‘Peel’s people?’

‘His lawyer. His friends.’

‘So let them agitate.’

‘I would. However I don’t know if you’ve noticed recently, but we are living in the age of recrimination. You step on a crack in the pavement and there’ll be an inquiry about it.’

‘Well, good luck to them,’ Vos says. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’

‘Good, because the IPCC are sending an investigator to ask you a few questions.’

Vos shakes his head. ‘You’ve got to be fucking joking, guv’nor! I was already cleared by the internal inquiry.’

‘At this stage they’re only interested if there’s a case to answer,’ Anderson says. Then her expression hardens. ‘Which is why you’re going to play this absolutely by the book, Theo. You’re not going to give Peel’s lawyer or the IPCC any leverage. I will expect you to cooperate fully with the investigator. And if I was you, I would keep your visits to the counsellor to yourself. It won’t look good if they find out the last person to see Jack Peel alive has an antisocial personality disorder.’

‘Borderline,’ he reminds her. Then he throws his hands in the air. ‘Dah, this is bullshit.’

‘Do you want me to suspend you?’

‘Suspend me?’

‘Because believe me there are people with bigger hat badges than me at headquarters who would like that very much.’

‘But that’s precisely what Peel’s “people” want!’

‘No, Theo, they want the moral high ground. And I don’t give a damn how inconvenient it is for you or this department or the brass, I am not prepared to give them it.’ She sighs and sits back in her chair. ‘You know as well as I do that Jack Peel was always going to come back and bite you in the arse sooner or later.’

Vos picks at the stitching on his shoe like a recalcitrant child. ‘How long will this last? The squad’s a man down as it is.’

‘I’m aware of that. I’ve just had the latest medical report on Vic Entwistle. It doesn’t look good.’

‘Does the IPCC know this?’ Vos says venomously.

‘The point is, Theo, with Bernice Seagram stepping up to acting DS, you’re going to need a replacement in the ranks.’

‘So give me someone from one of the other squads.’

‘I wish I could. But they’re all stretched tighter than the Chief Constable’s wallet.’

‘So what do you suggest, guv’nor?’ Vos says drily. ‘Britain’s Got Talent?’

‘I was thinking more along the lines of a spot of mentoring. A bright young DC from the sticks who is looking for a more exciting life.’

A deep, ugly silence descends on Anderson’s office once again. ‘Now you are fucking joking.’

‘Mentoring, Theo, not babysitting.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘You really are a miserable bastard,’ Anderson says. ‘Is it so long since you were wet behind the ears?’

‘I was only saying. Who is he?’

‘There are a couple of candidates I’ve got in mind.’

‘With respect, guv’nor, the Bug House is hardly the place for some greenhorn from the sticks.’

Anderson smiles thinly. ‘You never know, you might enjoy it. A captive audience to regale with all your old war stories.’

‘I’m forty-two years old, guv. You make it sound like I’m an old man.’

‘The average age of a detective constable on this force is twenty-five,’ Anderson points out. ‘As far as they’re concerned, you are.’

TWO

Vos lives in a thin three-storey town house at St Peter’s Basin, an inlet of the Tyne just east of the city centre that was optimistically developed as a marina during the height of the housing boom. The house has no garden, but screwed to the balcony outside Vos’s bedroom is a rectangular mat of artificial grass that he inherited from the previous owner, a bonds trader with one of the London finance houses that set up shop in Newcastle at around the same time as they were building St Peter’s Basin. From here the bonds trader used to fire golf balls across the river with a 3-wood, attempting to reach the Gateshead side. Apparently it helped to relieve the stress of his high-pressure job, although it could not save his job, which he lost when the finance house went bust. Vos keeps the mat because he enjoys the feel of the bristles on his bare feet when he drinks his morning coffee or his late-night whisky. He’s installed an old foldaway picnic chair and he can spend hours sitting there like some mild eccentric, staring out at the empty marina.

It’s Monday, a crisp autumn morning today in contrast to what has felt like a month of unbroken drizzle. On the street below a gang of teenage kids dawdle idly past on their way to school. Vos watches them, calculating that it is maybe thirty feet from the balcony to the pavement – about half the distance Jack Peel fell. He can see Peel’s florid face now, the arrogance draining from it as he realizes that there are just two of them, that nobody else is coming, and that Vos cannot be bought.

‘Oi, mister!’

One of the kids, scrawny and tousle-haired, with the arse of his jeans slung down to his knees, looks up and flicks Vos the bird, much to the amusement of his friends. Vos grins back and throws the dregs of his coffee over the little bastard. Then he turns to the sliding door leading to his bedroom and enters the house.

‘What is it with jeans that make it look like you’ve shit yourself?’

Alex Vos looks up from his breakfast and stares at his father across the kitchen. ‘What?’

‘Is it cool?’ Vos asks him. ‘Have I missed something? I’m genuinely baffled.’

Alex shrugs and digs his spoon into his bowl of cereal. ‘Speaks the man who buys his jeans from Asda.’

Vos stalks across to the sink and refills the kettle. ‘Yeah, well . . .’

‘And sits in a deckchair in his dressing gown,’ Alex continues. He picks up the remote and activates the DAB radio on the counter with a stabbing movement of his left hand. ‘Like someone from a psychiatric unit,’ he adds, sotto voce, for good measure.

Vos reaches over and yanks his son’s long, dark fringe. ‘You can get that cut as well, you bloody yob.’

They listen to the breakfast show until the presenter’s relentlessly upbeat jabber is drowned out by the roar of the kettle; then Alex puts his empty bowl in the dishwasher and goes upstairs while Vos spoons Nescafé into his mug and wonders how anyone can possibly eat muesli when there is a café no more than two hundred yards down the road that serves the finest bacon rolls in Christendom. Then the kettle clicks off and he refills the mug, stirring the contents absently as he listens to a fragment of a story on the 8 a.m. news bulletin about a row over queues at the airport – and he wonders, as he always does, what is really going on today, and what grim human drama has unfolded while the city slept.

*   *   *

In the bathroom, Vos stares at his face in the mirror. It is not a pleasant sight. He has clearly slept for several hours with his right cheek hard against the orthopaedic pillow, so that the loose skin around the eye has rippled upwards like a Shar Pei’s in a wind tunnel. When he opens his mouth and sticks out his tongue, it’s threadbare and there are hatched fissures at the tip – the result, the dentist says, of age, like the incipient gum disease festering between his increasingly snaggled teeth.

But then he can’t blame it all on age and decrepitude. The layer of khaki slime on his tongue is pretty much all down to the whisky he drank last night; the ivory hue to his teeth he can blame on excessive smoking. Yet it wasn’t a heavy one – three or four glasses of Grouse and a couple of Café Crème cigars – and what with the Astroturf against the soles of his bare feet and the view out over the marina, it had been a very pleasant evening, thank you very much.

‘Dad!’

‘What?’

‘Your phone’s ringing.’