnight: two on charges of drunk and disorderly; the third, apparently sober, had driven his fibreglass-bodied invalid tricycle into a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise and attempted to run over his ex-lover, who was one of the customers.

There had been eleven burglaries reported from the Victorian splendours of the Park estate and seven more, all of them in the same short street, from the less salubrious east side of the Alfreton Road. Carl Vincent was out there now, checking some of these door to door, while Naylor was talking to other aggrieved homeowners on the phone.

All routine: it was the last entry in the night’s incident file which claimed most of Resnick’s attention. At eleven minutes past three a message had been received giving information of a burglary taking place at a television and electrical goods suppliers in Radford. The officers who had responded, PCs Mark McFarlane and Mary Duffy, had initially reported seeing no obvious signs of forced entry, but in the narrow alley at the rear had run into a gang of four men armed with a sawn-off shotgun, iron bars and a long-handled sledgehammer. A mercy, Resnick thought, that the shotgun had not been brought into play, though he was by no means certain the officers would have agreed. Mark McFarlane was in Queen’s with a suspected fractured skull and Mary Duffy was in an intensive care bed in the same hospital, a splintered rib having pierced her lung. Such descriptions as they had been able to give of their assailants were necessarily brief and incomplete-balaclavas and coveralls, boots and gloves-it had been dark in the alley and McFarlane’s torch had been smashed early in the struggle.

Resnick snapped open the door from his office. ‘Graham…’

‘On its way. Kev, what you doing with that tea?’

‘This pair in hospital,’ Resnick said, ‘when did we last get a report?’

‘Not above half-hour back. No change.’

Resnick nodded. ‘Any list yet of what was taken?’

‘I’ve called the owner twice,’ Millington said, handing Resnick his favourite Notts County mug. ‘Promised it within the hour.’

‘Get on to them again, Graham. Sitting on it this long, likely all they’re busying themselves with is massaging the totals for the insurance. If they keep stalling, maybe you should get down there yourself.’

Millington nodded, right.

‘Sir,’ Lynn said, swivelling at her desk. ‘I’ve got a print-out of likely candidates for carrying the shotgun. Local, anyhow.’

‘Good. Cross-check with the information officer at Central, might be a body or two worth pulling to get things started. Let me know how it’s going when I get back.’ Resnick took a couple of swallows at his tea and set it down. ‘I’m off out to the hospital, take a look at the wounded, see if anything’s jogged their memory.’ He hoped the traffic had died down and that Duffy and McFarlane would be up to talking to him when he arrived.

He was hoping in vain. McFarlane had lost consciousness again by the time Resnick got to his side and all that Mary Duffy could tell him through bruised lips was that one of their attackers had seemed taller than the rest, two or three inches over six foot, and another might have been stockier and shorter than the other two.

‘Voices?’ Resnick asked. ‘Accents?’

Quietly, Duffy began to cry. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry.’

Resnick patted her hand and hoped she wouldn’t notice when he glanced at his watch.

Terry Cooke collected his tea and roll from the counter and went to his normal seat by the window. Across Gedling Street, the stalls of the open market were attracting a slow scuffle of elderly shoppers, collars turned up against the keenness of the wind. He watched as a lean, slope-shouldered figure, white haired, turned away from where he had been buying what looked like a couple of pounds of potatoes, a few carrots and onions, and crossed towards the cafe.

Like Terry, Ronnie Rather was a creature of routine. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he would push his olive-green shopping trolley sedately from stall to stall, before treating himself to tea and toast and a small cigar that burned like anthracite and had a similar flinty smell. On alternate Fridays, he splashed out on beans as well.

Since Ronnie had been adhering to this particular routine longer than Terry himself, and had made a habit, when it was vacant, of sitting at the window table, Terry could hardly object when-as today-the old man parked up his trolley against the table edge and joined him.

‘Ron.’

Terry.’

There would be no more said until Ronnie had cut his slices of toast into thin strips-soldiers, Terry’s mum would have called them, when she had been readying them for the young Terry to dip into his boiled egg-which Ronnie would then sprinkle with salt before chewing methodically. Two or three pieces despatched into the gurgles and groans of Ronnie’s antique digestive system and Terry’s breakfast companion would lean forward across the table, resting on one elbow, and engage him in conversation.

Which usually meant, as was the way with those old jossers well above the pensionable age, talking about the dim and distant past when a pint of beer was a pint of beer and the sound of a horse-drawn cart approaching along the road outside was enough to send every self-respecting householder running for his dustpan and broom. Or, in Ronnie Rather’s case, when there was a dance hall on every corner, each of them keeping a dozen or more musicians in fulltime employment, and when names like Joe Loss and Jack Hylton were enough to quicken the pulse and set up a tremble at the back of the knees.