Praise for Beneath the Bleeding:

‘McDermid’s previous novels have set the bar vertiginously high but the latest outing for criminal profiler Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan has all the craft, panache and pace that we have come to expect from this outstanding writer

… Vintage stuff: unplug the phone, lock the door and prepare to read in a sitting’

Guardian

‘Another intelligent and absorbing offering from one of crime fiction’s most consistent performers’

The Times

‘If Rankin is the king of British crime, Val McDermid is undoubtedly the queen … Hill and Jordan are compelling creations and their encounters fairly crackle. McDermid is a consummate plotter so there are pleasing twists and turns in this first-rate story’

Observer

‘McDermid is at the peak of her murderous craft … on the page, McDermid makes criminal profiler Hill every bit as engaging as [Robson Green]’

Daily Mirror

‘The Queen of serial killers in this country keeps her end up … few can scoop Val on throat-clutching narrative but at the same time she is marvellous on the sub-plot details … I am intrigued by the first appearance of Hill’s monster mother – more of her please’

Daily Mail

‘Peerless … one of the world’s finest crime writers, McDermid is currently at the top of her game’

Glasgow Herald

‘Very good … McDermid is an old hand at making things believable’

Irish Examiner

‘The novel opens explosively … the momentum doesn’t slacken … this is a book which works on more than one level. It fulfils the criteria of a very good contemporary crime novel in terms of excitement, topicality and its sense of authenticity. but it delivers more than this: the complex and unpredictable relationship between Hill and Jordan lies at the heart of the series and is one of its greatest strengths. McDermid’s writing gets better and better’

Spectator

‘McDermid’s usual ingredients of fear, revulsion, ingenuity and heroism … this book is all the more gripping because some holds are barred’

Literary Review

‘McDermid is up there with the best’

Good Reading

VAL McDERMID

Beneath the Bleeding

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2007

Copyright © Val McDermid 2008

Lines from Four Quartets: ‘East Coker’ by T.S. Eliot are reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

FSC is a non-profit international organisation established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests. Products carrying the FSC label are independently certified to assure consumers that they come from forests that are managed to meet the social, economic and ecological needs of present and future generations.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780007243280

Ebook edition SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007279401

Version: 2018-07-30

This one is for the members of the wedding, who helped to create the best of memories.

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

From Four Quartets: ‘East Coker’

T S Eliot

Contents

Praise Title Page Copyright Dedication Friday List 2 Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Midnight List 1 Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday List 3 Chapter Three Months Later Acknowledgements About the Author Series Title About the Publisher

Friday

The phases of the moon have an inexplicable but incontrovertible effect on the mentally ill. Ask any psychiatric nurse. For them, it’s a truth universally acknowledged. None of them volunteers for overtime around the time of the full moon. Not unless they are absolutely desperate. It’s also a truth that makes the behavioural scientists uneasy; it’s not something that can be laid at the door of an abusive childhood or an inability to relate socially. It’s an external rhythm that no amount of treatment can override. It drags the tides and it pulls the deranged out of their hampered orbits.

The internal dynamics of Bradfield Moor Secure Hospital were as susceptible to the undertow of the full moon as its name suggested. According to some of its staff, Bradfield Moor was a warehousing facility for those too dangerously crazy to walk free; to others, it was a haven for minds too fragile for the rough and tumble of life on the outside; and to the rest, it was a temporary refuge that offered the hope of a return to a loosely defined normality. The third group was, unsurprisingly, heavily outnumbered and heartily despised by the other two.

That night, it wasn’t enough that the moon was full. It was also subject to a partial eclipse. The milky shadows of the lunar surface gradually metamorphosed through sickly yellow to dark orange as the earth moved between its satellite and the sun. For most of those observing the eclipse, it possessed a mysterious beauty, provoking awe and admiration. For Lloyd Allen, one of Bradfield Moor’s less grounded inmates, it provided proof absolute of his conviction that the last days were at hand and thus his duty was to bring as many to his maker as he could. He had been hospitalized before he had achieved his goal of spilling as much blood as possible so that the souls of its owners might ascend more easily to heaven at the imminent second coming. His mission burned all the brighter within him for being thwarted.

Lloyd Allen was not a stupid man and this made the task of his keepers that much harder. The psychiatric nurses were well versed in low cunning and found it relatively easy to head off at the pass. It was much harder to spot the machinations of those who were deranged but smart. Recently, Allen had devised a method of avoiding taking his medication. The more experienced nurses were wise to tricks of this sort and knew how to subvert them, but the newly qualified, like Khalid Khan, still lacked the necessary canniness.

On the night of the full moon, Allen had managed to avoid taking both previous doses of the chemical cosh that Khan believed he had administered. By the time the eclipse began to be visible, Allen’s head was filled with a low thrumming mantra. ‘Bring them to me, bring them to me, bring them to me,’ echoed continuously inside his brain. From his room, he could see a corner of the moon, the prophesied sea of blood occluding its face. It was time. It really was time. Agitated, he clenched his fists and jerked his lower arms up and down every couple of seconds like a demented boxer raising and lowering his guard.

He turned to face the door and stumbled awkwardly towards it. He had to get out so he could complete his mission. The nurse would be here soon with his final medication for the night. Then God would give him the strength he needed. God would get him out of this room. God would show him the way. God knew what he had to do. He would bring them to Him. The time was ripe, the moon was bursting with blood. The signs were beginning and he had a task to fulfil. He was chosen, he was the road to salvation for the sinners. He would bring them to God.

The pool of light illuminated a small area on the top of a low-grade institutional desk. A file lay open, a hand holding a pen resting on one side of the page. In the background, Moby yearned plaintively for the spiders. The CD had been a gift, something Dr Tony Hill would never have chosen for himself. But somehow it had become an integral part of the after-hours work ritual.

Tony went to rub his gritty eyes, forgetting about his new reading glasses. ‘Ow,’ he yelped as the nose-pieces bit into his flesh. His little finger caught the edge of the rimless glasses, sending them spinning off his face to land askew on the file he’d been studying. He could picture the look of indulgent amusement the moment would have provoked on the face of Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan, the Moby donor. His distracted clumsiness had long been a standing joke between them.

The one thing she couldn’t tease or taunt him about was that he was still at his desk at half past eight on a Friday night. When it came to reluctance to leave the office until everything possible had been dealt with, she was at least his equal. If she’d been around she would have understood why he was still here, going over the brief he’d so painstakingly prepared for the Parole Board. A brief they’d chosen blithely to ignore when they’d released Bernard Sharples into the care of the Probation Service. No longer a danger to the public, his lawyer had persuaded them. A model prisoner who had co-operated with everything the authorities had asked of him. The very exemplar of remorse.

Well, of course Sharples had been a model prisoner, Tony thought bitterly. It was easy to behave when the objects of your desire were so far beyond your reach that even the most obsessed fantasist would struggle to conjure up anything remotely like temptation. Sharples would offend again, he knew it in his bones. And it would be his fault in part because he had failed to make his case strongly enough.

He retrieved his glasses and marked a couple of paragraphs with his pen. He could have, should have stated his case more firmly, left no cracks for the defence to slither through. He would have had to assert as fact what he knew to be conjecture based on years of working with serial offenders plus the gut feeling that came from reading between the lines of his interviews with Sharples. But there was no place for shades of grey in the Parole Board’s world of black and white. It seemed that Tony still had to learn that honesty was seldom the best policy when it came to the criminal justice system.

He pulled a pad of Post-It notes towards him but before he could scribble anything down, a noise from outside penetrated his office. He wasn’t generally disturbed by the miscellaneous noises that made up the soundtrack to life inside Bradfield Moor; the soundproofing was surprisingly effective, and besides, the worst of the anguish was generally acted out far away from the offices where people with degrees and status worked.

More noise. It sounded like a football match or a sectarian riot. Certainly more than he could reasonably ignore. Sighing, Tony stood up, tossing his glasses on the desk as he made for the door. Anything had to be better than this.

Not many people regarded a job at Bradfield Moor as a dream come true. But for Jerzy Golabeck it represented more than he had ever imagined possible growing up in Plock. Nothing much had happened in Plock since the Polish kings decamped in 1138. The only work to be had these days was in the petrochemical refineries where wages were pitiful and industrial disease a way of life. Jerzy’s narrow horizons had widened eye-poppingly when Poland had acceded to the European Union. He’d been one of the first to board a cheap flight from Krakow to Leeds/Bradford Airport and the prospect of a new life. From his perspective, minimum wage approximated a king’s ransom. And working with the inmates of Bradfield Moor wasn’t so different from dealing with a senile grandfather who thought Lech Walesa might still be the coming man.

So Jerzy had bent the truth and manufactured a level of experience of dealing with the mentally ill that bore little relationship to the reality of his past as a production line worker in the pickle-canning factory. So far, it hadn’t been an issue. The nurses and orderlies were more concerned with containment than treatment. They administered drugs and cleared up messes. Any attempts at cure or mitigation were left to doctors, psychiatrists, therapists of varying schools, and clinical psychologists. It appeared that nobody expected much more from Jerzy than that he turned up on time and didn’t shy away from the physical unpleasantnesses that cropped up every shift. That much he could manage with ease.

Along the way, he’d developed a shrewd eye for what was going on around him. Nobody was more surprised at that than he was. But there was no denying that Jerzy seemed to have an instinct for spotting when patients shifted away from the equilibrium that made Bradfield Moor possible. He was one of the few workers in the hospital who would ever have noticed anything amiss with Lloyd Allen. The problem was that he was confident enough by then to believe he could deal with it himself. He wasn’t the first twenty-four-year-old to have an inflated idea of his capabilities. Just one of the few who would die for it.

As soon as he entered Lloyd Allen’s room, the hair on Jerzy’s arms stood on end. Allen was standing in the middle of the cramped space, his big shoulders tensed. The fast flick of his eyes told Jerzy that either the medication had suffered a sudden and spectacular failure or Allen had somehow avoided taking it. Either way, it looked like the voices in his head were the only ones Allen was interested in listening to. ‘Time for your meds, Lloyd,’ Jerzy said, his voice deliberately offhand.

‘Can’t do that.’ Allen’s voice was a strained grunt. He rose slightly on the balls of his feet, his hands sliding over each other as if he were washing them. The muscles of his forearms danced and twitched.

‘You know you need them.’

Allen shook his head.

Jerzy mirrored the movement. ‘You don’t take your meds, I have to report it. Then it gets hard on you, Lloyd. That’s not how we want it to be, is it?’

Allen launched himself at Jerzy, his right elbow catching him under the breastbone and knocking the wind from him. As Jerzy doubled over, retching for air, Allen barged past, knocking him to the floor as he made for the door. In the doorway, Allen came to an abrupt halt then swung round. Jerzy tried to make himself look small and unthreatening, but Allen advanced all the same. He raised his foot and kicked Jerzy in the stomach, emptying his lungs in a dizzying explosion of pain. While Jerzy clawed at his gut, Allen calmly reached down and ripped his keycard from the clip at his waist. ‘I have to bring them to Him,’ he grunted, making for the door again.

Jerzy couldn’t stop the terrible convulsive groans as his body struggled for oxygen. But his brain was still working properly. He knew he had to get to the panic button in the hallway. Armed with Jerzy’s key, Allen could roam almost anywhere in the hospital. He could open the rooms of other inmates. It wouldn’t take long to free enough of his fellows to seriously outnumber the staff on duty at this time of the evening.

Coughing and gagging, strings of spittle trailing down his chin, Jerzy forced himself to his knees and shuffled closer to the bed. Clawing at the frame, he managed to drag himself to his feet. Clutching his guts, he stumbled into the hall. He could see Allen up ahead struggling to swipe the keycard through the reader mounted by the door that would release him into the main part of the building. You had to get the speed of the swipe just right. Jerzy knew that, but Allen, thankfully, did not. Allen thumped the reader and tried again. Swaying, Jerzy tried to cover the distance to the panic button as quietly as he could.

He wasn’t quiet enough. Something alerted Allen and he swung round. ‘Bring them to him,’ he roared, charging. His weight alone was enough to bring Jerzy’s weakened frame to the floor again. Jerzy wrapped his arms around his head. It was no defence. The last thing he felt was a terrible pressure behind his eyes as Allen stamped on his head with all his strength.

Opening his door brought Tony a sudden swell of volume. Voices shouting, swearing and screaming funnelled up the stairwell. The scariest thing about it was that nobody had pushed the emergency alarm. That suggested something so sudden and so violent that no one had had the chance to follow the procedures that were supposedly drummed into them from day one of their training. They were too busy trying to contain whatever was going on.

Tony hustled along the corridor towards the stairs, hitting the panic button as he went. A loud klaxon immediately blasted out. Christ, if you were crazy already, what would this do to your head? He was running by the time he reached the stairs but he slowed his pace enough to look down the stairwell to see what he could see.

Nothing, was the short answer. The raised voices seemed to be coming from the corridor off to the right, but they were distorted by the acoustics and the distance. Suddenly, there was the tinkle and crash of glass breaking. Then a shocking splinter of silence.

‘Oh, fuck,’ someone said clearly, disgust the apparent emotion behind the words. Then the shouting began again, the note of panic unmistakable. A scream, then the sound of scuffling. Without thinking about it, Tony had started down the stairs, trying to see what was going on.

As he rounded the final turn of the stairs, bodies spilled out of the corridor where the noise had come from. Two nurses were backing towards him, supporting a third man. An orderly, judging by the few areas of pale green scrubs left untouched by blood. They were leaving a smudged trail of scarlet behind as they scrambled backwards as fast as they could manage.

Carnage, Tony thought as a burly figure emerged from the corridor, swinging a fire axe in front of himself as if it were a scythe and he a grim reaper. His jeans and polo shirt were spattered with blood; the blade of the axe shed a fine spray with every swing. The burly man was intent on his prey, steadily pursuing them as they retreated. ‘Bring them to him. Nowhere to hide,’ he said in a low monotone. ‘Bring them to him. Nowhere to hide.’ He was gaining on them. Another couple of strides and the axe blade would be slicing through flesh again.

Even though the axeman wasn’t a patient of his, Tony knew who he was. He’d made a point of familiarizing himself with the files of any inmates considered capable of violence. Partly because they interested him, but also because it felt like a kind of insurance policy. Tonight, it looked like he was about to lose his no-claims bonus.

Tony stopped a few steps from the bottom of the staircase. ‘Lloyd,’ he called softly.

Allen didn’t break stride. He swung the axe again, in rhythm with his mantra. ‘Bring them to him. Nowhere to hide,’ he said, sweeping the blade inches from the nurses.

Tony took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. ‘This is not the way to bring them to him,’ he said loudly, with all the authority he could summon. ‘This is not what he wants from you, Lloyd. You’ve got it wrong.’

Allen paused, turning his head towards Tony. He frowned, puzzled as a dog tormented by a wasp. ‘It’s time,’ he snarled.

‘You’re right about that,’ Tony said, moving down a step. ‘It is time. But you’re going about it the wrong way. Now, put down the axe and we’ll figure out a better way of doing it.’ He tried to keep his face stern, not to reveal the fear curdling his stomach. Where the hell was the back-up team? He had no illusions about what he could do here. He could maybe hold Allen up long enough for the nurses and the wounded orderly to get clear. But good as he was with the deranged and the demented, he knew he wasn’t good enough to restore Lloyd Allen to anything like equilibrium. He doubted he could even get him to lower the weapon. He had to try, he knew that. But where the fuck was the cavalry?

Allen stopped swinging the axe through its long arc and raised it at an angle across his body like a baseball player preparing for the strike. ‘It’s time,’ he said again. ‘And you’re not him.’ And he launched himself across the gap between them.

He was so fast that all Tony could register was a slash of red and a glint of polished metal. Then a seam of pain exploded from the middle of his leg. Tony toppled like a felled tree, too shocked even to scream. Inside his head, a light bulb detonated. Then blackness.

List 2

Belladonna

Ricin

Oleander

Strychnine

Cocaine

Taxus Baccata

Sunday

Thomas Denby studied the chart again. He was puzzled. He’d diagnosed a severe chest infection when he’d first examined Robbie Bishop. He’d had no reason to doubt that diagnosis. He’d seen enough chest infections in the twenty years since he’d qualified and chosen to specialize in respiratory ailments. In the twelve hours since the footballer had been admitted, Denby’s team had been administering antibiotics and steroids according to the directions he’d given them. But there had been no improvement in Bishop’s condition. In fact, he had deteriorated to the point where the duty SHO had been prepared to risk wrath by summoning Denby from his bed. Mere House Officers didn’t do that to consultants unless they were very, very nervous.

Denby replaced the chart and gave the young man lying on the bed his casually professional smile, all teeth and dimples. His eyes, however, were not smiling; they were scanning Bishop’s face and his torso. The sweat of his fever had glued the hospital gown to his chest, revealing the outline of well-defined muscles currently straining to drag breath into his lungs. When Denby had first examined him, Bishop had complained of weakness, nausea and pain in his joints as well as the obvious difficulty in breathing. Spasms of coughing had doubled him over, their intensity bringing colour back to his pale face. The X-rays had shown fluid on his lungs; the obvious conclusion was the one that Denby had drawn.

Now, it was beginning to look as if whatever ailed Robbie Bishop was no ordinary chest infection. His heart rate was all over the place. His temperature had climbed a further degree and a half. His lungs were incapable of keeping his blood oxygen levels stable, even with the assistance of the oxygen mask. Now, as Denby watched, his eyelids fluttered and stayed shut. Denby frowned. ‘Has he lost consciousness before?’ he asked the SHO.

She shook her head. ‘He’s been mildly delirious because of the fever – I’m not sure how aware he’s been of where he is. But he’s been responsive until now.’

An insistent beeping kicked in, the screen revealing a new low in Bishop’s blood oxygen level. ‘We need to intubate,’ Denby said, sounding distracted. ‘And more fluids. I think he’s a little dehydrated.’ Not that that would explain the fever, or the cough. The SHO, galvanized by the instruction, hurried out of the small room that was the best Bradfield Cross Hospital could provide for those who required their privacy even in extremis. Denby rubbed his chin, wondering. Robbie Bishop was in peak condition; fit, strong and, according to his club doctor, he had been perfectly well after Friday’s training session. He’d missed Saturday’s game, diagnosed initially by the same club doctor as having some sort of flu bug. Now here he was, eighteen hours later, visibly deteriorating. And Thomas Denby had no idea why, nor how to make it stop.

It wasn’t a position he was accustomed to. He was, he knew, a bloody good doctor. A skilled diagnostician, a cunning and often inspired clinician, and a good enough politician to make sure his department’s needs were seldom frustrated by the bureaucrats. He pretty much sailed through his professional life, rarely given pause by the ailments his patients presented. Robbie Bishop felt like an affront to his talent.

