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  Steve woke too early, like every night since they brought him here. It was the silence, he thought. The silence and the darkness. He’d never be comfortable in this place. He was a city boy, used to the traffic-drone that never died away, the wasteful small hours glare of the street lights and office blocks.

  He rolled over, pulling the cheap duvet around his body, burrowing in search of further sleep. But the moment had passed. He was awake, mind already racing through the same thoughts, the same anxieties. Feeling a sudden claustrophobia, he threw back the covers and sat up in the pitch black. The room faced east, across the open valley, and the curtains were as cheap and flimsy as the duvet. But there was no sign of dawn, no promise of the rising sun.

  He fumbled around the unfamiliar bedside table until he found a switch for the lamp. The sudden glare was blinding but, after a moment, reassuring. The bedroom was as bland and anonymous as ever. Off-white walls, forgettable chain store pictures, inoffensive flat-pack furniture. There’d been a half-hearted attempt to make it homely, but that only highlighted its bleakness, confirmed beyond doubt that no one would ever stay in this place by choice.

  It was cold too, he thought, as he reached for his dressing gown. The central heating hadn’t yet come on, and he could taste the damp in the air. He crossed to the window and peered out. A clear night, the sky moonless but full of stars, less dark than he had imagined. In the faint light, he could make out the valley, the faint gleam of the Goyt in the distance. Miles from anywhere. The end of the line, past all civilisation.

  He pulled the dressing gown more tightly around him, and stepped out on to the landing. This was his routine. Waking in the middle of the bloody night, making himself a black coffee, sitting and waiting for the sun to rise on another empty day.

  The unease struck him halfway down the stairs. Nothing he could put his finger on, just a sudden sense of something wrong. He hesitated momentarily, then forced himself to continue down. Of course something was wrong. Everything was fucking wrong. He didn’t even know why he’d done it. It wasn’t the money – he knew there would be little enough of that, now they didn’t need him any more. It wasn’t the supposed guarantees. He’d few illusions about what those would be worth when the excrement hit the extractor. It wasn’t even that he was doing the right thing. He’d just managed to get himself wedged firmly up shit creek and then discovered that there never had been any paddle.

  He pushed his way into the tiny kitchen and went wearily through the familiar ritual – filling the kettle, spooning coffee into the cup, adding two sugars. While the kettle boiled, he stared out of the kitchen window, across the postage stamp of an unkempt garden, towards the Peaks. The eastern sky was lighter now, a pale glow over the bleak moorland.

  He stirred the coffee and paused for a moment longer, sipping the hot sweet liquid, gazing vacantly at the darkness. The sense of unease had remained, a thought lurking at the edge of his mind. Something more focused than the usual ever-present anxiety. Some idea that had struck him and receded before he could catch it.

  He picked up the coffee and forced himself back into his routine. He would go into the living room, sit on the chilly plastic sofa, switch on the television and watch the silent moving figures, with no interest in turning up the volume. Waiting for yet another bloody morning.

  He pushed open the sitting room door, and his mind finally grasped the thought that had been troubling him. The door. He’d closed the sitting room door before going to bed. Another part of his routine, some unquestioned wisdom retained from childhood. Close the downstairs doors in case of fire. Waste of bloody time in a place like this, he’d reasoned. Whole place would be up like a tinderbox before you could draw a breath. But he still closed the doors.

  Halfway down the stairs he’d registered, without even knowing what he’d seen, that the living room door was ajar.

  He thought of stepping back, but knew it was already too late. In that moment another, more tangible sensation struck him. The acrid scent of cigarette smoke, instantly recognisable in this ascetic, smoke-free official house.

  He thrust the door wide and stepped inside. The small table lamp was burning in the corner of the room, The man was sprawled across the tacky sofa, toying lazily with a revolver.

  ‘Up early, Steve,’ he commented. He was a large man in a black tracksuit, wearing dark glasses, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His face was neatly shaven and boyish, but there was nothing soft about him. ‘Guilty conscience?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ Steve said. ‘You?’

  ‘Sleep of the just, mate,’ the man said. ‘Sleep of the fucking just.’

  A moment before, Steve had been contemplating how to get out of this. Whether to try to get back into the kitchen or upstairs. Out of the front door, or through the patio windows.