As the SHO returned with the intubation kit and a couple of nurses, Denby sighed. He glanced at the door. On the other side, he knew, was Robbie Bishop’s team manager. Martin Flanagan had spent the night slumped in a chair next to his star player. His expensive suit was rumpled now, his craggy face rendered sinister by a scribble of stubble. They’d already gone head to head when Denby had insisted the pugnacious Ulsterman leave the room while the doctors consulted. ‘Do you know what that lad’s worth to Bradfield Victoria?’ Flanagan had demanded.

Denby had eyed him coldly. ‘He’s worth exactly the same to me as every other patient I treat,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t sit on the touchline telling you what tactics to employ. So let me do my job without interference. I need you to give my patient his privacy while I examine him.’ The manager had left, grumbling, but Denby knew he’d still be waiting, his face pinched and anxious, desperate to hear something that would contradict the deterioration he’d already witnessed.

‘When you’re done with that, let’s start him on AZT,’ he said to his SHO. There was nothing left to try but the powerful retroviral medication that might just give them pause enough to figure out what was wrong with Robbie Bishop.

Monday

‘Remind me again why I let you open that third bottle,’ Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan sighed, putting the car in gear and inching forward a few yards.

‘Because it was the first time you’ve graced us with a visit since we moved to the Dales and because I have to be in Bradfield this morning and you don’t have a proper spare room. So there was no point in driving back last night.’ Her brother Michael leaned forward to fiddle with the radio. Carol slapped his hand away.

‘Leave it be,’ she said.

Michael groaned. ‘Bradfield Sound. Who knew my life would come down to this? Local radio at its most parochial.’

‘I need to hear what’s happening on my patch.’

Michael looked sceptical. ‘You run the Major Incident Team. You’re affiliated to the British equivalent of the FBI. You don’t need to know if there’s a burst water main causing problems for traffic on Methley Way. Or that some footballer’s been carted off to hospital with chest problems.’

‘Hey, Mr IT. Wasn’t it you who taught me the “micro becomes macro” mantra? I like to know what’s happening at the bottom of the food chain because it sometimes provokes unexpected events at the other end. And he’s not just “some footballer”. He’s Robbie Bishop. Midfield general of Bradfield Victoria. And a local lad to boot. His female fans will be staking out Bradfield Cross as we speak. Possible public order issues.’

Michael subsided with a pout. ‘Whatever. Have it your own way, Sis. Thank god their reception doesn’t stretch far from the city. I’d have lost my mind if you’d made me listen to this all the way in.’ He rolled his head on his neck, wincing at the crackling it produced. ‘Haven’t you got one of those blue lights that you can slap on the car roof?’

‘Yes,’ Carol said, easing forward with the traffic flow, praying this time it would keep moving. She felt sweaty and faintly sick in spite of the shower she’d had less than an hour ago. ‘But I’m only supposed to use it in emergencies. And before you go there, no. This is not an emergency. This is just the rush hour.’

As she spoke, the clotted traffic suddenly began to flow. Within a couple of hundred yards, it was hard to figure out quite why it had taken twenty minutes to travel half a mile when now they were moving relatively smoothly.

Michael frowned slightly, studying his sister, then said, ‘So, Sis, how’s it going with Tony?’

Carol tried not to let her exasperation show. She thought she’d got away with it. A whole weekend with her parents, her brother and his partner without any of them mentioning that name. ‘It’s working out pretty well, actually. I like the flat. He’s a very good landlord.’

Michael tutted. ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

Carol sighed, edging in front of a Mercedes who blared his horn at her. ‘We probably saw more of each other when we were living on opposite sides of the city,’ she said.

‘I thought …’

Hands tight on the wheel. ‘You thought wrong. Michael, we’re a pair of workaholics. He loves his nutters and I’ve had a new unit to get up to speed. Not to mention trying to put Paula back together again,’ she added, her face tightening at the thought.

‘That’s a pity.’ The glance he gave her was critical. ‘Neither of you is getting any younger. If I’ve learned anything from being with Lucy it’s that life’s a lot easier when you share the nuts and bolts with somebody on the same wavelength. And I think you and Tony Hill are totally that.’

Carol risked a quick glance to check whether he was taking the piss. ‘The man who once kind of, almost, sort of, maybe thought you might be a serial killer? This is the man you think is on the same wavelength as me?’

Michael rolled his eyes. ‘Stop hiding behind the history.’

‘It’s not about hiding. History like ours, you need crampons and oxygen to get over it.’ Carol found a space in the traffic and edged to the kerb, hazard lights flashing. ‘This is the part where you run away,’ she said in a bad imitation of Shrek.

‘You’re dropping me here?’ Michael sounded mildly outraged.

‘It’ll take me ten minutes to get round to the front of the Institute,’ Carol said, leaning past him to point out of the passenger window. ‘If you cut through the new shopping arcade, you’ll be at your client meeting in three.’

‘God you’re right. We’ve only been away from the city for three months and already I’m losing the mental map.’ He put an arm across her shoulders, gave her cheek a dry kiss then climbed out of the car. ‘Speak to you in the week.’

Ten minutes later, Carol walked into Bradfield Police headquarters. In the short gap between dropping Michael off and leaving the lift on the third floor, where the team she thought of as the ragged misfits was based, she had made the shift from sister to police officer. The only element the two personae shared was the mild hangover.

She carried on down a corridor whose lavender and off-white walls were broken up by doors of plate glass and steel. Their central sections were frosted so it was hard to see any detail of what was going on behind them unless it was happening on the floor or dangling from the ceiling. The tarted-up interiors still reminded her of an advertising agency. But then, modern policing often seemed to have as much to do with image as it did with catching villains. Happily, she’d managed to keep herself as close to the sharp end as was possible for an officer of her rank.

She pushed open the door of 316 and stepped into the land of the dead and the damaged. This early on a Monday morning, the living were thin on the ground. DC Stacey Chen, the team’s IT wizard, barely glanced up from the pair of monitors on her desk, grunting something Carol took to be a greeting. ‘Morning, Stacey,’ Carol said. As she crossed to her office, Detective Sergeant Chris Devine stepped out from behind one of the long whiteboards that encircled their desks like covered wagons keeping the enemy at bay. Startled, Carol stopped in her tracks. Chris held her hands up in a placatory gesture.

‘Sorry, guv. Didn’t mean to freak you out.’

‘No harm done.’ Carol let her breath out in a sigh. ‘We really do need to get those see-through incident boards.’

‘What? Like they have on the telly?’ Chris gave a small snort. ‘Don’t see the point, myself. I’ve always thought they’re a proper bitch to read. All that background interference.’ She fell into step beside Carol as her boss made for the glassed-off cubicle that served as her office. ‘So what’s the latest on Tony? How’s he doing?’

It was, thought Carol, a funny way to put it. She gave a half-shrug and said, ‘As far as I know, he’s fine.’ Her tone was calculated to close the subject.

Chris swung around so she was walking backwards in Carol’s path, checking out her boss’s expression. Her eyes widened. ‘Oh my good god, you don’t know, do you?’

‘Don’t know what?’ Carol felt the clutch of panic in her stomach.

Chris put a hand on Carol’s arm and indicated her office with a jerk of her head. ‘I think we’d better sit down,’ she said.

‘Christ,’ said Carol, allowing herself to be led inside. She made for her chair while Chris closed the door. ‘I’ve only been in the Dales, not the North Pole. What the hell’s been going on? What’s happened to Tony?’

Chris responded to the urgency in her voice. ‘He was attacked. By one of the inmates at Bradfield Moor.’

Carol’s hands came up to her face, covering her cheeks and pushing her mouth into an O. She drew breath sharply. ‘What happened?’ Her voice was raised, almost a shout.

Chris ran a hand through her short salt-and pepper hair. ‘There’s no way to soften it, guv. He got in the way of a madman with a fire axe.’

Chris’s voice sounded as if it was coming from a long way off. Never mind that Carol had inured herself to sights and sounds that would have made most people whimper and gibber. When it came to Tony Hill, she had a unique vulnerability. She might choose not to acknowledge it consciously, but at moments like this, it altered everything. ‘What …?’ Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. ‘How bad is it?’

‘From what I heard, his leg’s pretty smashed up. He took it in the knee. Lost a lot of blood. It took a while for the paramedics to get to him, on account of there was a madman with an axe on the prowl,’ Chris said.

Bad though this was, it was far less than her imagination had managed to conjure in a matter of seconds. Blood loss and a smashed knee were manageable. No big deal, really, in the great scheme of things. ‘Jesus,’ Carol said, relief in her released breath. ‘What happened?’

‘What I heard was that one of the inmates overpowered an orderly, got his key off him, trampled his head to a bloody pulp then got into the main part of the hospital where he broke the glass and got the axe.’

Carol shook her head. ‘They have fire axes in Bradfield Moor? A secure mental hospital?’

‘Apparently that’s precisely why. It’s secure. Lots of locked doors and wire-reinforced glass. Health and Safety says you have to be able to get the patients out in the event of fire and a failure of the electronic locking systems.’ Chris shook her head. ‘Bollocks, if you ask me.’ She threw up her hands in the face of Carol’s admonitory expression. ‘Yeah, well. Better a few mad bastards burn than we get this kind of shit. One orderly dead, another one on the critical list whose internal organs are never going to be right again and Tony smashed up? I’d shed a few homicidal nutters to avoid that.’ Somehow, the sentiment sounded even worse in Chris’s strong Cockney accent.

‘It’s not an either/or, and you know it, Chris,’ Carol said. Even though her own gut reaction matched that of her sergeant, she knew it was emotion and not common sense talking. But these days, only the reckless and the heedless casually spoke their mind in the workplace. Carol liked her mavericks. She didn’t want to lose any of them because the wrong ears heard them sounding off, so she did her best to curb their excesses. ‘So how did Tony get caught up in it?’ she asked. ‘Was it one of his patients?’

Chris shrugged. ‘Dunno. Apparently he was the hero of the hour, though. Distracted the mad bastard enough for a couple of nurses to drag the injured orderly out of harm’s way.’

But not enough to save himself. ‘Why did nobody contact me? Who was our duty officer this weekend? Sam, wasn’t it?’

Chris shook her head. ‘It was supposed to be Sam, but he swapped with Paula.’

Carol jumped up and opened the door. Scanning the room, she saw DC Paula McIntyre hanging her coat up. ‘Paula? In here a minute,’ she called. As the young detective crossed the room, Carol felt the familiar wash of guilt. Not so long ago, she had put Paula in harm’s way and harm had come running. Never mind that it had been an officially sanctioned operation: Carol had been the one who had promised to protect Paula and had failed. The double whammy of that botched operation and the death of her closest colleague had set Paula teetering on the brink of abandoning her police career. Carol knew that place. She’d been there herself, and for scarily similar reasons. She’d offered what support she could to Paula, but it had been Tony who had talked her back from the edge. Carol had no idea what had passed between them, but it had made it possible for Paula to continue being a cop. And for that she was grateful, even if it meant having that constant reminder of her own inadequacy on her team.

Carol stepped aside to make way for Paula and returned to her chair. Paula leaned against the glass wall, arms folded as if that would disguise the weight she had lost. Her dark blonde hair looked as if she’d forgotten to comb it after towelling it dry and her charcoal trousers and sweater hung baggily on her. ‘How’s Tony?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know, because I’ve only just found out about the attack,’ Carol said, careful not to make it sound like an accusation.

Paula looked stricken. ‘Oh, shit,’ she groaned. ‘It never occurred to me that you wouldn’t know.’ She shook her head in frustration. ‘They didn’t even ring me, actually. The first I knew about it was when I turned on the TV on Saturday morning. I just assumed somebody would have called you …’ her voice trailed off, dismayed.

‘Nobody called me. I was having a family weekend in the Dales with my brother and my parents. So we didn’t have the TV or the radio on. Do we know which hospital he’s in?’

‘Bradfield Cross,’ Paula said. ‘They operated on his knee on Saturday. I checked. They said he’d come out of surgery OK and he was comfortable.’

Carol got to her feet, grabbing her bag. ‘Fine. That’s where I’ll be if you need me. I take it there’s nothing fresh in the overnights that we need to concern ourselves with?’

Chris shook her head. ‘Nothing new.’

‘Just as well. There’s plenty to be going on with.’ She patted Paula’s shoulder as she passed. ‘I’d have made the same assumption,’ she said on her way out. But I’d still have called to make sure.

Dry mouth. Too dry to swallow. That was just about the biggest thought that could make it through the cotton wadding filling his head. His eyelids flickered. Dimly, he knew there was a reason why opening them would be a bad idea, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He wasn’t even sure he could trust this fuzzy warning from his brain. What could be so bad about opening his eyes? People did it all the time and nothing bad happened to them.

The answer came with dizzying speed. ‘About time,’ the voice snapped from somewhere behind his left ear. Its critical edge was familiar but only historically so. It didn’t seem to fit the ragged impression he retained of his current life.

Tony rolled his head to the side. The movement reawakened pain that was hard to locate specifically. It seemed to be a general ache throughout his body. He groaned and opened his eyes. Then he remembered why keeping them shut had been the better option.

‘If I’ve got to be here, the least you could do is make conversation.’ Her mouth clamped tight in the disapproving line he remembered so well. She closed her laptop, put it on the table beside her and crossed one trouser-clad leg over the other. She’d never liked her legs, Tony thought pointlessly.

‘Sorry,’ he croaked. ‘I think it’s the drugs.’ He reached for the glass of water on his tray, but it was beyond his grasp. She didn’t make a move. He tried to pull himself into a sitting position, idiotically forgetting why he was in the hospital bed. His left leg, weighed down in a heavy surgical splint, shifted infinitesimally but delivered a completely disproportionate blast of pain that made him gasp. With the pain came memory. Lloyd Allen bearing down on him, screaming something incomprehensible. The glint of light on blue steel. A moment of paralysing pain, then nothing. Since then, flickers of consciousness. Doctors talking about him, nurses talking over him, the TV talking at him. And her, emanating irritation and impatience. ‘Water?’ he managed, not sure whether she would oblige.

She gave the flouncing sigh of a woman much put upon and lifted the water glass, prodding the straw towards his dry lips so he could drink without having to sit up. He sucked at the water, taking it in small sips, enjoying the sensation as his mouth recovered moistness. Suck, savour, swallow. He repeated the process till he’d drunk half the glass, then let his head fall back on the pillow. ‘You don’t have to be here,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’

She snorted. ‘You don’t think I’m here from choice, do you? Bradfield Cross is one of my client accounts.’

That she could still let him down so brutally was no surprise but it didn’t stop it hurting. ‘Keeping up appearances, eh?’ he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.

‘When my income and my reputation are at stake? You bet.’ She gave him a sour look, the eyes that were so like his narrowing in appraisal. ‘Don’t pretend you disapprove, Tony. When it comes to keeping up appearances, you could represent England at the Olympics. I bet none of your colleagues has a clue what goes on in your grubby little mind.’

‘I had a good teacher.’ He looked away, pretending to watch the morning magazine show on the TV.

‘All right then, we don’t have to talk. I’ve got work to do and I’m sure we can get someone to bring you some reading material. I’ll stick around for a day or two, just till they get you on your feet. Then I’ll be out of your way.’ He heard her shift in her chair and the tap of fingers on keys.

‘How did you find out?’ he said.

‘Apparently I’m on your personnel records as your next of kin. Either you haven’t updated them for twenty years or you’re still the Billy No Mates you always were. And some clever clogs senior nurse recognized me when I walked in. So I’m stuck here for as long as propriety demands.’

‘I had no idea you had any connection to Bradfield.’

‘Thought you were safe here, did you? Unlike you, Tony, I’m a success story. I have connections all over the country. Business is booming.’ When she boasted, her face softened.

‘You really don’t have to be here,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell them I sent you away.’ He spoke quickly, his words tumbling over themselves in an attempt to minimize the effort of speech.

‘And why exactly should I trust you to tell the truth about me? No thanks. I’ll do my duty.’

Tony stared at the wall. Was there a more depressing sentence in the English language?

Elinor Blessing swirled the whipped cream into her mug of mocha with the wooden stirrer. Starbucks was a two-minute walk from the back entrance of Bradfield Cross, and she reckoned there was a groove in the pavement worn by the feet of junior doctors fixing themselves with caffeine to keep sleep at bay. But this morning she wasn’t trying to stay awake, she was trying to stay out of the way.

A vertical line furrowed between her brows and her grey eyes stared into the middle distance. Thoughts tumbled over each other as she tried to figure out what she should do. She’d been Thomas Denby’s SHO for long enough to have formed a pretty clear opinion of him. He was probably the best diagnostician she’d ever worked with, and he backed it up with solid clinical care. Unlike a lot of consultants she’d seen, he didn’t seem to need to massage his ego by trampling junior doctors and students into the dirt. He encouraged them to take an active role in his ward rounds. When his students answered what was asked of them, he appeared gratified when they got it right and disappointed when they got it wrong. That disappointment was far more of an incentive to learn than the sarcasm and humiliation dealt out by many of his colleagues.

However, like a good barrister, Denby was generally asking questions whose answers he knew already. Would he be quite so generous if one of his underlings had the answer to a problem he had failed to solve? Would he thank the person who interrupted the smooth flow of his ward rounds with a suggestion he hadn’t already considered? Especially if it turned out that they were right?

You could argue that he should be pleased, no matter who came up with the theory. Diagnosis was the first step on the journey of helping the patient. Except when it was a diagnosis of despair. Incurable, intractable, untreatable. Nobody wanted that sort of diagnosis.

Especially when your patient was Robbie Bishop.

There was, Carol thought, something dispiriting about knowing your way round a hospital so well. One way or another, her job had taken her to all the major departments of Bradfield Cross. The one advantage was that she knew which of the congested car parks to aim for.

The woman on duty at the nurses’ station on the men’s surgical ward recognized her. Their paths had crossed several times during the surgery and recovery of a rapist whose victim had miraculously managed to turn his knife against him. They’d both taken a certain amount of pleasure in his pain. ‘It’s Inspector Jordan, isn’t it?’ she said.

Carol didn’t bother correcting her. ‘That’s right. I’m looking for a patient called Hill. Tony Hill?’

The nurse looked surprised. ‘You’re a bit high on the totem pole to be taking statements.’

Carol debated momentarily how to describe her relationship with Tony. ‘Colleague’ was insufficient, ‘landlord’ somehow misleading and ‘friend’ both more and less than the truth. She shrugged. ‘He feeds my cat.’

The nurse giggled. ‘We all need one of those.’ She pointed down the hallway to her right. ‘Past the four-bed wards, there’s a door on the left right at the end. That’s him.’

Anxiety worrying at her like a rat with a bone, Carol followed the directions. Outside the door, she paused. How was it going to be? What was she going to find? She had little experience of dealing with other people’s physical incapacity. She knew from her own experience that when she was hurt the last people she wanted around her were the ones she cared about. Their obvious distress made her feel guilty and she didn’t enjoy having her own vulnerability on display. She would have put money on Tony sharing similar feelings. She cast her mind back to a previous occasion when she’d visited him in hospital. They hadn’t known each other well then, but she remembered it hadn’t exactly been a comfortable encounter. Well, if it turned out that he wanted to be left alone, she wouldn’t stick around. Just show her face so he’d know she was concerned, then bow out graciously, making sure he knew she’d be back if he wanted her.

Deep breath, then a knock. Then the familiar voice, blurred around the edges. ‘Come in if you’ve got drugs.’ Carol grinned. Not that bad, then. She pushed the door open and walked in.

She was immediately aware that there was someone else in the room, but at first she only had eyes for Tony. Three days’ stubble emphasized the grey tinge to his skin. He looked as if he’d lost weight he could ill afford. But his eyes were bright and his smile seemed like the real thing. A contraption of pulleys and wires held his knee braced in its splint at an angle that looked scarcely comfortable. ‘Carol,’ he began before he was interrupted.

‘You must be the girlfriend,’ the woman sitting in the corner of the room said, the accent faint but recognizably local. ‘What kept you?’ Carol looked at her in surprise. She looked to be a well-preserved early sixties, doing a good job of keeping the years at bay. The hair was skilfully dyed golden brown, the makeup impeccable but understated. Her blue eyes held an air of calculation, and the lines that were visible did not speak of a kind and generous nature. On the thin side of slender, she was dressed in a business suit whose cut raised it above the average. Certainly well above what Carol could afford to pay for a suit.

‘Sorry?’ Carol said. She wasn’t often caught on the back foot, but even villains were seldom quite so blunt.

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Tony said, irritation apparent. ‘She’s Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan.’

The woman’s eyebrows rose. ‘You could have fooled me.’ A thin smile, entirely lacking in humour. ‘I mean about the girlfriend part, not about you being a copper. After all, unless you’re here to arrest him, what’s a senior police officer doing sniffing around this useless article?’

‘Mother.’ It was a snarl through clenched teeth. Tony made a face at Carol, a mix of exasperation and plea. ‘Carol, this is my mother. Carol Jordan, Vanessa Hill.’

Neither woman made a move to shake hands. Carol fought back her surprise. It was true that they’d never spoken much about their families, but she had formed the distinct impression that Tony’s mother was dead. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Carol said. She turned back to Tony. ‘How are you?’

‘Cram-jammed with drugs. But at least today I can stay awake for more than five minutes at a time.’

‘And the leg? What are they saying about that?’ As she spoke, she realized Vanessa Hill was packing her laptop away in a bright neoprene case.

‘Apparently it was a clean, single break. They’ve done their best to stick it together …’ His voice tailed off. ‘Mother, are you going?’ he asked as Vanessa rounded the end of the bed, coat over her arm, laptop slung over her shoulder alongside her handbag.

‘Bloody right, I’m going. You’ve got your girlfriend to look after you now. I’m off the hook.’ She made for the door.

‘She is not my girlfriend,’ Tony shouted. ‘She’s my tenant, my colleague, my friend. And she’s a woman, not a girl.’

‘Whatever,’ Vanessa said. ‘I’m not abandoning you now. I’m leaving you in good hands. A difference that will be apparent to the nursing staff.’ She sketched a wave as she left.

Carol stared open-mouthed at the disappearing woman. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, turning back to Tony. ‘Is she always like that?’

He let his head fall back on the pillow, avoiding her eyes. ‘Probably not with other people,’ he said wearily. ‘She owns a very successful consultancy business in HR. Hard to believe, but she oversees personnel decisions and training in some of the country’s top companies. I think I bring out the worst in her.’

‘I’m beginning to understand why you’ve never talked about her.’ Carol pulled the chair out of the corner and sat down next to the bed.

‘I hardly ever see her. Not even Christmas and birthdays.’ He sighed. ‘I didn’t see much of her while I was growing up either.’

‘What about your dad? Was she that rude to him?’

‘Good question. I have no idea who my father was. She’s always refused to tell me anything about him. All I know is that they weren’t married. Can you pass me the remote control for the bed?’ He dredged up a proper smile. ‘You saved me from another day of my mother. The least I can do is sit up for you.’

‘I came as soon as I heard. I’m sorry, nobody called me.’ She passed him the remote and he fiddled with the buttons till he was half-upright, wincing as he settled. ‘Everybody assumed somebody else had told me. I wish you’d let me know.’

‘I knew how much you needed a weekend off,’ he said. ‘Besides, there’s only so many favours I can call in and I thought I’d rather save them for when I really needed them.’ Suddenly his mouth fell open and his eyes widened. ‘Oh shit,’ he exclaimed. ‘Have you been home or did you go straight to the office?’

It seemed an odd question, but his manner was urgent. ‘Straight to the office. Why?’

He covered his face with his hands. ‘I am so sorry. I forgot all about Nelson.’

Carol burst out laughing. ‘A nutter smashes your leg with a fire axe, you spend the weekend in surgery and you’re worried about not feeding my cat? He’s got a cat flap, he can go and murder small animals if he gets desperate.’ She reached for his hand and patted it. ‘Never mind the cat. Tell me about your knee.’

‘It’s wired together but they can’t put a proper pot cast on it because of the wound. The surgeon says they have to make sure that’s healing properly, that it’s not infected. Then they can put a cast on it and maybe I can try to move around with a walking frame by the end of the week. If I’m a good boy,’ he added sarcastically.

‘So how long are you going to be in hospital?’

‘At least a week. It depends on how good I get at moving around. They won’t let me out till I can get about with the walking frame.’ He waggled his arm. ‘And probably without the intravenous morphine too.’

Carol grimaced sympathetically. ‘That’ll teach you to play the hero.’

‘There was nothing heroic about it,’ Tony said. ‘The guys who were trying to drag their mate out of there, they were the heroes. I was just the diversion.’ His eyelids fluttered. ‘That’s the last time I work late.’

‘Do you need anything from home?’

‘Some T-shirts? That’s got to be more comfortable than these hospital gowns. And some pairs of boxers. It’ll be interesting to see if we can get them over the splint.’

‘What about something to read?’

‘Good thinking. There’s a couple of books I’m supposed to be reviewing on my bedside table. You can tell which ones they are because they’ve got Post-It notes on the covers. Oh, and my laptop, please.’

Carol shook her head in amusement. ‘You don’t think this might be a good opportunity to chill? Maybe read something frivolous?’

He looked at her as if she was talking Icelandic. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t think anybody’s expecting you to be working, Tony. And I think you might find it’s not as easy to concentrate as you imagine.’

He frowned. ‘You think I don’t know how to relax.’ He was only half-joking.

‘I don’t think that. I know it. And I understand, because I have similar tendencies.’

‘I can relax. I watch football. I play computer games.’

Carol laughed. ‘I’ve seen you watch football. I’ve seen you play computer games and there is no sense of the word “relaxing” that applies to either activity where you are concerned.’

‘I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. But if you are bringing the laptop, you might as well bring me Lara …’ He gave her the full twinkle.

‘You sad bastard. Where will I find her?’

‘In my study. On the shelf that your left hand would reach if you stretched out from the chair.’ He stifled a yawn. ‘And now it’s time for you to go. I need to sleep and you’ve got a Major Incident Team to run.’

Carol stood up. ‘A Major Incident Team with no major incidents to run. Not that I’m complaining,’ she added hastily. ‘I don’t have a problem with a quiet day at the office.’ She patted his hand again. ‘I’ll pop back this evening. If there’s anything else you need, call me.’

She walked down the corridor, already pulling out her mobile phone so she could turn it back on as soon as she left the hospital building. As she passed the nurses’ station, the woman she’d spoken to earlier gave her a wink. ‘So much for feeding the cat.’

‘What do you mean?’ Carol asked, slowing.

‘According to his mum, he does a bit more than that for you.’ Her smile was arch, her eyes knowing.

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you hear. Does your mother know everything about you?’

The nurse shrugged. ‘Point taken.’

Carol juggled bag and phone and pulled out a card. ‘I’ll be back later. That’s my card. If there’s anything he needs, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.’

‘No problem. Good cat feeders are hard to find, after all.’

Yousef Aziz glanced at the dashboard clock. He was doing well. Nobody expected him to make it back from a nine o’clock meeting in Blackburn much before lunchtime. Everybody knew what Monday morning trans-Pennine traffic was like. But what they didn’t know was that he’d rearranged the meeting for eight. Sure, he’d had to leave Bradfield a bit earlier, but not the whole hour, because he would avoid the worst of the rush hour this way. To cover himself, all he’d had to say to his mother was that he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t be late for this important new client. He knew he should have felt uncomfortable when she’d used his supposed punctuality as a stick to beat his little brother with. But it was water off a duck’s back with Raj. Their mother had spoiled him, the youngest son, and now she was reaping what she’d sown.

The main thing was that Yousef had created a little window of opportunity for himself. It was something he’d grown accustomed to doing over the previous few months. He had become adept at squeezing unmissed hours from the working day without raising suspicion. Ever since … He shook his head as if to dislodge the thought. Too distracting. He had to try to compartmentalize the warring elements of his life, otherwise he would be bound to give something away.

Yousef had kept the Blackburn meeting as tight as he could without appearing rude to the new client, and now he had an hour and a half for himself. He followed the instructions of his satellite navigation system. Down the motorway and into the heart of Cheetham Hill. He knew North Manchester pretty well, but this particular section of the red-brick warren was unfamiliar. He turned into a narrow street where a battered terrace of weary houses faced on to a small industrial estate. Halfway down, he spotted the signage for his destination. PRO-TECH SUPPLIES, in scarlet against a white background inside a border of black exclamation marks.

He parked the van outside and turned off the engine. He leaned on the steering wheel, breathing deeply, feeling his stomach wind itself into knots. He’d hardly eaten anything that morning, using his urgency to get to his meeting to defuse his mother’s oppressive concern with his recent loss of appetite. Of course he’d lost his appetite, just as he’d lost the ability to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time. What else could he expect? This was how it was when you embarked on something like this. But it was important not to arouse suspicion, so he tried to be away from the family table at mealtimes as much as he could.

Given how little he was eating and sleeping, he couldn’t quite believe how energized he felt. A bit light-headed sometimes, but he thought that was more to do with imagining the effect of their plan than the lack of food and rest. Now, he pushed back from the steering wheel and climbed out of the van. He walked through the door marked RETAIL SALES. It led into a room ten feet square partitioned off from the warehouse behind. Behind a zinc-topped counter that bisected the room, a skinny man hunched over a computer. Everything about him was grey – his hair, his skin, his overalls. He looked up from his computer screen as Yousef entered. His eyes were grey too.

He stood up and leaned on the counter. The movement stirred the air enough to send the bitter after-smell of cheap tobacco across the gap between them. ‘All right?’ Yousef said.

‘All right. What can I do you for?’

Yousef pulled out a list. ‘I need some heavy-duty gloves, a face shield and ear protectors.’

The man sighed and pulled a dog-eared catalogue along the counter. ‘Best have a look in here. That shows you what we do.’ He opened it, flicking through the creased pages till he reached the section on gloves. He pointed to a picture at random. ‘See, there’s a description. Gives you an idea of thickness and flexibility. Depends what you want them for, see?’ He pushed the catalogue towards Yousef. ‘You decide what you’re after.’

Yousef nodded. He began to pore over the catalogue, a bit taken aback by the range of choices on offer. As he read the descriptions of the items, he couldn’t help smiling. For some reason, Pro-Tech didn’t list his project among their recommended uses for their protective gear. Mr Grey behind the counter would shit himself if he knew the truth. But he never would know the truth. Yousef had been careful. His tracks were clean. A scientific and chemical supplies warehouse in Wakefield. A specialist paint manufacturer in Oldham. A motorbike accessories shop in Leeds. A laboratory equipment supplier in Cleckheaton. Never, never, never in Bradfield, where there was an outside chance of being spotted by someone who knew him. Every time, he’d dressed the part. Painter’s overalls. Biker’s leathers. Neatly pressed shirt and chinos with a line of pens in a pocket protector in the shirt. Paid in cash. The invisible man.

Now, he made his decision and pointed out what he wanted, adding a protective chest shield for good measure. The warehouseman entered the details into the computer and told Yousef his goods would be along in a minute. He seemed nonplussed when Yousef offered to pay in cash. ‘Have you not got a credit card?’ he asked, sounding incredulous.

‘Not a company one, no,’ Yousef lied. ‘Sorry, mate. Cash is all I’ve got.’ He counted out the notes.

The warehouseman shook his head. ‘That’ll have to do, then. Your lot like cash, don’t you?’

Yousef frowned. ‘My lot? What do you mean, my lot?’ He felt his fists clench in his pockets.

‘You Muslims. I read it some place. It’s against your religion. Paying interest and that.’ The man’s jaw took a stubborn set. ‘I’m not being racist, you know. Just stating a fact.’

Yousef breathed deeply. As these things went, the man’s attitude was pretty mild. He’d experienced much, much worse. But these days, he was hypersensitive to anything that had the faintest whiff of prejudice about it. It all served to reinforce his choice to stay on this road, to carry his plans through to the end. ‘If you say so,’ he said, not wanting to get into a ruck that would make him memorable, but equally reluctant to say nothing at all.

He was saved from further conversation by the arrival of his purchases. He picked them up and walked out without responding to the warehouseman’s ‘See ya.’

The motorway traffic was heavy and it took him the best part of an hour to make it back to Bradfield. He barely had enough time to take the protective gear to the bedsit, but he couldn’t leave it lying round in the van. If Raj or Sanjay or his father saw it, it would provoke all sorts of questions he definitely didn’t want to answer.

The bedsit was on the first floor of what had once been the town house of a railway baron. A sprawling pile of Gothic Revival, the stained stucco covering the gables and bays was scabby and crumbling, the window frames rotting and the gutters sprouting an assortment of weeds. It had once had a view; now all that could be seen from its front windows was the cantilevered slant of the west stand of Bradfield Victoria’s vast stadium half a mile away. What had once been a quarter endowed with a certain grandeur had declined into a ghetto whose inhabitants were united only by their poverty. Skin tones ranged from the blue-black of sub-Saharan Africa to the skimmed-milk pallor of Eastern Europe. According to a survey carried out by Bradfield City Council, thirteen religions were practised and twenty-two native tongues spoken in the square mile to the west of the football ground.

Here, Yousef travelled under the radar of his own third-generation immigrant community. Here, nobody noticed or cared who else came and went from his first-floor hideaway. Here, Yousef Aziz was invisible.

The receptionist tried to hide her shock and failed. ‘Good morning, Mrs Hill,’ she gabbled on automatic. She glanced down at the calendar on her desk, as if she couldn’t believe she’d got it so wrong. ‘I thought you … we weren’t …’

‘Good, it keeps you on your toes, Bethany,’ Vanessa said as she swept past on her way to her office. The faces she passed on the way looked startled and guilty as they stammered out their greetings. She didn’t imagine for one moment they’d done anything to be guilty about. Her staff knew better than to try to put one over on her. But she liked that her unexpected arrival sent a ripple of anxiety through the office. It was a sign she was getting her money’s worth. Vanessa Hill wasn’t a touchy-feely employer. She had friends already; she didn’t need to make her employees her buddies. She was tough, but she thought she was fair. It was a message she tried to hammer home to her clients. Keep your distance, win their respect, and your HR problems would be minimal.

Pity it wasn’t that straightforward with kids, she thought as she dumped her laptop on the desk and hung up her jacket. When your staff didn’t cut the mustard, you could sack them and recruit someone better suited to the job. Kids, you were stuck with. And right from the start, Tony had failed to live up to expectations. When she’d fallen pregnant to a man who had disappeared like snow off a dyke at the news, her mother had told her to put the baby up for adoption. Vanessa had refused point blank. Now, she looked back in bewilderment and wondered why she had been so adamant.

It hadn’t been for sentimental reasons. She didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body. Another position she recommended to her clients. Had she really gone that far out on a limb just to spite her demanding, controlling mother? There had to be more to it than that, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember. It must have been the hormones, addling her brain. Whatever, she’d endured the neighbourhood spite and gossip that went with single parenthood back then. She’d changed jobs, moving right across town to where nobody knew her, and lied about her past, inventing a dead husband to avoid the stigma. And it wasn’t as if she’d had any illusions about basking in a hazy glow of motherhood. With her father dead and no prospect of a husband now, she was the breadwinner. She’d always known she’d be back at work as soon as was humanly possible, like some bloody Chinese peasant dropping one in the ditch then getting back to the paddy field. And for what?

Her mother had taken reluctant charge of the boy. She didn’t have much choice since it was her daughter’s pay packet that kept them all afloat. Vanessa remembered enough of her own childhood to know the regime she was condemning her son to. She tried not to think about what Tony’s days would have been like and she didn’t encourage him to talk about it. She had enough to contend with, running a busy personnel department, then branching out to set up her own business. She relished the challenge of work, but she didn’t have energy to spare for a whiny kid.

Credit to him, he got that pretty early. He learned to put up and shut up, and to do what he was told. When he forgot himself and bounced around her like a puppy, it only took a few sharp words to knock the stuffing out of him.

Even so, he’d held her back. No doubt about that. All those years ago, no bloke wanted to settle down with some other man’s kid. He was a handicap professionally too. When she was getting her own business established, she’d had to keep the travel to a minimum because her mother kicked off if she was left overnight too often with the boy. Vanessa had missed chances, failed to build fast enough on the contacts she was making and played catch-up too bloody many times thanks to Tony.

And there had been no pay-off. Other women’s kids got married and provided grand-kids. Photos on the desk, anecdotes in the meeting breaks, family holidays in the sun. Ice-breakers, all of them. Confidence-builders. The bricks and mortar of professional relationships that generated business and earned money. Tony’s continuing failures meant Vanessa had to work that much harder.

Well, it was payback time now and no mistake. Things couldn’t have worked out better if she’d planned it. He was stuck in hospital, groggy with drugs and sleep. No hiding place. She could get access to him whenever she wanted and pick her moment. All she had to do was make sure she avoided the girlfriend.

Her PA slipped in and wordlessly delivered the coffee that always arrived within minutes of her settling behind her desk. Vanessa opened up her computer and allowed herself a grim little smile. Fancy Tony landing a woman with looks and brains. Carol Jordan wasn’t the sort of catch Vanessa expected of her son. If she’d imagined him with anyone, it would have been some mousy slip of a girl who worshipped the ground he walked on. Well, girlfriend or no girlfriend, she was going to have her way.