  But there was no point. The man knew his name. Knew who he was. Why he was here. Someone had grassed. Why else had he come? Someone would always grass. He ought to know that better than anyone.

  There was no way out. No future. There never had been any future, not to speak of, once he’d taken that step. He’d known it then and there was no escaping it now.

  Steve felt oddly calm, detached, observing all this from a distance. He saw the man playing aimlessly with his gun. He saw it all, and he felt untroubled. He had no illusions about what the man would do. Perhaps no more than he deserved.

  So he stood there, motionless, waiting for it to start. And in that moment – before the flare and the noise, before the impact, before his blood began to seep into the worn fibres of the cheap grey carpet – Steve felt almost relieved.

  He’d almost missed it.

  Something caught the corner of his eye, some movement. A twitch. He moved himself to the right to try to gain a better vantage through the spyhole.

  It was well after midnight. The dead hours of routine patrols when nothing much ever happens. Maybe just some scrote with insomnia – and, Christ knew, all of this bunch ought to have trouble sleeping – shouting the odds, wanting to share his misery with the rest of the fucking world.

  But usually nothing much. A fifteen minute stroll along the dimly lit landing, glance into the cells, check that no one was up to no good. There was never any real trouble.

  Sometimes Pete tried to kid people that this was a responsible job, stuck up here all night by himself on the landing. If anything happens, it’s up to me to sort it out. Yeah, he thought, up to me to press the bell and summon backup. He was an OSG. Operational Support Grade. Bottom of the pile, with – at least in theory – minimal prisoner contact. Didn’t always work out that way, of course. But nobody expected much of him. Especially not the Prison Officers.

  Like that one earlier, who’d been coming up here just as he was ending his previous patrol. Pete had been running a bit late, had lingered a bit too long over his coffee and copy of The Sun. Nobody really cared at this time of the night, but he didn’t like to let things slide, so he’d been a bit out of breath, dragging his overweight body hurriedly round the landings then down the stairs.

  He hadn’t recognised the officer who’d met him on the stairs. He thought he knew most of them, but they kept buggering the shifts about and this one was new to him. Christ knew what he was doing going up to the landings at this hour.

  Pete had tried to offer a cheery greeting – they were both stuck on this arse end of a roster, after all – but the guy had just blanked him, hardly seeming to register that Pete was there. Well, fuck you as well, Pete had thought, puffing down the last few stairs. He’d heard the officer unlocking the landing doors above him.

  Afterwards, he’d been worried that the officer might report him for being late. It was a stupid concern. The guy probably wouldn’t even have known what time Pete was supposed to carry out the patrol. But there was something about him, something about the way he’d ignored Pete on the stairs, that had seemed unnerving. Just the kind of officious bastard who’d grass you up for the sheer hell of it.


  So, just in case the guy was still up there, Pete had kicked off his next patrol a little early so he could get it finished on time without busting a gut. But of course the landing had been deserted. Whatever the officer had been doing, he’d finished it and buggered off.

  There was nothing else to do. Pete shuffled with effort round the landing, stopping to check on each cell in turn. Everyone sleeping like a baby.

  He’d reached the last cell and was preparing to move on to the next landing, when he stopped and looked again.

  Yeah, he’d almost missed it. The cell was in darkness and he’d assumed the occupant was securely in bed. Then he’d caught some movement in the periphery of his vision. He hadn’t even been sure he’d seen it at first. He’d shifted his body to get a better view.

  Jesus.

  There was something – someone – there, jerking and struggling. Someone pressed against the wall behind the door, almost invisible. And now Pete could hear the sound of choking, the awful sound of a wordless, gasping scream…

  He reacted better than he’d have expected, racing across the landing to sound the alarm. Then back to the cell, fumbling with his own set of keys. He was supposed to enter the cells only in the direst of emergencies, but surely this counted as one of those. As he pushed open the door, it occurred to him that he might have been suckered. But the landing was sealed and backup would be there in minutes.

  He knew straight away he’d done the right thing. The prisoner was hanging halfway up the wall – Christ knew how he’d managed it – some kind of cord tight around his neck. The man’s head lolled to one side, his waxy face already blue in the dim light from the landing.