Elinor raised her hand to knock then paused. Was she about to commit career suicide? You could argue that, if she was right, it didn’t matter whether she spoke up or not. Because if she was right, Robbie Bishop was going to die anyway. Nothing could alter that. But if she was right and she didn’t speak up, someone else could die. Whether accident or intent lay behind whatever had happened to him, it could happen to someone else.

The thought of having another death on her conscience swung it for Elinor. Better to make an arse of herself in a good cause than have to deal with that. She rapped on the door and waited for Denby’s distracted, ‘Yes, yes, come in.’ He looked up impatiently from a stack of case notes. ‘Dr Blessing,’ he said. ‘Any change?’

‘In Robbie Bishop?’

Denby pulled a half-smile. ‘Who else? We claim to treat all our patients equally, but it’s not exactly easy when we have to run the gauntlet of football fans whenever we enter or leave the hospital.’ He swung round in his chair and looked through the window to the car park below. ‘Even more of them now than when I came back in after lunch.’ He turned back as Elinor began to speak. ‘Do you suppose they think being there can influence the outcome?’ He sounded more bemused than cynical.

‘I expect it depends whether they believe in the power of prayer. I did see a pair of them huddled in a doorway saying the rosary.’ She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t appear to be helping Mr Bishop – he seems to be deteriorating steadily. The fluid on his lungs is building up. I’d say respiratory distress is getting worse. There’s no question of him coming off the ventilator.’

Denby bit his lip. ‘No response to the AZT, then?’

Elinor shook her head. ‘Nothing discernible so far.’

Denby sighed and nodded. ‘Damned if I know what’s going on here. Oh, well. So it goes sometimes. Thanks for keeping me posted, Dr Blessing.’ His eyes returned to the files on his desk in dismissal.

‘There was one thing?’

He looked up, eyebrows raised. He appeared to be genuinely interested in what she had to say. ‘To do with Mr Bishop?’

She nodded. ‘I know it sounds crazy, but have you considered ricin poisoning?’

‘Ricin?’ Denby looked almost offended. ‘How on earth would a premiership footballer be exposed to ricin?’

Elinor battled on. ‘I’ve no idea. But you’re a terrific diagnostician and when you couldn’t come up with anything, I thought it must be something a bit off the wall. And I thought, maybe poisoning. So I checked it out on the online database and all his symptoms match ricin poisoning – weakness, fever, nausea, dyspnea, cough, pulmonary oedema and arthralgia. Add to that the fact that he’s not responding to any of the medications we’ve tried him with … I don’t know, it fits the way nothing else does.’

Denby looked bemused. ‘I think you’ve been watching too many episodes of Spooks, Dr Blessing. Robbie Bishop is a footballer, not a KGB defector.’

Elinor stared at the floor. This was what she’d been afraid of. But the reason that had driven her through the door in the first place still existed. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous,’ she said. ‘But none of us has been able to come up with an alternative diagnosis that makes sense of the symptoms and the fact that the patient is not responding to any of the drug regimes we’ve tried.’ She looked up. His head was cocked to one side and although his mouth was a tight line, his eyes expressed interest in what she had to say. ‘And I’m not saying this to flatter you into taking me seriously. But if you can’t work out what is clinically wrong with Robbie Bishop, I don’t think there can be a straightforward explanation in terms of a viral or bacterial illness. Which only leaves poison. And the only poison that makes sense is ricin.’

Denby jumped to his feet. ‘This is crazy. Terrorists use ricin. Spies use ricin. How the hell does a premiership footballer get ricin into his system?’

‘With respect, I think that’s somebody else’s problem,’ Elinor said.

Denby rubbed the palms of his hands over his face. She had never seen him flustered, never mind this agitated. ‘First things first. We need to check whether or not you’re right.’ He looked expectantly at her.

‘You can do an ELISA test for ricin. But even if they’ve got the right antigen in stock and they fast-track it, we still won’t get the results of a sandwich ELISA till tomorrow.’

He took a deep breath and visibly pulled himself together. ‘Set the wheels in motion. Take the bloods yourself, take them straight to the lab. I’ll call ahead, make sure they know what’s coming down the line. We can start treatment –’ He stopped dead, his mouth hanging open. ‘Oh fuck.’ He squeezed his eyes shut momentarily. ‘There is no bloody treatment, is there?’

Elinor shook her head. ‘No. If I’m right, Robbie Bishop’s a condemned man.’

Denby slumped back into his chair. ‘Yes. Well, I don’t think we need to share this possibility with anyone just yet. Not until we know for sure. Don’t tell anyone else what you suspect.’

‘But …’ Elinor frowned.

‘But what?’

‘Shouldn’t we tell the police?’

‘The police? You were the one who said it was someone else’s problem, determining how the ricin got into his system. We can’t call the police in on a hunch.’

‘But he’s still having lucid spells. He can still communicate. If we wait till tomorrow, he could have lapsed into a coma and he won’t be able to tell anyone how this happened. If it happened,’ she added, seeing the ominous expression on Denby’s face.

‘And if you’re wrong? If it turns out to be something quite other? This department will have lost all credibility within the hospital and the wider community. Let’s face it, Dr Blessing, two minutes after we call the police in, the media will be screaming from the rooftops. I’m not prepared to put my reputation and that of my team on the line like that. I’m sorry. We don’t tell anyone – not another living soul – until we get the ELISA results and we know for certain. Are you clear on that?’

Elinor sighed. ‘I’m clear.’ Then her face brightened. ‘What if I was to ask him? When we’re alone?’

Denby shook his head. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said firmly. ‘I will not have you interrogate a patient like that.’

‘It’s kind of like taking a history.’

‘It’s nothing like taking a history. It’s playing at Miss bloody Marple. Now please, let’s not waste any more time. Get started on the ELISA protocol.’ He managed a faint bloodless smile. ‘Good thinking, Doctor Blessing. Let’s just hope for once you’re wrong. Apart from anything else, Bradfield Victoria have no chance of making it into Europe next season without Robbie Bishop.’ Elinor’s face must have revealed her shock for he rolled his eyes and said, ‘I’m joking, for Christ’s sake. I’m as worried about this as you are.’

Somehow, Elinor doubted that.

Tony started awake, eyes wide, mouth stretched back in a silent scream. The power of morphine dreams to recreate the gleam of the axe, the battle cry of his attacker, the smell of sweat and the taste of blood was terrifying. His breathing was fast and shallow and he could feel sweat curdling on his top lip. Only a dream. He deliberately controlled his breathing and gradually the panic subsided.

Once he’d calmed down, he tried to raise his wounded leg from the hip. He clenched his hands into tight fists, the nails biting into his palms. The veins on his neck corded up as he strained to move a limb that seemed to have been transmuted into lead. The futile seconds stretched out, then with a grunt of frustration, he gave up. It felt as if he’d never move his left leg again.

Tony reached for the bed control and eased himself upwards. He glanced at his watch. Half an hour till they would bring his evening meal. Not that he felt like eating, but it was a way of punctuating the day. He almost wished his mother had stayed. At least it gave him something to butt against. Tony shook his head, aghast at the thought. If his mother’s company was the answer, he was asking the wrong question. Not that there weren’t aspects of the history of their relationship that he ought to confront and deal with. But this wasn’t the time or the place. He wasn’t sure when or where would be appropriate for something so potentially painful, but he knew it wasn’t here and now.

Still, it couldn’t wait for ever. Carol had met her now, and she would have questions. He couldn’t just blank her; Carol deserved more than that from him. The problem was where to start. His childhood memories lacked a narrative. They were fragmentary, a series of incidents loosely linked like dark beads on a tarnished chain. Not all of the memories were bad. But his mother featured in none of the good ones. He knew he wasn’t the only person with such an experience. He had treated plenty of them, after all. Just one more aspect of his history he shared with the crazies.

He flapped his hand in front of his face as if swatting a fly and picked up the remote control. He began to flick through the limited range of channels. Nothing engaged his attention, but he was spared having to make a decision by a knock at the door.

The person on the other side didn’t wait for an invitation. The woman who marched in looked like a peregrine falcon run to fat. Glossy brown hair swept back from her forehead in a wavy bob that stopped just short of her shoulders. Deep-set hazel eyes gleamed beneath perfectly shaped eyebrows and the hawk’s nose jutted out from plump cheeks. The sight of Mrs Chakrabarti lifted Tony’s spirits far more than any TV channel could have. Here was more interesting news than BBC24.

She was trailed by half a dozen acolytes in white coats who looked young enough to be doing sixth-form work experience. She gave Tony a swift, practised smile as she reached for his notes. ‘So,’ she said, looking at him from under her brows. ‘How’s it feeling?’ Her accent bore a greater resemblance to that of the royal family than to the denizens of Bradfield. It made Tony feel as if he should doff a cap or tug a forelock.

‘Like you replaced my leg with a lead pipe,’ he said.

‘No pain?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing the morphine can’t take care of.’

‘But you’re not feeling any pain once the morphine kicks in?’

‘No. Should I be?’

Mrs Chakrabarti smiled. ‘It’s not our preferred option. I’m going to take you off the morphine drip tomorrow morning, see if we can achieve the pain management by other means.’

Tony felt the clutch of apprehension. ‘Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

The smile grew positively predatory. ‘Just as sure as you are about the advice you give your patients.’

Tony grinned. ‘In that case, let’s just stick with the morphine.’

‘You’ll be fine, Dr Hill.’ She replaced the chart and studied his leg, angling her head round to see the twin drains carrying bloody fluid away from the wound in his knee. She turned to the students. ‘You’ll see there’s not much coming off the wound site now.’ Back to Tony. ‘I think we might take the drains out tomorrow and get this splint off so we can get a sense of what you’re going to need. Probably a nice cylinder cast.’

‘When can I go home?’

Mrs Chakrabarti turned to her students with the perennial condescension of the surgeon. ‘When can Dr Hill go home?’

‘When he can bear weight on his leg.’ The speaker looked as if he should be delivering newspapers, not clinical judgements.

‘How much weight? His whole body weight?’

The students exchanged covert glances. ‘When he can get around with a Zimmer frame,’ another offered.

‘When he can get around with a Zimmer frame, do a leg raise and climb stairs,’ a third chipped in.

Tony could feel something inside his head stretch to its limit. ‘Doctor,’ he said forcibly. When he had her attention, he spoke very clearly. ‘That was not an idle question. I need to not be here. None of the important things in my life can be accomplished from a hospital bed.’

Mrs Chakrabarti wasn’t smiling now. This, Tony thought, must be what a mouse feels like eyeball to eyeball with a raptor. The only good thing about it is you know it’s not going to last long. ‘That’s something you have in common with the vast majority of my patients, Dr Hill,’ she said.

His blue eyes glittered with the strain of not showing his frustration. ‘I’m perfectly aware of that. But unlike the vast majority of your patients, nobody else can do what I do. That’s not arrogance. It’s the way that it is. I don’t need two functioning legs to do most of the things I do that matter. What I really need is for my head to function, and that’s not happening very well in here.’

They glared at each other. None of the students fidgeted. They barely breathed. ‘I appreciate your position, Dr Hill. And I understand your sense of failure.’

‘My sense of failure?’ Tony was genuinely puzzled.

‘It was one of your patients who put you here, after all.’

He burst out laughing. ‘Good God, no. Not one of my patients. Lloyd Allen wasn’t one of mine. This isn’t about guilt, it’s about giving my patients what they need. Just like you want to do, Mrs Chakrabarti.’ His smile lit up his face, infectious and compelling.

The corners of her lips twitched. ‘In that case, Dr Hill, I’d say it’s up to you. We can perhaps try a leg brace rather than a cast.’ She eyed his shoulders critically. ‘It’s a pity you don’t have better upper body strength, but we can try you on elbow crutches. The bottom line is that you have to be mobile, you have to be committed to your physiotherapy and you have to be off the intravenous morphine. Do you have someone at home to take care of you?’

He looked away. ‘I share the house with a friend. She’ll help.’

The surgeon nodded. ‘I won’t pretend the rehab isn’t tough. Hard work and a lot of pain. But if you’re determined to get out of here, we should be able to free up your bed early next week.’

‘Early next week?’ There was no hiding his dismay.

Mrs Chakrabarti shook her head, chuckling softly. ‘Someone split your patella with a fire axe, Dr Hill. Just be grateful you live in a city whose hospital is a centre of excellence for orthopaedics. Some places, you’d be lying there wondering whether you’d ever walk properly again.’ She dipped her head in farewell. ‘One of this lot will be here tomorrow when they take the drains out and the splint off. We’ll see where we go from there.’

She moved away from the bed with her entourage in tight formation behind her. One of them scuttled in front of her to open the door and the surgeon nearly walked into Carol Jordan’s raised fist. Startled, Mrs Chakrabarti recoiled slightly.

‘Sorry,’ Carol said. She looked at her hand and smiled sheepishly. ‘I was just about to knock.’ She stepped aside to let the doctors pass and raised her eyebrows at Tony as she walked in, loaded with cargo. ‘That looked like a royal progress from the Middle Ages.’

‘Close. That was Mrs Chakrabarti and her body slaves. She’s in charge of my knee.’

‘What news?’ Carol asked, dumping assorted carrier bags and easing the laptop in its case on to Tony’s bed table.

‘I’m probably going to be stuck in here for another week,’ he grumped.

‘Only another week? God, she must be good. I thought it would take a lot longer than that.’ She began to unpack the carrier bags. ‘Ginger beer, dandelion and burdock, proper lemonade. Luxury roast nuts. Books as requested. All the Tomb Raider games Lara Croft ever starred in. Jelly beans. My iPod. Your laptop. And …’ She produced a sheet of paper with a flourish. ‘The access code for the hospital’s wireless broadband.’

Tony mimed astonishment. ‘I’m impressed. How did you manage that?’

‘I know the senior nurse from way back. I told her how much easier her life would be if you were online. She seemed to think that a total breach of hospital regulations was a small price to pay. You’ve obviously made an impression already.’ Carol shrugged off her coat and settled into the chair. ‘And not in a good way.’

‘Thanks for all of this. I really appreciate it. You’re a lot earlier than I expected.’

‘Privilege of rank. I suspect I’m going to have to show my warrant card next time I want to get in, though.’

‘Why’s that?’ Tony handed her the power cord for his laptop. ‘There’s a socket behind you, I think.’

Carol got up and stretched behind the chair to plug it in. ‘The Robbie Bishop fan club.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Have you not seen the news? Robbie Bishop’s here, in Bradfield Cross.’

Tony frowned. ‘Did he get injured in Saturday’s match, then? I’m so out of touch in here, I don’t even know if we won.’

‘One–nil to the Vics. But Robbie wasn’t playing. He supposedly had flu, but whatever it is, it got bad enough for him to be admitted here on Saturday. And I just heard on the radio that he’s been moved to the ICU.’

Tony whistled. ‘Well, it’s obviously not flu, then. Are they saying what the problem is?’

‘No. They’re just calling it a chest infection. But the fans are out in force. You can’t see the main entrance for a sea of canary yellow. Apparently they’ve had to bring in extra security to keep the more enterprising ones at bay. One woman even dressed up in a nurse’s uniform in a bid to get to his bedside. I’m sure she won’t be the last to try something like that. It’s a big problem, because you can’t close the hospital to the public. The patients and their families wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘I’m surprised he’s not in one of the private hospitals.’ Tony opened the bag of jelly beans and stirred them with his finger till he found his favourite buttered popcorn flavour.

‘Neither of the private hospitals in Bradfield has the facilities to deal with acute respiratory problems, according to your friendly senior nurse. They’re fine if you want a new hip or your tonsils out, but if you’re seriously ill, Bradfield Cross is where you want to be.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Tony said wryly.

‘You’re not ill,’ Carol said briskly. ‘You’re just a bit more damaged than usual.’

He pulled a half-smile. ‘Whatever. I’d still bet that Robbie Bishop will be walking out of here ahead of me.’

Tuesday

Sometimes being right was no pleasure at all, Elinor thought as she stared at the lab report. This was definitely one of those times. The test results were incontrovertible. Robbie Bishop had enough ricin in his system to kill him several times over.

Elinor paged Denby, asking him to meet her at the ICU. As she crossed the covered walkway that linked the labs to the main hospital, she couldn’t avoid the sight of Robbie Bishop’s fans, their patient vigil rendered pointless by the piece of paper she held in her hand. According to one of the women in admin who had been holding forth in the staff canteen that morning, the hospital had been inundated with offers of blood, kidneys and anything else that might be donated to help Robbie. But there was nothing anyone could give Robbie now that would alter the fate in prospect.

As she approached the ICU, she folded the report in half and shoved it in her pocket. She didn’t want any of the security staff to glimpse its contents as they checked her ID before allowing her into the unit. The tabloids had their spies everywhere; the least she could do was to ensure Robbie’s last hours were as dignified as possible. She cleared security and crossed the reception area, spotting Martin Flanagan slumped against the end of a sofa. When he saw her, he jumped to his feet, eagerness and anxiety chasing the exhaustion temporarily from his face. ‘Any news?’ he asked, his flat Ulster accent lending the simple question an incidental air of aggression. ‘Mr Denby’s just gone in. Did he send for you?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Flanagan,’ Elinor said automatically. ‘There’s really nothing I can tell you right now.’

His face collapsed in on itself again, hope disappearing with her words. He dragged his fingers through his silver-streaked hair, a beseeching look on his face. ‘They won’t let me sit with him, you know. His mum and dad are here, they get to be with him. But not me. Not now he’s in there. I signed Robbie when he was just fourteen, you know. I brought him on. He’s the best player I’ve ever worked with and he’s got the heart of a lion.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it, you know? Seeing him brought so low. He’s been like a son to me.’ He turned his face away from her.

‘We’re doing all we can,’ Elinor said. He nodded and dropped back on to the sofa like a sack of potatoes. It didn’t do to get emotionally involved, she knew that. But it was hard to see Flanagan’s pain and not feel connected.

Being in the ICU was one of life’s great levellers, she thought as she walked into the dim space with its bays crammed with equipment. Here, it didn’t matter whether you were a household name or a nobody. You got the same total commitment from the staff, the same access to whatever means it took to keep you alive. And the same restrictions on visitors. Immediate family only, and they could and would be unceremoniously shunted to one side if necessary. Here, the needs of the patient were paramount, and here the medical staff ruled supreme, if only because the patients were in no fit state to question them.

Elinor headed straight for Robbie Bishop’s cubicle. As she drew near, she could see the couple sitting on the left of the bed. A man and woman in their middle years, they were both clearly in the grip of the tension that comes with abject fear. Their focus was fierce and aimed exclusively at the figure wired to the machines. For all the notice they were taking of Thomas Denby standing at the end of the bed, he might as well be invisible. Elinor wondered if they had grown so accustomed to seeing their son from afar that they were somehow transfixed by his proximity as well as his infirmity.

She paused on the fringes of the group, the dim lighting creating a chiaroscuro effect that made her feel as if she were spying on a diorama in a gallery. At the heart of it, Robbie Bishop, a pale mockery of his former glossy self. Hard to imagine now, that mastery of the beautiful game, those fluid breaks down the wing and the curving crosses that had created so many opportunities for Bradfield Victoria’s strikers. Impossible to equate the puffy, waxen face with the glowing good looks that had earned millions promoting everything from organic fruit and vegetables to deodorant. His familiar mop of light brown hair, expertly streaked to make him look like a surfer dude, was lank and dark now, grooming being lower on the priority list of hospital staff than it was on that of premiership footballers. And Elinor was the one who was about to wrench the last shreds of hope from this dramatic tableau.

She took a step forward and cleared her throat tactfully. Only Denby registered her arrival; he turned, gave her a half-nod and ushered her away from the bedside towards the side office where the nurses were stationed. Denby smiled at the two nurses sitting in front of computer terminals and said, ‘Can you give us a minute, please?’

Neither looked particularly pleased at being shunted out of their own space, but they were conditioned to obey consultants. As the door closed behind them, Elinor pulled the test results from her pocket and handed them over. ‘It’s not good,’ she said.

Denby read the report, his face impassive. ‘No room for doubt there,’ he muttered.

‘So what do we do now?’

‘I tell his parents, you tell Mr Flanagan. And we do everything we can to make sure that Mr Bishop suffers as little as possible during his last hours.’ Denby was already turning, making for the door.

‘What about the police?’ Elinor said. ‘Surely we have to tell them now?’

Denby looked perplexed. ‘I suppose so. Why don’t you do that while I talk to Mr and Mrs Bishop?’ And he was gone.

Elinor sat at the desk and stared at the phone. Eventually she picked it up and asked the hospital switchboard to connect her to Bradfield police. The voice that answered sounded brisk and down-to-earth. ‘My name is Elinor Blessing and I’m a Senior House Officer at Bradfield Cross Hospital,’ she began, heart sinking as she realized how improbable her news was going to sound.

‘How can I help you?’

‘I think I need to talk to a detective. I need to report a suspicious death. Well, when I say death, he’s actually still alive. But he’s going to be dead before too long.’ Elinor winced. Surely she could have put it better than that?

‘I’m sorry? Has something happened? An assault?’

‘No, nothing like that. Well, I suppose technically, yes, but not in the way you’re thinking. Look, I don’t want to waste time explaining this over and over again. Can you just put me through to someone in CID? Someone who deals with murder?’

Tuesdays, Yousef Aziz made a point of dropping in on his main middleman. Knowing what he knew, it was hard to motivate himself, but for the sake of his parents and his brothers, he forced himself to do more than simply go through the motions. He owed them that, at least. His family’s textile business had survived in the teeth of fierce competition because his father had understood the value of personal relationships in business. That had been the first thing he had taught his two elder sons when he had initiated them into First Fabrics. ‘Always take care of your customers and suppliers,’ he’d explained. ‘If you make them your friends, it makes it hard for them to dump you when times get tough. Because the first rule of business is that times will always get tough sooner or later.’

He’d been right. He’d weathered the collapse of the textile business in the North when cheap imports from the Far East had all but obliterated British garment manufacturers. He’d hung on by the skin of his teeth, always keeping one step ahead, jacking up the quality of his merchandise when he couldn’t pare his costs any further, carving out new markets at the higher end of the game. And now it was all happening again. This time, the customers were driving the changes. Clothes were going for a song, fall-apart fashions available in chain stores for peanuts. Buy it cheap, wear it once, sling it. The new philosophy had infected a whole generation regardless of class. Girls whose mothers would have taken poison rather than enter a cut-price fashion store rubbed shoulders with teenage mothers on benefit in Matalan and TK Maxx. So Yousef and Sanjar were sticking to the tried-and-tested formula for survival.

And he hated it. Back when his father had started the business, he’d been dealing mostly with other Asians. But as First Fabrics had stabilized and established itself, they had to deal with all sorts. Jews, Cypriots, Chinese, Brits. And the one thing they all had in common was that they acted like 9/11 and 7/7 had given them the right to treat any Muslim with contempt and suspicion. All the misapprehensions and downright deliberate misunderstandings of Islam operated as the perfect excuse for racism. They knew it wasn’t acceptable to be openly racist any more, so they’d found another way to express their racism. All the stuff about women wearing the hijab. The complaints about them speaking Arabic or Urdu instead of English all the time. Fuck, had they never been to Wales? Go into a coffee bar there and suddenly it’s like nobody ever learned English.

What pissed off Yousef more than almost anything else was the way he was treated by people he’d known for years. He’d go into a factory or a warehouse where he’d been buying or selling for the seven years since he’d started working for his dad. And now, instead of the locals greeting him by name and having a laugh with him about the football or the cricket or whatever, their eyes slid away from him like he was slick with oil. Either that or they did that false, bright thing that made him feel patronized, like they were only being nice so they could preface their remarks in the pub with, ‘Of course, some of my best mates are Muslims …’

Today, though, he bit back his anger. It wasn’t like this was going to be for ever. As if to confirm the thought, his mobile rang just as he was pulling in to the car park behind Howard Edelstein’s factory. He recognized the ring tone and smiled, putting the phone to his ear. ‘How’s it going?’ the voice on the other end said.

‘All according to plan. It’s great to hear from you, I wasn’t expecting you to call this morning.’

‘Cancelled meeting. I thought I’d give you a quick bell, just to make sure everything was on track.’

‘You know you can rely on me,’ Yousef said. ‘When I say I’ll do something, it’s as good as done. Don’t worry about me bottling out.’

‘That’s the one thing I’m not worried about. You know we’re doing the right thing.’

‘I do. And I tell you, days like these make me glad we decided to do it this way.’

‘You having a bad one?’ The voice was sympathetic, warm.

‘The kind of arse-licking I hate. But I won’t be doing this for much longer.’

A chuckle at the other end of the phone. ‘That’s for sure. This time next week, the world will feel like a very different place.’

Before Yousef could respond, the familiar figure of Howard Edelstein himself loomed up beside his driver’s door, sketching a little wave and gesturing with his thumb towards the building. ‘I gotta go,’ Yousef said. ‘I’ll see you.’

‘Count on it.’

Yousef thumbed the phone shut, jumping out of the car with a smile on his face. Edelstein nodded at him, unsmiling. ‘Let’s get sorted, then,’ he said, leading the way indoors without waiting to see if Yousef was following.

This time next week, Yousef thought. This time next week, you bastard.

Carol stared at Thomas Denby, taking in the image. Prematurely silver hair swept back from his forehead, a single lock falling loose over one eyebrow. Greenish blue eyes, pink skin. A beautifully cut charcoal pinstripe suit, jacket thrown open to reveal a flamboyant scarlet lining. He could have sat for a portrait of the archetype of the successful young consultant. What he absolutely didn’t look like was someone whose idea of a good time was to wind up a senior police officer. ‘So let me get this straight. You’re reporting a murder that hasn’t happened yet?’ She wasn’t in the mood to be messed around, and keeping her waiting for the best part of fifteen minutes hadn’t been the best way to get things started.

Denby shook his head. ‘Murder is your word, not mine. What I am saying is that Robbie Bishop is going to die, probably within the next twenty-four hours. The reason he is going to die is that he has ricin in his system. There is no antidote. There’s nothing we can do for him except to limit his pain as much as possible.’

‘You’re sure about this?’

‘I know it sounds bizarre. Like some James Bond film. But yes, we’re sure. We’ve done the tests. He’s dying from ricin poisoning.’

‘Could it be suicide?’

Denby looked bemused. ‘I shouldn’t think so for a moment.’

‘But could it? In theory?’

He looked faintly annoyed. Carol thought he probably wasn’t accustomed to having his views questioned. He lined up his pen with the edge of the file in front of him. ‘I’ve been reading up on ricin since my SHO proposed it as the possible cause of Robbie Bishop’s symptoms. Ricin works by invading the cells of a person’s body and inhibiting the cells from synthesizing the proteins they need. Without the proteins, cells die. The respiratory system fails, the heart stops. I haven’t seen any suggestion in the literature that it’s ever been used for suicide. Against it, you’d have to say it’s far from readily available. You’d have to have some skills as a chemist to manufacture it, even supposing you could get your hands on the raw material. Either that or you’d have to have connections to a terrorist organization – they allegedly found it stockpiled in the Al-Quaeda caves in Afghanistan. The other aspect militating against it is that it’s a long-drawn-out and very painful way to go. I can’t imagine why anyone would choose it as a means of suicide.’ He spread his hands and raised his shoulders to emphasize his point.

Carol made a note on her pad. ‘So we could also rule out accident, by the sounds of it?’

‘Unless Mr Bishop was in the habit of hanging around castor oil factories, I would say so,’ Denby said brusquely.

‘So how did it get into his system?’

‘He probably inhaled it. We’ve examined him thoroughly and we can’t find any puncture wounds.’ Denby leaned forward. ‘I don’t know if you remember the case of the Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in the late seventies? He was assassinated with a pellet of ricin fired from a doctored umbrella. Once we knew ricin was involved here, I had our ICU team make a thorough examination of Mr Bishop’s skin. No sign of any foreign body being injected.’

Carol felt bemused. ‘It’s hard to believe,’ she said. ‘It’s not the sort of thing that happens in Bradfield.’

‘No,’ Denby said. ‘That’s why it took us a couple of days to figure it out. I suppose it was the same for the doctors at UCH who treated Alexander Litvinenko. The last thing they expected to confront was radiation poisoning. But it happened.’

‘How could he be poisoned without realizing it?’

‘Quite easily,’ Denby said. ‘The data we have on ricin tell us that, if injected, as little as 500 micrograms could be enough to kill an adult. There’s animal research that indicates that inhaling or ingesting similar amounts could be lethal. A 500 microgram dose of ricin would be about the size of the head of a pin. Not hard to slip into a drink or into some food. In those quantities, it would be tasteless.’

‘So we’re looking for someone who had access to his food or drink?’

Denby nodded. ‘That’s the most likely route.’ He fiddled with his pen. ‘It might also be infiltrated into a recreational drug such as cocaine or amphetamine, something snorted. Again, one would not notice any taste or smell.’

‘Do you have blood and urine samples that you can test for recreational drugs?’

Denby nodded. ‘I’ll see that it’s done.’

‘How did you figure it out?’

‘My SHO, Dr Blessing. I think you or one of your colleagues spoke to her in the first instance?’

‘Yes, I know Dr Blessing contacted us. But what alerted her?’

Denby gave a little smirk. Carol liked him even less. ‘I don’t want to sound vain, but Dr Blessing reckoned that if I couldn’t work out what was wrong with Mr Bishop, then it must be something quite a long way out of the ordinary. She checked out the symptoms in our online database and ricin poisoning was the single thing that fit the bill. She brought her conclusions to me, and I ordered the standard test. It came back strongly positive. There really is no room for doubt, Chief Inspector.’

Carol closed her notebook. ‘Thanks for explaining this so clearly,’ she said. ‘You said you’d been reading up on ricin – is there any chance you could put some sort of briefing together for me and my officers?’

‘I’ll get Dr Blessing on to it right away.’ He stood, indicating that the interview was over as far as he was concerned.

‘Can I see him?’ Carol said.

Denby rubbed his thumb against his jaw. ‘Nothing much to see,’ he said. ‘But yes, I’ll take you through. His parents may have come back – they were in the relatives’ room. I had to break the news to them, and they were understandably shocked and upset. I asked them to stay put until they were feeling a little calmer. It doesn’t help the ICU team if people are in an emotional state around the patients.’ He spoke dismissively, as if the smooth running of a hospital ward were infinitely more important than the anguish of parents about to lose a son.

Carol followed him to Robbie Bishop’s bedside. The two chairs by the bed were empty. Carol stood at the foot of the bed, taking in the various monitors, the tubes and machines that were keeping Robbie Bishop as stable as possible on what was going to be a short journey to death. His skin was waxy, a sheen of sweat visible on his cheeks and forehead. She wanted to hold this image in her head. This was going to be a nightmare investigation for all sorts of reasons, and she wanted to make sure she didn’t lose sight of the human being at the heart of it. The media would be clamouring for answers, the fans would be demanding someone’s head on a platter and her bosses would be eager to cover themselves in whatever glory she could drag out of the situation.

Carol was determined to find out who had destroyed Robbie Bishop, and why. But for her own sake, she needed to be sure she was pursuing his killer for the right reasons. Now she’d seen him, she could be a lot more sure of that.

Detective Constable Paula McIntyre knew all about shock and grief. She’d seen countless examples and she was still recovering from experiencing the extremes of both at first hand. So she didn’t read anything into Martin Flanagan’s behaviour other than the obvious fact that he had been shattered to the core by the news Dr Blessing had delivered.

His was the active, agitated response. He couldn’t keep still. It didn’t surprise Paula; she’d seen it before, particularly with men whose livelihoods centred round physical activity, whether on a building site or a sports field. Flanagan paced restlessly, then threw himself into a chair where he fidgeted with fingers and feet till he could stand the confinement no longer. Then he was back on his feet, quartering the room. Paula simply sat, the still point of his whirling world.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Flanagan said. He’d been saying it ever since Paula had arrived, the short sentence a punctuation between everything else he said. ‘He’s been like a son to me, you know. I can’t believe it. This is not what happens to footballers. They break bones, they strain muscles, they snap ligaments, you know. They don’t get poisoned. I can’t believe it.’

Paula let him wind himself up, waiting till he began to wind down before starting with her questions. She was used to waiting. She had become very good at it. Nobody was better at the art of the interview than Paula, and that was due in no small part to her knack of knowing when to dive in and when to hold back. So she waited till Martin Flanagan ran out of steam and fell silent, his forehead leaning against the cool glass of the window, his hands on the wall on either side of the frame. She could see the reflection of his face, haggard with pain.

‘When did Robbie first show signs of being ill?’ she asked.

‘Saturday breakfast. We always stay at the Victoria Grand the night before home games.’ Flanagan shrugged one shoulder upwards. ‘It’s a way of keeping tabs on them, you know. Most of them, they’re young and stupid. They’d be out on the town till all hours if we didn’t keep them on a tight leash. I sometimes think we should have them electronically tagged, like they do with cats and dogs and paedophiles.’

‘And Robbie said he was feeling ill?’

Flanagan sniffed. ‘He came over to my table. I was with Jason Graham, my assistant, and Dave Kermode, the physio, and Robbie said he was feeling out of sorts. Tight chest, sweaty, feverish. And his joints were aching, like he was coming down with the flu, you know. I told him to finish his breakfast and go to his room. I said I’d get the team doctor to come and take a look at him. He said he wasn’t hungry, so he’d just go upstairs and get his head down for a bit.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it, so I can’t.’

‘So Friday night, he definitely wasn’t out on the town?’

‘No way. He shares with Pavel Aljinovic.’ He turned to face Paula and slid down the wall into a crouch. ‘The goalkeeper, you know. They’ve shared since Pavel came to Bradfield two seasons back. Robbie always says Pavel’s a boring bastard, keeps him honest.’ A sad smile tugged at his mouth. ‘There’s some I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw them, you know, but Pavel’s not one of them. Robbie’s right, Pavel is a boring bastard. He’d never have tried to sneak out for a night on the randan. And he wouldn’t have let Robbie do it either.’

‘I’m a bit at sea here,’ Paula said. ‘I don’t really have much of a sense of what Robbie’s typical routine was. Maybe you could run me through it? Say, from Thursday morning?’ Paula wasn’t sure how long the symptoms of ricin poisoning took to develop, but she reckoned going back to Thursday would cover the moment of its administration.

‘We had a UEFA cup match on Wednesday night, so they had Thursday morning off, you know. Robbie came in to see the physio, he’d taken a knock on the ankle and it was a bit swollen. Nothing serious, but they all take their physical condition seriously. It’s their living, you know. Anyway, he was done by half past ten. I assume he went home. He’s got a flat down in the Millennium Quarter, just off Bellwether Square. He turned up for training on Thursday afternoon. We just did a light session, you know. Concentrating on skills more than tactics. We were done by half past four. And I’ve no idea what he did after that.’

‘You don’t have any sense of how he spent his free time?’ Just like a son to you, Paula thought ironically. Robbie Bishop might be twenty-six years old, but if he was anything like most footballers she’d read about in the tabloids, he probably had arrested development. The lifestyle of a sixteen-year-old granted unlimited pocket money and access to beautiful women. The last person who would know what he was up to was anyone in a parental role.

Flanagan shrugged. ‘They’re not children, you know. And I’m not like some managers. I don’t barge into their homes and turn off their stereos and kick their girlfriends out. There are rules about not going out the night before a game. But apart from that, they do their own thing.’ He shook his head again. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘And what was Robbie’s thing?’

‘There’s a fitness centre where he lives. They’ve got a full-sized pool down in the basement. He likes to swim, relax in the sauna, that kind of thing. He’s good pals with Phil Campsie, he’s got a bit of land up on the edge of the moors. They go fishing and shooting together.’ Flanagan pushed himself upright and recommenced his restless pacing. ‘That’s about all I can tell you.’

‘What about girlfriends? Was Robbie seeing anybody special?’

Flanagan shook his head. ‘Not that I knew about. He was engaged for a while. Bindie Blyth, the Radio One DJ. But they called it a day about three months ago.’

Paula’s interest quickened. ‘Who called it a day? Robbie, or Bindie?’

‘I don’t know anything about that. But he didn’t seem to be that bothered, you know.’ He leaned his forehead against the window again. ‘What’s all this got to do with somebody poisoning Robbie, anyway? It’s not his team-mates or his ex who’d be doing that kind of thing.’

‘We have to look at all the possibilities, Mr Flanagan. So, since Bindie, he’s been what? Playing the field?’ Paula winced at her unintentional pun. Please let him not think I’m taking the piss.

‘I suppose.’ He turned back, rubbing his temples with his fingers. ‘You’d have to ask the lads. Phil and Pavel, they’d likely know.’ He looked longingly at the door that led to the ICU. ‘I wish they’d let me see him, you know. To say goodbye, at least. I can’t believe it.’

‘What about Friday? Do you know what he did then?’

‘We were at the training ground on Friday.’ Flanagan paused for a moment. ‘Come to think of it, he was a bit lacklustre. Head down, a bit slow off the ball. As if he was kind of dozy. I didn’t think anything of it, you know. They all have their off days and, frankly, you’d rather they had them on a training session than a match. He wasn’t off it enough for me to do anything about it, though. And then when he said he had the flu on Saturday, I put it down to that.’

Paula nodded. ‘Anyone would have done the same. Now, I have to ask you this. Is there anyone you can think of who has a grudge against Robbie? Has he had any hate mail? Any problems with stalkers?’

Flanagan winced and shook his head. ‘You don’t get to where he is without pissing off one or two people along the way. You know? Like, there’s always been a bit of needle between him and Nils Petersen, the Man United centre-back. But that’s football. It’s not real life. I mean, if he ran into Petersen in a bar, they’d likely indulge in a bit of argy-bargy, but that’d be the size of it. It wouldn’t come to blows, never mind poisoning.’ He threw his hands into the air. ‘It’s insane. It’s like something in a bad film. There’s nothing more I can tell you, because none of it makes sense.’ He gestured towards the door with his thumb. ‘That lad in there is dying and it’s a tragedy. That’s all I know.’

Paula sensed she’d reached the end of Flanagan’s capacity for answers. They’d probably have to talk to him again, but for now she thought there wasn’t likely to be much more he could tell her. She stood up. ‘I hope you get to say goodbye, Mr Flanagan. Thank you for talking to me.’

He nodded, too distracted now to care what she had to say. Paula walked away, thinking about death and second chances. She’d been given her life back, complete with its load of survivor guilt. But thanks to Tony Hill, she was starting to understand that she had to make that gift mean something. Robbie Bishop was as good a place to start as any.

Not all of Robbie Bishop’s fans were outside Bradfield Cross. Those who lived in Ratcliffe had decided against the cross-town journey and settled for bringing their bunches of supermarket flowers and their children’s paintings to Bradfield Victoria’s training ground. They were propped along the chain-link fence that kept the punters away from the stars. Detective Sergeant Kevin Matthews couldn’t help a faint shudder of distaste as he waited for the gate security to call through and confirm their permission to enter the ground. He couldn’t be doing with these public outpourings of synthetic emotion. He wouldn’t mind betting that none of those who had made their pilgrimage to the Ratcliffe ground had ever exchanged more than a few words along the lines of, ‘And who shall I sign it to?’ with Robbie Bishop. It wasn’t so long since Kevin had had to mourn for real, and he resented the cheapness of their gestures. In his view, if the pilgrims lavished those emotions on the living – their kids, partners and parents – the world would be a better place.

‘Tacky,’ Chris Devine said from the passenger seat as if reading his mind.

‘This is nothing to what there’ll be in a couple of days, after he’s actually died,’ Kevin said as the guard waved them through, pointing to the parking area near the long, low building that impeded the view of the field from the street. He slowed as they passed the Ferraris and Porsches of the players. ‘Nice motors,’ he said approvingly.

‘You’ve got a Ferrari, haven’t you?’ Chris said, recalling something Paula had told her.

He sighed. ‘Mondial QV cabriolet, Ferrari red. One of only twenty-four right-hand-drive cabs ever built. She’s a dream machine, and she’s going soon.’

‘Oh no. Poor Kevin. Why are you getting rid?’

‘She’s really only a two-seater and the kids are getting too big to squeeze in. She’s a single person’s car, Chris. I don’t suppose you’re interested?’

‘A bit rich for my blood, I think. I’d never hear the end of it from Sinead. She’d be telling me it was my mid-life crisis car.’

‘Shame. I’d like to be sure she’s going to a good home. At least I’ve managed to get a stay of execution for a bit.’

‘How come?’

‘There’s this journalist, Justin Adams. He writes for the car magazines and he wants to do an article about ordinary blokes who drive extraordinary cars. Apparently a cop with a Ferrari is right up his street. So I got Stella to agree that I get to keep the car till the magazine article comes out, so I don’t get the piss taken out of me for having my name and my photo in a magazine when I don’t own the car any more.’ Chris grinned. ‘Sounds like a good deal to me.’

‘Yeah, well, the countdown begins next week, when we do the interview.’ Kevin sniffed as he got out of the car. ‘Digestive day,’ he said.

‘What?’

He pointed to the west, where a two-storey brick building slumped along the boundary of the playing fields. ‘The biscuit factory. When I was a kid, I trained for a season with the Vic juniors. When the wind’s in the right direction, you can tell what biscuits they’re baking. I always thought it was a refined form of torture for teenage lads trying to keep fit.’

‘What happened?’ Chris asked, following him round the end of the changing pavilion.

Kevin strode ahead of her so she couldn’t see the regret on his face. ‘I wasn’t good enough,’ he said. ‘Many are called but few are chosen.’

‘That must have been rough.’

Kevin gave a little snort of laughter. ‘At the time, I thought it was the end of the world.’

‘And now?’

‘The money would have been better, that’s for sure. And I’d have a fleet of Ferraris.’

‘True,’ Chris said, catching up with him as he paused, looking out across the grass where a couple of dozen young men were dribbling balls around traffic cones. ‘But for most footballers, you’re on the scrapheap by the time you’re our age. And what’s left? Sure, a handful make it into management, but a lot more end up behind the bar in some shitty pub trading on their glory days and bitching about the ex-wife that cleaned them out.’

Kevin grinned at her. ‘And you think that would be worse than this?’

‘You know it would.’

As they rounded the building, a man in shorts and a Bradfield Victoria sweatshirt headed their way. He looked to be in his middle forties, but he was in such good shape it was hard to be certain. If his dark hair had still been in a mullet, he’d have been instantly recognizable to football fans and indifferents alike. But now it was cut close to his head, it took Kevin a moment to realize he was face to face with one of the heroes of his youth.

‘You’re Terry Malcolm,’ he blurted out, twelve again and besotted with the ball skills of the England and Bradfield midfielder.

Terry Malcolm turned to Chris with a smile and said, ‘I’ll be all right if I ever get Alzheimer’s. You’d be amazed how often people feel the need to tell me who I am. You must be Sergeant Devine. I’m only guessing, mind. In a hopeful sort of way, on account of he’s not my type and I can’t see myself calling him Devine.’ His expression said he was accustomed to people finding him funny and charming. Kevin, already disillusioned with his former hero, was pleased to see Chris Devine unmoved.

‘Mr Flanagan told you why we’re here?’ Kevin said, his tone slightly incredulous. As if he couldn’t quite believe anyone who worked for Bradfield Vic could be so flippant while their finest player lay dying.

Malcolm looked suitably chastened. ‘He did. And believe me, I’m gutted about Robbie. But I can’t afford to let my feelings show. There’s another twenty-one players on the squad who need to stay motivated. We’ve got Spurs in the premiership on Saturday and we can’t afford to be dropping points at this stage in the season.’ He gave Chris the benefit of his smile again. ‘I hope that doesn’t sound callous. Like I said, I’m gutted. But our boys need to be kept on their toes. On Saturday, we’ll be winning it for Robbie. All the more reason not to chuck our routines in the bin.’

‘Quite,’ Chris said. ‘And we need to check out Robbie’s movements in the forty-eight hours before he started feeling ill on Saturday. We want to talk to his mates. The ones who are close enough to know what he was up to between the end of training on Thursday and breakfast on Saturday.’

Malcolm nodded. ‘You want to talk to Pavel Aljinovic and Phil Campsie. Robbie bunks up with Pavel when we’re in a hotel. And Phil’s his best mate.’ Malcolm made no move to summon the players.

‘Now, Mr Malcolm,’ Chris said.

Again the cheap and cheesy smile. ‘It’s Terry, love.’

It was Chris’s turn to smile. ‘I’m not your love, Mr Malcolm. I am a police officer investigating a very serious attack on one of your colleagues. And I want to talk to either Pavel Aljinovic or Phil Campsie right now.’

Malcolm shook his head. ‘They’re training. I can’t interrupt that.’

Kevin flushed an unbecoming scarlet, his freckles darkening across his cheeks. ‘Do you want me to arrest you for police obstruction? Because you’re going the right way about it.’

Malcolm’s lip lifted in a sneer. ‘I don’t think you’ll be arresting me. Your boss likes his seat in the directors’ box far too much for that.’

‘That cuts both ways,’ Chris said sweetly. ‘It means we have a hotline to your boss, too. And I don’t think he’d be very impressed to hear you’ve been impeding our inquiries into the attempted murder of his star player.’

Although Chris had spoken, it was Kevin who was on the receiving end of a glare of deep dislike. Malcolm was clearly one of those men who could only flirt with women and talk with men. ‘I’ll get Pavel.’ He gestured with his thumb towards the pavilion. ‘Wait inside there, I’ll sort you out a room in a minute.’

Five minutes later, they were sitting in a weights room that smelled of stale sweat and muscle rub. The Croatian international goalkeeper was hot on their heels. As he walked in, his nose twitched and a look of distaste crossed his chiselled features. ‘Stinks in here, sorry,’ he said, pulling a plastic chair from a short stack against the wall and sitting down opposite the two detectives. ‘I am Pavel Aljinovic.’ He nodded formally to them both.

The word that came to Kevin’s mind was ‘dignified’. Aljinovic had shoulder-length dark hair, normally pulled back in a tight ponytail on match days, but flowing free this afternoon. His eyes were the colour of conkers baked in the oven then polished on a sleeve. High cheekbones over hollow cheeks, full lips and a narrow, straight nose made him look almost aristocratic. ‘Coach says somebody tried to poison Robbie,’ he said, his accent faint but unmistakably Slavic. ‘How can this be?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Chris said, leaning forward, elbows on knees and hands clasped.

‘And Robbie? How is he doing?’

‘Not very well,’ Kevin said.

‘But he will be OK?’

‘We’re not doctors. We can’t say.’ Chris wanted to avoid making it clear that Robbie’s death was inevitable. In her experience, there was a substantial brake on what people were willing to say once the stakes were raised to murder. ‘It would help if we knew where Robbie was on Thursday and Friday.’

‘Of course he was at training sessions. Thursday night, I don’t know what he did.’ Aljinovic spread his big goalkeeper’s hands. ‘I am goalkeeper, not Robbie’s keeper. But on Friday night, we shared the hotel room. We all had dinner together, like usual. Steak and potatoes and salad and a glass of red wine. Fruit salad and ice cream. We always have the same thing, me and Robbie. Actually, most of the guys. We went upstairs about nine o’clock. Robbie took a bath and I called my wife. We watched the Sky football channel together until about ten, then we went to sleep.’

‘Did Robbie have anything out of the mini-bar?’ Kevin asked.

Aljinovic chuckled. ‘You don’t know much about football, do you? They don’t give us keys for the minibar. We’re supposed to stay pure. This is why we are in a hotel and not at home. They can control what we eat and drink and they can keep us away from women.’

Chris returned his smile. ‘I thought that was a myth, keeping your strength up before a match by avoiding sex.’

‘It’s not the sex, it’s the sleep,’ Aljinovic said. ‘They like us to have good sleep before a game.’

‘Did Robbie have any food or drink with him? Bottled water, whatever?’

‘No. There is always plenty of water in the room.’ He frowned. ‘You have reminded me. Friday evening, Robbie said he was very thirsty. He said he felt as if he was coming down with a cold or something. He didn’t make a big deal out of it, just that he wasn’t feeling great. And of course in the morning, he thought he had flu. I was worried in case I might catch it. This feeling like flu, is this the poison? Or is he sick too?’

‘It’s the poison.’ Kevin looked directly into his eyes. ‘Did Robbie take cocaine on Friday evening?’

Aljinovic reared backwards, an expression of affront on his face. ‘Of course not. No. Who told you that? Robbie didn’t use drugs. Why are you asking this?’

‘It’s possible he inhaled the poison. If it was mixed in with cocaine or amphetamine, Robbie might not have noticed,’ Chris said.

‘No. This is not possible. Not possible at all. I will not believe this about him.’

‘You said earlier that you’re a goalkeeper, not Robbie’s keeper. How can you be so sure he never uses drugs?’ Kevin said, his voice mild but his eyes intent.

‘We have talked about it. About drugs in sports. And for fun. Robbie and me, we think the same. It’s a fool’s game. You cheat yourself, you cheat the fans, you cheat your club. We both know people who use drugs and we both despise them.’ He spoke vehemently. ‘Whoever poisoned Robbie, they didn’t do it with drugs.’

By the time Carol arrived at Robbie Bishop’s flat, Detective Constable Sam Evans had already made a start on the search. The footballer’s home was a penthouse complete with roof terrace in the heart of the city. The building had been a department store; the main living area was bright with daylight that poured in through metal-framed Art Deco windows. Sam was going through the desk drawers, caught in a shaft of sunlight that made his coffee-coloured skin glow. He looked up as Carol walked in, giving her a rueful shake of the head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not so far.’

‘What kind of nothing?’ She snapped a pair of latex gloves over her hands.

‘Neatly filed bills, bank statements, credit card statements. He pays his bills on time, he pays his credit cards off every month. He’s got an account with a bookie, gambles a few hundred a month on the ponies. Nothing that stands out. I haven’t looked at the computer yet, I thought I’d leave that for Stacey.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be thrilled. You think she knows what football is?’ Carol said, crossing to look out of the window. A hawk’s-eye view of the city centre; people going about their business, trams criss-crossing, fountains playing, Big Issue sellers cajoling, shoppers dawdling by windows full of promises. None of them thinking about poisoning a premiership footballer with ricin, not today. Tomorrow or the day after, when Robbie Bishop finally died, it would be different. But not today. Not yet. She turned back. ‘What have you done so far?’

‘Just the desk.’

Carol nodded. She looked around. Sam had been right to start at the desk. There weren’t many other search options. The dining area, all glass and steel, had nothing to hide. There were a couple of groups of scarlet leather sofas, one centred on a huge plasma screen home cinema system complete with PlayStation, the other set around a low glass coffee table whose leading edge looked like a breaking wave. A wall of shelves housed a vast collection of DVDs and CDs. Someone would have to go through every one, but she’d leave that to the crime scene team. She walked over to the media collection. The CDs were mostly by people she’d never heard of. The names she did recognize were dance and hip-hop; she assumed the rest were similar in flavour.

The DVDs were roughly arranged – football on two shelves in the middle, popular action and comedy movies beneath them, TV comedy and drama above them. PlayStation and PC computer games filled the bottom shelf. The top one, appropriately, held the porn. Carol skimmed the titles, deciding Robbie’s taste in porn was as unadventurous as his taste in film and drama. Unless there was a secret stash somewhere, it appeared that Robbie’s sexual inclinations were not the sort to get him killed.

Carol wandered through to the bedroom, smiling wryly at the sight of a bed that must have been seven feet wide. The rumpled dark blue silk sheets were piled with fake furs, and a dozen pillows were scattered around. Another plasma TV dominated the wall opposite the bed, and the other walls displayed paintings of nudes that the vendor had almost certainly described as ‘artistic’.

A walk-in wardrobe ran the whole length of one wall. There was an empty section. Carol wondered if that had been where his fiancée had hung her clothes, or if he’d just been having a clear-out. At the far end were two rectangular baskets, one labelled ‘laundry’, the other ‘dry cleaning’. Both were almost full. Presumably, someone else took care of them. Luckily, they hadn’t been in since Robbie had been taken ill.

The top layer of the laundry basket consisted of a pair of Armani jeans, Calvin Klein trunks and an extravagantly striped Paul Smith shirt. Carol picked up the jeans and went through the pockets. At first, she thought they were empty, but as her fingers probed, they encountered a screw of paper rammed right down into the seam of the front right-hand pocket. She pulled it out and gently teased the creases and folds apart.

It was the corner of a page of lined paper, apparently torn from a notebook. Written in black ink was, ‘www.bestdays.co. uk’. Carol took it through to the living area and asked Sam for an evidence bag. ‘What you got, boss?’ he asked, handing one over.

Carol dropped the paper in the bag, sealing and dating it. ‘A url. Probably nothing. Take it back for Stacey, please. You find anything?’

Sam shook his head. ‘I tell you, he looks a pretty boring bastard to me.’

Carol went back through to the bedroom. Bedside tables held few surprises – condoms, breath mints, tissues, a blister pack of Nurofen, a pinkie-sized butt plug and a tube of KY. Carol was pretty sure that, these days, that counted as vanilla. Interestingly, the book tucked into the drawer on the left was Michael Crick’s critical biography of Manchester United’s boss, Alex Ferguson. Though Carol was far from knowledgeable about football, even she knew that in a world of celebrity soccer hagiographies this was an interesting choice.

Nothing in the ensuite bathroom gave Carol a moment’s pause. Sighing, she returned to Sam. ‘It’s almost spooky,’ she said. ‘There’s so little personality here.’

Sam snorted. ‘Probably because he hasn’t got one. These football stars – they’re all stuck in their adolescence. They get picked up by the big clubs before they’ve had their first kiss, and the management system takes over from their mums. If they make the grade, they’re cash rich and common sense poor by the time they’re out of their teens. They’re wrapped in cotton wool and models’ thighs. Way more money than sense or experience. Bunch of Peter Pans with added testosterone.’

Carol grinned. ‘You sound bitter. Did you lose a girlfriend to one of them, or what?’

Sam returned her grin. ‘The women I like are too smart for footballers. No, I’m just bitter because I can’t afford a Bentley GTC Mulliner.’ Sam waved an invoice at her. ‘His new car. Delivery next month.’

Carol whistled. ‘I know men who would kill for one of those. But probably not using ricin.’ As she spoke, her phone rang. ‘DCI Jordan,’ she said.

‘This is Dr Blessing. Mr Denby asked me to call you. Robbie Bishop’s taken a turn for the worse. We don’t think he’s got long. I don’t know if you want to be here?’

‘I’m on my way,’ Carol said. She closed her phone and sighed. ‘Looks like this is about to become a murder inquiry.’

They were waiting for Phil Campsie. Chris idly picked up a dumbbell and did a few forearm curls. ‘He’s the ugly one, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘The one who looks like a cross between a monkey and Mr Potato Head?’

‘Phil Campsie, you mean? Yeah, he’s ugly.’ Kevin stretched, yawning. His four-year-old daughter had recently lost the knack of sleeping through the night. His wife, not unreasonably, had pointed out that when Ruby had been breastfeeding, she had been the one who had had to deal with broken nights. Now it was Kevin’s turn to soothe his daughter back to sleep. It didn’t feel fair, not when he was going out to work and Stella was staying home. But it was hard to argue against without sounding like he didn’t love his daughter. ‘He’s very ugly,’ he said through the tail end of the yawn.

‘So it’s not just teenage girls who pair up according to looks.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Pretty one, ugly one. Symbiosis. The pretty one gets to look even better next to the ugly one, and the ugly one gets the pretty one’s cast-offs. Win-win.’

Kevin tutted. ‘That’s not very sisterly of you.’

Chris gave a derisive snort. ‘See, Kevin, you keep conflating lesbian and feminist. Try lesbian and pragmatist next time.’

He grinned. ‘I’ll try and remember. So, you think that’s what was going on with Robbie and Phil?’

‘To some degree. Of course, Phil is also rich and famous, which trumps ugly every time. But I bet it didn’t hurt, going out on the town with one of the most recognizable, handsome and eligible men in Europe. Not to mention sexy.’

‘You think Robbie’s sexy?’

‘Sex appeal is gender blind, Kevin. Don’t tell me you don’t think Robbie is sexy, deep down.’

Kevin flushed. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

‘But you like the way he looks. The way he moves. The way he dresses,’ Chris persisted.

‘I suppose.’

‘It’s all right, it doesn’t mean you’re a poof. All I’m trying to say is that Robbie’s got sex appeal, charisma, call it what you will. David Beckham’s got it, Gary Neville hasn’t. John Lennon had it, Paul McCartney doesn’t. Bill Clinton has it, Dubya definitely doesn’t. And if you don’t have it, the next best thing is to hang around with somebody who does.’ Chris put down the dumbbell as the door opened. She turned on her best smile. ‘Mr Campsie. Thanks for making the time to talk to us.’

Phil Campsie hooked his ankle round the chair and pulled it a couple of feet further away from them before he sat down. ‘It’s for Robbie, innit?’ His London accent was almost as strong as Chris’s own. ‘Do anything for him. He’s me mate.’

Kevin made the introductions. Close up, Phil Campsie was even more unattractive. He had pale, mottled skin like a scrubbed potato, a flat nose that looked as if it had been broken a couple of times. His small grey eyes were set wide on his cannonball head. His reddish hair was cut close and already the shape of male pattern baldness was etched into his hairline. But when he smiled, as well as uneven yellowing teeth he revealed a genuine spark of cheeky warmth. Kevin led off. ‘We hear Robbie probably spends more time with you after work than any of his other teammates.’

‘’S right. Me and Robbie, we’re like that –’ Phil crossed the first two fingers of his right hand.

‘So, what kind of stuff do you guys get up to?’ Chris raised her eyebrows, as if to suggest that nothing he said could shock her.

‘This and that. I got a place outside the city. Bit of land, couple of miles of trout stream. Me and Robbie, we do a bit of rough shooting – rabbits, pigeons, that kind of thing. And we go fishing.’ He grinned, looking like the small boy he must have been not so long ago. ‘I’ve got this woman comes in from the village, cooks and cleans for me. She deals with the stuff we kill. Cooks it all up, sticks it in the freezer. There’s something really cool about eating something you’ve killed yourself, know what I mean?’

‘Impressive,’ Chris said, before Kevin could put his foot in it. ‘And what about a social life? What do you do for fun when you’re not slaughtering the wildlife?’

‘We go out in town,’ Phil said. ‘Nice bit of dinner somewhere smart, then on to a club.’ He gave a curiously self-deprecating little shrug. ‘The clubs like having us. Gives them a bit of a profile. So we get taken to the VIP areas, free champagne, very tasty girls.’

‘We’re interested in Robbie’s movements on Thursday and Friday,’ Kevin said.

Phil nodded, rolling his big shoulders as if squaring up to someone. ‘Thursday after training, we went back to Robbie’s flat. We played on the PlayStation for a bit. GT HD, you know? The new one, with the Ferraris? Well cool. We had a couple of beers then we went out for dinner to Las Bravas. It’s Spanish,’ he added, apparently trying to be helpful.

‘I hear it’s very nice there. What did you have to eat?’ Chris asked, mild as milk.

‘We had a load of tapas between us. We kind of left it to the waiter and he brought us a right old mix of stuff. Most of it was lovely, but I couldn’t be doing with some of the seafood.’ He pulled a face. ‘I mean, who wants to eat a baby squid? Yech.’

‘Did you both eat the same things?’ Kevin said.

Phil thought for a moment, his eyes turning up and to the left. ‘Pretty much,’ he said slowly. ‘Robbie didn’t have the garlic mushrooms, he doesn’t like mushrooms. But apart from that, yeah, we both gave everything a whirl.’

‘And drink?’

‘We was on the rioja. We got as far as the second bottle, but we didn’t finish it.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘We went on to Amatis. D’you know it? Dance club the far side of Temple Fields?’

Kevin nodded. ‘We’re police officers, Phil. We know Amatis.’

‘It’s a nice place,’ Phil said defensively. ‘Nice people. And great music.’

‘You into music, then? You and Robbie?’

Phil blew out a big breath, making his lips flap. ‘Me, I’m not bothered as long as it’s got a decent beat. But Robbie, he’s well into it, yeah. He used to be engaged to Bindie Blyth.’ Seeing their looks of incomprehension, he gave them more. ‘The Radio One late-night DJ. It was music what brought them together.’ He shifted in his seat, sticking his legs out in front of him and crossing them at the ankles. ‘Wasn’t enough to keep them together, though. They split up a couple of months back.’

Chris could feel Kevin come alert beside her. She tried for nonchalant. ‘How come?’ she said.

‘Why d’you wanna know about Bindie?’

Chris spread her hands. ‘Me, I’m just interested in everything. Why did they split?’

Phil looked away. ‘Just wasn’t going anywhere.’

‘Was he messing around behind her back?’ Chris asked.

Phil gave her a cagey glance. ‘This doesn’t go no further, right?’

‘Right. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,’ Chris said.

‘It’s the world we live in,’ Phil said. For an insane moment, Chris thought he was going to make some philosophical point about the human condition. ‘Every time we go out the house, we’re surrounded by people who want to make an impression. Women who want to shag us, blokes who either want to buy us a drink or fight us. And if your girlfriend’s a couple of hundred miles away most of the time, you’d have to be a saint. And Robbie ain’t no saint.’

‘So Bindie got the hump and gave him the elbow?’

‘Pretty much. But they didn’t want the tabloids all over them, so they both agreed they’d just say it was a mutual thing, too hard to keep it going with them both having high-pressure careers. No hard feelings, that sort of thing.’

‘And were there any hard feelings?’ Kevin butted in. Chris wanted to slap him for breaking her flow.

Phil cocked his head. ‘No.’ It came out firm and defensive. Then a frown slowly furrowed his forehead. ‘Wait a minute. You’re not thinking Bindie had anything to do with this?’ He gave a roar of laughter. ‘Fucking hell, it’s obvious you’ve never listened to her show. Bindie’s got balls. If she was that pissed off, she’d have sent Robbie home with his nuts in a paper bag. Bindie’s the kind of woman who lets you have it to your face. No way she’d be sneaking around with poison.’ He shook his head. ‘Mental.’

‘Nobody’s suggesting Bindie had anything to do with this, Phil. We’re just trying to get a picture of Robbie’s life. So, Thursday. Tell us about Amatis.’

Phil shifted in his chair, a man preparing to be less than candid. ‘Not much to tell. We was in the VIP area mostly, drinking champagne. There was a couple of the lads from Yorkshire Cricket Club there, that geezer that presents the TV show about making a mint from what’s in your attic, some twat that was on Big Brother a couple of series back. I didn’t recognize any other blokes. And the usual sort of birds. Tasty but with a bit of class. That’s the sort of bird you get at Amatis.’

‘Was Robbie with anyone in particular?’

Phil thought for a moment. ‘Not really. We was both up dancing, but he wasn’t with the same bird for long. He kept chopping and changing, like he couldn’t find one he really fancied.’ He smirked. ‘Not like me. I pulled practically right away. Jasmine, her name was. Legs up to heaven, tits out to here.’ He mimed substantial breasts. ‘So I wasn’t paying too much attention to Robbie, if you catch my drift. He went down the vodka bar for a while after I clicked with Jasmine. Me and her, we decided to go back to hers, so I went looking for Robbie. Found him on his way back from the toilet. I said I was going back to Jasmine’s, he was cool with that. He said he’d run into somebody he was at school with and they was having a drink.’ Phil shrugged. ‘Next time I saw him was training on Friday and he looked rough as a badger’s arse. I said he looked like he’d made a night of it. He went all sheepish, said he couldn’t actually remember. Well, that’s the way it goes sometimes, innit? You get so wellied, it’s all just a black hole the next morning.’

Chris realized she was holding her breath. She let it out and said, ‘This old school friend. Do they have a name?’

‘He never said. He never even said if it was a bird or a bloke.’ Phil looked upset. ‘I should have asked him, shouldn’t I? I should have taken better care of him.’

Chris hid her disappointment behind a smile. ‘Nobody’s blaming you, Phil. We don’t know when Robbie was poisoned. But in my experience, when somebody is determined to attack another person, it’s very hard to stop them succeeding.’

‘He’s going to be all right, isn’t he? I mean, the doctors know what they’re doing, right?’ He bit his lower lip. ‘He’s strong as an ox, is Robbie. And he’s a fighter.’

Kevin looked away, leaving it up to Chris to decide which way to go. ‘They’re doing their best,’ she said. ‘You guys’ll be out on the town again before you know it.’

Phil pursed his lips and nodded. He looked close to tears. ‘You’ll never walk alone, innit.’ He got to his feet. ‘Right then. I better get back.’

Chris stood up and put a hand on his upper arm. ‘Thanks, Phil. You’ve been a big help.’ She watched him go, broad shoulders bowed, all spring removed from his step. The door closed behind him and Kevin turned to her.

‘I’m guessing you don’t have him down as number one suspect?’

Chris shook her head. ‘He probably thinks ricin is something horses and greyhounds do. At least he gave us something.’

‘The old school mate?’

‘The very same. Lots of potential motive there. Was the golden boy a bit of a bully? Did he seduce somebody else’s girlfriend? Did he commit a dirty tackle that ruined somebody else’s chances of stardom?’

Kevin headed for the door. ‘Definitely a bone for the DCI to chew on.’

‘Just what she needs. Something to take her mind off the fact that nobody told her Tony was in hospital.’

Kevin winced. ‘Don’t. I tell you, if it had been anybody except Paula on duty this weekend, there would have been blood and teeth on the floor.’

‘What is it with Tony and the guv’nor? First time I met them, I was convinced they were an item. But everybody says no, nay, never. I don’t get it.’

‘Nobody gets it,’ Kevin said. ‘Least of all them, I suspect.’

If Sam Evans had a motto, it was that knowledge is power. His application of the aphorism was indiscriminate; he worked at acquiring information about and ahead of his colleagues as thoroughly as he did against criminals. So, after Carol had left Robbie Bishop’s apartment, he decided to sneak a quick look at the footballer’s computer ahead of Stacey. He knew there were good reasons why he should leave it alone, but from what he had gleaned of Robbie Bishop, Sam didn’t expect his computer to be equipped with a logic bomb primed to destroy all data if a stranger attempted to access it.

He was right. It wasn’t even password-protected. It was tempting to start opening files, but he knew that would leave the sort of traces Stacey couldn’t fail to notice. But he reckoned he’d be safe enough copying files on to the blank CD-ROMs he’d found in one of the desk drawers.

It didn’t take him long to realize there wasn’t much worth copying, at least from an information point of view. There were thousands of music files; according to Robbie’s iTunes software, it would take 7.3 days to listen to them all. A serious amount of music, but not likely to shed any light on Robbie’s murder. Also unlikely to serve any useful purpose were a few dozen saved game files, further evidence of his recreational software habit. Instead, Sam concentrated on the emails, the photos and a handful of Word files. Even with such ruthless culling, it still took three CDs to download what he wanted for himself.

Then he closed down the machine, confident that he was bomb-proof. Let Stacey play with it as much as she wanted. He had the head start he needed to make sure he was right out in front of the rest of the team.

Satisfied, Sam turned off the computer and returned to the desk. Now he had something solid to work with, he minded less that he was stuck here when he should be out on the front line interviewing the key players. Bloody Jordan. It didn’t matter what he did, she refused to be impressed. He was going to have to figure out a way to go round her if he was going to make the headway he craved. Sill mildly pissed off, he reached for his cigarettes and lit up. It wasn’t like Robbie Bishop would be back to complain.

Carol stood in the shadows, watching the final act of Robbie Bishop’s tragedy play out before her. Not even the machines could keep him alive any longer. Denby had explained it to her when she’d arrived at the hospital. ‘As I told you before, ricin stops the cells manufacturing the proteins they need, so they start to die. We can compensate for that to some degree with machines, but there comes a point where the blood pressure falls so low we simply can’t get enough oxygen to the brain, and everything begins to shut down. That’s the point we’ve reached now.’

He was, she knew, in no pain. There was morphine to take care of that. And prophanol to keep him asleep. Although he was still technically alive, there was nothing left of what had made Robbie Bishop himself. It was hard to believe that the man she was watching die had inspired his team-mates to a memorable victory only days before. He didn’t look like an athlete any longer. His head was swollen to twice its normal size, his body bloated and distended. Under the thin bedclothes, his formerly beautiful legs looked like twin pillars. Robbie Bishop, sporting hero, idol of millions, looked utterly pitiful.

His mother sat by his side, both hands clutching limp fingers turned black from the lack of peripheral circulation brought on by the very drugs they’d given him in their attempts to raise his blood pressure. Silent tears coursed down her cheeks. She was only in her late forties, but the past couple of days had turned her into an old woman, hunched and bewildered. Behind her stood her husband, his hands tight on her shoulders. The resemblance between him and his son when healthy was striking. Brian Bishop was a living reminder of what Robbie would never become.

On the other side of the bed, Martin Flanagan stood, head bowed, hands clasped in front of him. Carol could see his face was screwed tight with the effort of not crying. After England’s last dismal World Cup exit, Carol had thought it was acceptable for real men to shed tears. Perhaps not for those of Flanagan’s generation, she thought.

As she watched, Robbie’s chest seemed to seize, his body to spasm. All over in seconds. When it was done, the heart monitor’s numbers were plummeting, the blood pressure sinking like a stone, the blood oxygen saturation falling in a blur of digital display. ‘I’m very sorry,’ Thomas Denby said. ‘We need to switch off the life support now.’

Mrs Bishop wailed. Just one long keening cry, then she fell forward, her head against the side of her boy, her hand clawing at his bloated chest, as if she could somehow thrust life back into him. Her husband turned away, his hands over his face, his shoulders shaking. Flanagan was slumped against the wall in a crouch, his head on his knees.

It was too much. Carol stepped away. When she emerged into the corridor, Denby was at her shoulder. ‘We’ll have to issue a statement, hold a press conference. I suggest we make it a joint one.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Half an hour enough for you to prepare?’

‘I’m not sure we should …’

‘Look, I’m going to have to tell them what we know, which is that Robbie Bishop died from ricin poisoning. They’re going to want to know what you people are doing. All I’m trying to do is to make sure the whole story comes out at once, rather than have a raft of speculation floating around any announcement I make.’ Denby sounded irritated, a man unaccustomed to being challenged.

Carol had never had any problem standing up to men like Denby, but she had learned to pick her battlegrounds. ‘I suppose I’ve had more experience than you at trying to do my job in the midst of a hostile media rattling their sabres,’ she said sweetly. ‘If it makes it easier for you to have my support at the press conference, I’m sure it can be arranged. Where will we be meeting the press?’

Thoroughly wrong-footed, Denby said curtly, ‘The boardroom on the second floor is probably the best place. I’ll see you there in twenty minutes.’ And he was gone, his white coat so starched it barely stirred in the wind of his passage.

‘Bastard,’ she muttered under her breath.

‘Problems, chief?’ Paula stood in the doorway of the family room where she’d earlier interviewed Flanagan.

‘Mr Denby doesn’t like hanging around. Pronounces death one minute, announces the press conference the next. I’d have liked a little more time to make sure I was up to speed, that’s all.’

‘You want me to ring round the team? Get the bullet points?’

Carol had trouble taking Paula’s eagerness at face value. When she’d found herself in a similar position professionally, she’d felt rage, resentment and a burning desire for vengeance. She couldn’t imagine any circumstances in which she could have worked for those who had let her down and betrayed her trust. Yet instead of hating her, Paula seemed to be even more driven to win her approval. Carol had asked Tony to explain it to her, but he’d been hampered by his own clinical involvement with Paula. All he’d felt able to say was, ‘She genuinely doesn’t blame you for what went wrong that night in Temple Fields. She understands that you didn’t hang her out to dry. That you did everything you could to keep her safe. There’s no hidden agenda here, Carol. You can trust that she’s on your side.’

So now she tried. She smiled and put a hand on Paula’s arm. ‘That would be a big help. I’m going to put some notes together down in the café – I need the caffeine. I’ll see you there in quarter of an hour.’

As she walked, Carol disregarded the hospital rule forbidding mobiles and called her boss. John Brandon, the Chief Constable of Bradfield Metropolitan Police, had been responsible for dragging her back into the world of policing when she’d desperately wanted to leave it for good. He’d created the Major Incident Team she headed up, and he was the one senior police officer she trusted without reservation.

She brought him up to date on the Robbie Bishop situation, explaining the need for a joint press conference.

‘Go ahead,’ Brandon said. ‘You’re the one on the ground. I trust your judgement.’

‘There’s only one thing I’m not sure of – I don’t know whether to go public with murder or stick with suspicious death.’

‘Do you think it’s murder?’

‘Hard to see how it could be anything else.’

‘Then go with murder. High-profile case like this, they’ll crucify us if they think we’re covering our backs. Call it as you see it.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘And, Carol – keep me on the page with you on this one.’

Carol ended the call not a moment too soon. As she thrust her phone back into her bag, a TV reporter standing on the fringes of the press battalion recognized her. He broke away, calling her name, running towards her.

Carol smiled and waggled her fingers in a wave. She was deep in the warren of hospital corridors before he reached the main door. It was beginning.

Yousef walked into the living room just after the regional evening news programme began. He started to speak, but Raj and Sanjar both shushed him. ‘What?’ he protested, giving Raj a shove so he’d move up and let Yousef squeeze in on the end of the sofa.

‘It’s Robbie Bishop,’ Sanjar said. ‘He’s dead.’

‘No way,’ Yousef protested.

‘Shush,’ Raj insisted. Of the three brothers, he was the only real football fan. Sanjar loved cricket, but Yousef had never caught the sports bug. Still, given his plans for the weekend, this story was interesting.

On the screen, the newsreader looked solemn. ‘And now we are going live to a press conference at Bradfield Cross Hospital where Robbie Bishop’s doctor, Mr Thomas Denby, is making a statement.’

The picture changed. Some geezer in a serious suit and a sharp haircut was sitting at a table flanked by a good-looking blonde and a nothing brunette in a white coat. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Robbie Bishop died in the Intensive Care Unit here at Bradfield Cross half an hour ago. His parents and Martin Flanagan, the manager of Bradfield Victoria, were with him when he died.’ Posh voice. Cleared his throat and went on. ‘We have known for some hours that there was nothing further we could do for Robbie except to make sure his last hours were as comfortable as possible.’ There was a buzz of voices in the background from reporters who didn’t have the patience or the manners to wait for Denby to say what he had to say. Just like his baby brother, who kept repeating, ‘So what did he die of?’

The posh geezer held up a hand, appealing for quiet. He gave it a few seconds then started again. ‘This morning, we received the results of lab tests that proved conclusively that Robbie Bishop was not suffering from any kind of infection. What killed Robbie Bishop was a substantial dose of the poison ricin.’ The room erupted.

‘Fucking hell,’ Sanjar breathed. ‘Isn’t that what they were arresting all them lads for making? Them so-called terrorists?’

‘Yeah, but most of them got let go,’ Yousef said. ‘I think there was one bloke went on trial for it.’

‘Then they’ll blame us,’ Raj said, his face solemn, his eyes bright. ‘They’ll say it was Muslim fundamentalists. I tell you, I’ve been supporting the Vics since I was a little kid, but that won’t make no difference now.’

Yousef patted his shoulder awkwardly. He felt sorry for Raj, but he had to think of the bigger picture. Which was looking even better now. Recently, he’d been zoning out into a world of his own when he’d been planted in front of the TV, but for this, his mind was fully engaged. ‘Let’s see what they’ve got to say.’

They dragged their attention back to the TV set, where the geezer in the suit had given way to the blonde. ‘My team have already begun our investigation into this tragic death,’ she was saying. ‘We are treating it as a murder inquiry.’ So, a cop, then. ‘We would like to talk to anyone who saw Robbie or spoke to him in the Amatis nightclub in Bradfield late on Thursday evening. We are also interested in his movements after he left the nightclub. We need to find the person who did this. If anyone has information, they should call this number.’ She held up a piece of paper with a free phone number and read it out.

As soon as she finished speaking, the journalistic frenzy began again. ‘Is there any question of terrorist involvement?’ was the one that rose above the rest.

The blonde’s lips pursed in a thin line. ‘There is no reason to suspect terrorism in this case,’ she said. ‘Nor is there any suggestion that anyone else is at risk from the event that killed Robbie Bishop.’

‘When did your investigation begin?’

‘The hospital informed us this morning,’ the cop said.

‘We called the police as soon as the ricin diagnosis was confirmed,’ the suit butted in.

‘Covering his arse,’ Sanjar said as the screen cut back to the studio, where the anchor promised any fresh information as soon as it was available. They moved on to a rapidly assembled montage of Robbie Bishop’s greatest moments on the pitch. Raj stared avidly, soaking up the magic that would never be repeated.

‘I was there,’ he said, as they showed Robbie’s spectacular shot from thirty yards out, the goal that had clinched the Vics’ semi-final slot in the previous season’s UEFA Cup. ‘Oh man, we got no chance in the premiership now. Not without Robbie.’

Yousef shook his head. ‘You should stay away from the games. Till they’ve caught whoever did this.’

‘I’ve got a ticket for Saturday,’ Raj protested. ‘And the next European game.’

‘Yousef’s right,’ Sanjar said. ‘Till they find out who did this, there’s going to be people looking for scapegoats. Even though that cop woman said it wasn’t no terrorist thing, there’s still going to be fuckwits out there who think it’s an excuse to go paki-bashing. Feelings are going to run high, Raj. Better you stay clear.’

‘I don’t want to stay clear. Not from the matches, and not tonight either. Everybody’s going to be down the stadium, paying tributes and that. I want to be part of it. It’s my club too.’ Raj was close to tears.

His elder brothers exchanged a look. ‘Sanjar’s probably right about the matches. Once it’s sunk in, there’ll be bad feeling, no doubt about it. But I’ll come with you tonight if you’re set on that,’ Yousef said, understanding only too well the precariousness of the bridge between the two cultures that claimed his generation. ‘We’ll go together.’

Tony turned the TV off and leaned back on his pillows. The intravenous morphine had worn off and he could feel the beginning of a dull ache in his knee. The nurse had told him sternly that he didn’t have to suffer, that he should summon a nurse and ask for pain relief. He tried moving his leg, testing the limits of his endurance. He reckoned he could wait a little longer. More drugs would just make him go to sleep, and he didn’t want to be asleep now. Not when there was the prospect of a visit.

Carol was in the hospital. He’d just seen her on TV, doing a live press conference. She had a murder. And what a murder. Celebrity corpse and a creepy murder method. She’d want to talk to him about it. Of that he was certain. But he didn’t know when she’d be able to get away.

He thought about Robbie Bishop and of the evenings he’d spent in the cosy cave that was his study, watching Bradfield Victoria on the satellite channel. He recalled a thoughtful player, seldom careless with his passes. In control of himself as much as he’d been in control of the ball. Tony couldn’t remember ever seeing Robbie Bishop pick up a yellow card. But being mindful of what he was doing hadn’t meant a lack of passion. Robbie in his number seven shirt would run himself into the ground. What had made Robbie special, though, were the gorgeous moves he’d created out of nothing, moments when there was no need to explain to unbelievers why football was the beautiful game.

And somebody had wiped that skill and grace from the map. They’d done it in the cruellest of ways, left him a dead man walking. Why would someone choose such a death for Robbie Bishop? Was it personal? Or was it a more general statement? Either was possible. Tony needed more detail. He needed Carol.

He didn’t have long to wait. Within ten minutes of the end of her press conference, Carol was shutting his door behind her, leaning against it as if expecting pursuit. ‘He doesn’t like anybody else getting the limelight, does he?’ Tony said, waving her towards the bedside chair.

‘My way or the highway,’ Carol said, abandoning her defence of the door and throwing herself into the chair. ‘Like just about every consultant I’ve ever dealt with.’

‘You should meet Mrs Chakrabarti. At least she lets you bask in the misapprehension that she’s taking notice of what you say. So, you’ve got the poisoned chalice, have you?’

‘Oh yes. CID took the call and as soon as they realized what they were looking at, they couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. I’m not looking forward to the next few days. But enough of me and my troubles.’ Carol made a visible effort to shrug off her problems. ‘How are you?’

Tony smiled. ‘It’s me, Carol. You don’t have to pretend you’ve got room in your head for anything other than Robbie Bishop. And as for me, if you really want to know, I’ll feel a lot better as soon as you stop treating me like an invalid. It’s my knee that’s messed up, not my brain. You can run this past me, same as you would any other murder lacking an obvious motive.’

‘Are you sure? You don’t look like you’re firing on all cylinders, to be honest.’

‘I’m not, clearly. My concentration isn’t great, which makes reading anything complex impossible.’ He made a dismissive gesture towards the books he’d asked her to bring in. ‘But I’m off the intravenous morphine and my brain is returning to what passes for normal. When I’m awake, I’d rather be puzzling over this than watching daytime TV. So, what can you tell me?’

‘Depressingly little.’ Carol ran through what she and her team had established so far.

‘So, to sum up,’ Tony said. ‘We don’t know of anybody who hated him enough to kill him, he was probably poisoned in a nightclub crammed with people and we don’t know where the ricin came from.’

‘That’s about it, yeah. I did find a scrunched-up bit of paper in the pocket of the last pair of jeans he wore. It had a url on it that I’ve not had a chance to check out yet: www.bestdays.co.uk.’

‘We could look at it now.’ Tony offered, pressing the button to raise the bed and wincing as a fresh pain asserted itself. He flipped open the laptop and waited impatiently for it to emerge from hibernation.

‘You in pain?’ Carol asked.

‘A bit,’ he admitted.

‘Can’t they give you something for it?’

‘I’m trying to keep the painkillers to a minimum,’ Tony admitted. ‘I don’t like the way they make me feel. I’d rather have my wits about me.’

‘That’s just stupid,’ Carol said firmly. ‘There’s nothing helpful about pain.’ Without asking permission, she pressed the nurse call button.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Sorting you out.’ She pulled her chair round so she could see the screen.

Tony typed in the url. It took them to a page with the banner heading, ‘The Best Days of Our Lives.’ For only £5 annual membership, the site promised it would provide the best service in the UK for reuniting old school friends and workmates. A brief exploration revealed that by registering with the site, people could check out their old contacts and get back in touch via emails which would be forwarded by the website administration. ‘Why would Robbie Bishop be interested in contacting old school mates?’ Tony said. ‘I’d have thought they’d be falling over themselves to get back in touch with him.’

Carol shrugged. ‘Maybe he wanted to look up an old flame who dumped him? He was footloose and fancy free after the end of his engagement.’

‘I don’t see it. He was good looking, rich and talented. Everywhere he went, women threw themselves at him. And apparently, he was quite happy to catch some of them. He was engaged to a very cool trophy babe. If he was still carrying a torch for somebody who dumped him when he was fifteen, he wouldn’t be behaving like that. And he’d have done something about it before now.’ He shook his head. ‘No, the psychology’s all wrong for that. Do we know for sure it’s Robbie’s handwriting?’

‘We don’t. It’s with forensics now. You think somebody gave it to him?’

‘He told Phil Campsie he was having a drink with someone from school. Maybe whoever he was drinking with suggested he should check out the site, look up some old mates. Robbie’s not interested but he doesn’t want to seem rude so he shoves it in his pocket and forgets all about it.’

‘Could be. It makes sense.’

Tony opened a window and typed in, ‘Harriestown High School, Bradfield.’

‘You know where he went to school?’ Carol sounded suspicious.

‘I follow football, Carol. I know where he grew up. His mum and dad still live in the same house, in Harriestown. He offered to buy them a new place, but they wanted to stay where they belonged.’

‘You don’t learn stuff like that from following football.’

Tony had the grace to look shame-faced. ‘So I surf the gossip from time to time. It doesn’t make me a bad person. Look at that.’ He pointed to the screen. There was a photograph of Harriestown High School, boxy sixties concrete and glass flanking the old Victorian brick core. Beneath a brief history of the school there was a section entitled ‘Famous Alumni’. A couple of MPs, two rock bands who had made a small dent in the charts during the Britpop era, a mid-list crime writer, a minor soap star, a fashion designer and Robbie Bishop. A couple of clicks and he’d brought up the names of Harriestown High School former pupils who had overlapped Robbie Bishop’s years in the school. ‘Whoever gave him the url, chances are the name is here.’

Carol groaned. ‘I suppose it does whittle down the list a little. Rather than checking out every single person who was at school with Robbie, now we only have to go through the ones who are paid-up members of the Best Days of Our Lives.’

‘At least now you’re looking for a needle in a sewing box rather than a haystack.’

‘You think that makes it easier? That’s the trouble with not having an obvious motive. You don’t know where to start.’

Tony winced. ‘And that’s what I’m for, right? The one who narrows things down when “Who benefits?” doesn’t cut the mustard.’

Carol grinned. ‘Something like that. And on that cheerful note, I’m going to leave you to it. I’m off to London to talk to Robbie’s ex.’

‘The lovely Bindie Blyth, would that be?’

‘I see what you mean about surfing the gossip. You’re absolutely right. And before I can take off, I need to sort out some bodies to acquire as much city-centre CCTV footage as we can get our hands on. And then the poor sods have to go through it all.’

‘Rather them than me. What’s the coverage like around Amatis?’

Carol rolled her eyes. ‘It ranges from overkill to nothing at all. The front of the club is well covered, and so are the routes to the nearest multi-storeys. But there’s a side exit near the VIP area. It opens on to an alley that runs down the side of the building. From there, you’re into the warren of Temple Fields back streets. And in spite of our best efforts, far too much of that is still CCTV-free.’ There was a moment’s silence while they both remembered past cases that had revolved around Temple Fields, an area that managed to combine the red-light district, the gay village, designer apartments in converted warehouses and a honeycomb of small businesses. Temple Fields was the cusp of cool and crap, where edgy met enterprising for denizens who spanned the spectrum from criminal to righteous.

‘It’s still the only part of town where anything can happen,’ Tony said, his voice almost dreamy. ‘Good and bad.’

Carol snorted derisively. ‘I’ll have to take your word for the good.’

‘We only ever see the worst. I suspect there’s good magic there too.’

‘Tell that to Paula.’ Carol’s voice was sour, remembering how Paula had almost died in a dingy room in Temple Fields.

Tony smiled. ‘Carol, Paula understands much more about transgression than you or I ever will. She knows what tempers the down side of Temple Fields. For a long time, it was the only place where people like her could be safe. There were gays in Temple Fields long before the gay village became a cool destination.’

It was a gentle rebuke, but one that reminded Carol she couldn’t lay her reactions over Paula’s and expect an exact fit. ‘You’re right,’ she admitted. Before she could say more, a nurse knocked and walked in.

‘What can I do for you?’ she said.

‘He needs pain relief but he won’t admit it,’ Carol said, standing up and gathering her things together.

‘Is that right?’

Tony nodded. ‘I suppose so.’

The nurse consulted his chart and said, ‘I told you, there’s no medals for martyrs here. I’ll bring you something.’

Carol followed her to the door. ‘I’m not sure when I’ll be back from London, but I’ll try and come by tomorrow.’

‘Good luck,’ Tony said. He wasn’t sorry to see her go; her visit had reminded him how little energy he had. It was a relief to know there would be no other visitors that evening. There were advantages to keeping the world at arm’s length.

For a long time, he had mistrusted those few overtures of friendship that had come his way. He’d believed they were based on the misconception that the face he presented to the world had anything to do with what was going on inside him. He was aware how slender was the connection between the two. And that his own history placed him closer to those he hunted than those on whose behalf he hunted. He knew the extent of his damage and understood that its gift of empathy had to be paid for somehow. By the time he’d plucked up the emotional courage to lay some of the blame on his mother, he’d also acquired enough knowledge to understand that was too easy an option. He had spent years feeling like a child with its face pressed to the window behind which the happy family were celebrating the perfect Dickensian Christmas. It had taken him that long to understand that most of those apparently happy families hid as many dark places as his own. That he was not the only one doing what he called ‘passing for human’. But by then he had built himself a life that willingly embraced solitude and spectatorship.

And then Carol Jordan had arrived. None of his psychology textbooks nor his thousands of hours of clinical practice had prepared him for someone who could walk straight through his defences as if they did not exist. It was both too simple and too complicated. If either of them had been different, they might have been able to fall in love and get it over with. But there had been too many snags and hitches at the start and now it seemed that every time they tentatively considered surrender, the world threw up mountains in their path.

Mostly, he wished it could be different. But sometimes, like now, he recognized that perhaps it was enough for each of them to know there was at least one relationship in their lives that was never going to be hamstrung by them acting out their needs. Whatever they did for each other meant itself alone. When she negotiated wireless access from a hospital bed for him, there was no ulterior motive. And now, he would trawl the world of information online and in his head to help her, just because he could.

When the nurse returned, he dutifully swallowed his medication and lay back, letting his mind wander free. Where there was no obvious motive, it was his talent to tease out meaning. What could Robbie Bishop’s murderer have gained from the act of killing? To understand that would be a giant step on the journey to giving this stranger face and form. It was, thankfully, the sort of giant step he didn’t need two functioning knees for. Just a brain that could possibly be helped on its way by the lovely, soothing chemicals infiltrating his bloodstream.

A twenty-four-hour news agenda is always hungry for headlines. Now that Robbie Bishop had died, the circus had moved from outside the hospital to the Bradfield Victoria stadium. The story had moved so fast that most of the media were there ahead of the fans, having quicker access to their vehicles. To begin with, there were more journalists and camera crew than there were mourners. They milled around in the chilly evening air, cracking black jokes and waiting for the action they knew would arrive soon enough.

Within an hour, they got what they wanted. Hundreds of people drifted around in the shadow of the cantilevered Grayson Street stand, breath puffing in clouds around their heads. Already the iron railings that marked the boundary had become the literal props for bunches of supermarket flowers, beribboned teddies, mourning messages, sympathy cards and photos of Robbie himself. Distraught women wept, men in canary yellow home strips looked as gutted as if they’d just witnessed a five–nil home defeat. Children looked bewildered, youths betrayed. Reporters moved among them, mikes and tape recorders thrust towards the banalities of manufactured emotion. A discreet police presence patrolled the mourners, a precaution against any kind of excess.

Yousef and Raj were among the first to arrive. Yousef felt conspicuous and awkward. He thought he was probably the only person apart from cops and media not wearing a Vics shirt or scarf. He politely declined when a couple of TV reporters asked for his comments and dragged a protesting Raj away from their mikes and cameras. ‘Why can’t I say summat?’ Raj said.

‘You’re supposed to be here because you’re in mourning, not to get your gob all over the TV,’ Yousef said. ‘This isn’t about you, remember?’

‘It’s not fair. I really loved Robbie. I love the Vics. Half the people that’ll end up on the telly or the radio couldn’t give a toss about the team from one week to the next. They just want to get in on the act.’ Raj trailed behind his brother, scuffing his heels on the ground.

‘So let them.’

Another reporter thrust a tape recorder at them. ‘Some people are linking Robbie Bishop’s death to Muslim terrorist production of ricin,’ he gabbled. ‘What’s your view on that?’

‘It’s bollocks,’ Yousef said, finally goaded into speech. ‘Didn’t you hear what that cop said earlier? No reason to link this to terrorism. You’re just trying to stir up trouble. It’s people like you that provoke race riots. My brother here, the only thing he’s fanatical about is Bradfield Vics.’ He spat on the ground. ‘You’ve got no respect. Come on, Raj.’ He grabbed his brother’s sleeve and pulled him away.

‘Great,’ said Raj. ‘I don’t get to talk about Robbie, but you get to shout your mouth off, make us look like troublemakers.’

‘Yeah, I know. It’s not fair.’ Yousef steered Raj away from the media and towards the tributes at the railings. ‘But I’m so sick of that sort of shit. Why would terrorists kill Robbie Bishop, for fuck’s sake?’

‘’Cos he’s a symbol of the decadence of the West, dummy,’ Raj said, imitating the stupid parrot tones of the big mouths he’d heard sounding off in the kebab shops and the mosque car park.

‘That’s true, actually. But not a good enough reason to kill him. Killing Robbie doesn’t create terror, just outrage. For terrorism to work, you need to strike at ordinary people. But that’s too sophisticated an argument for the likes of that wanker with the microphone,’ Yousef said bitterly.

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