  Pete threw his arms round the prisoner’s body and tried to drag it down from whatever was holding the rope. He struggled at first, afraid that he was doing more harm than good, but knowing the prisoner would have no chance as long as his own weight continued to tighten the cord. Suddenly, as Pete strained to lift the prisoner’s body, the rope gave way and the body toppled sideways, out of Pete’s grip, on to the hard floor.

  A nail. A fucking six inch nail hammered into the wall. Where the fuck had he got that from? And the rope, for that matter? Someone was for the high jump.

  Pete crouched down by the body, fumbling to loosen the ligature from the prisoner’s neck. The face was purple now, and the old guy looked like he might be a goner already. Pete fumbled around the plastic cord and finally found the knot. He could feel it beginning to give under his trembling fingers. At the same moment, he heard the sound of the landing gates behind unlocked.

  By the time the two officers and the principal had reached the cell door, Pete had managed to loosen the rope. He looked up as the three men crowded the doorway: ‘Trying to top himself.’

  Pete moved back as the principal officer crouched over the body and began to administer CPR, thrusting hard and rhythmically on the prisoner’s chest. One of the officers was on his radio calling for an ambulance.

  Pete dragged himself to his feet, only now beginning to take in what had happened. What he’d just dealt with. ‘Jesus.’ He glanced down at the supine figure, still bouncing under the pounding arms of the principal officer.

  The officer with the radio nodded laconically towards Pete. ‘Good work, son. Let’s hope we’re in time. We all get a bollocking if one of them tops himself.’ He took a step back and glanced at the number of the cell. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘won’t be too many saying any prayers for this one.’

  Pete looked up. ‘That right?’

  ‘Don’t reckon so.’ The officer moved to lean against the doorframe. ‘This is Keith Welsby. Just another bent copper. There’s one or two would be glad to help him on his fucking way.’

  PART ONE

  1

  ‘So you were lying to me.’

  Salter gazed back at her, his mouth working hard at a piece of gum. His expression was that of a bored spectator staring into an aquarium at an unfamiliar species of fish. ‘If it wasn’t the kind of thing that gets me branded as sexist,’ he said, finally, ‘I’d say that sounded a tad hysterical, sis.’

  She eased herself back in Salter’s uncomfortable visitor’s chair, wondering how to extricate herself from this conversation. There was no way of combatting Salter in this kind of exchange. The most you could hope for was to slow him momentarily on his path to victory.

  ‘It was a condition of my joining your team,’ she said. ‘I made that clear.’ Which was true, but there was no way of proving it now.

  He shrugged, chewing at the gum. ‘Nobody makes conditions in this business. You know that. We do what we’re told.’

  ‘I’m not trying to be difficult, Hugh–’

  ‘Never thought you were, sis. All seems easy enough from where I’m sitting.’

  She didn’t doubt that. Life tended to look pretty easy from where Hugh Salter was sitting, if only because he was busy making life hard for everyone else. Like his insistence on calling her ‘sis’. A hangover from that last undercover assignment. Salter had invented a family connection supposedly as cover in their telephone conversations. It was a joke now long past its sell-by date, but he knew she was irritated by the implied intimacy.

  ‘You know my circumstances. There must be someone else.’

  He waved his hand around as if the other potential candidates were gathered in the office with them. ‘Believe me, sis, I’ve looked. There’s no one else with your talents.’ He made the last word sound like a double entendre. ‘No one with half your experience.’

  That wasn’t entirely bullshit, she knew. Apart from herself, Salter’s team was pretty wet behind the ears. That was how Salter picked them. Bright young things smart enough to do a decent job, but without the confidence to answer back. She tried another tack. ‘Anyway, it’s too risky. It’s against procedures.’

  Salter’s smile was unwavering. ‘“Procedures”? Who gives a fuck about procedures? The other side don’t follow procedures.’

  And that’s why they’re on the other side, she thought. Out loud, she said, ‘It’s not about bureaucracy, Hugh. It’s about not jeopardising the work. Or me, for that matter.’

  ‘Look, sis, if there was an alternative, I’d jump at it. I don’t want to do this any more than you do.’

  Like hell, she thought. That’s what this came down to. Another of Hugh Salter’s games. She sometimes thought it was what really motivated him. Not career. Not money. Just the opportunity to screw other people around. None of this was a surprise. It was what she’d expected, one way or another, from the moment she’d finally agreed to join Salter’s team.

  It had taken him longer than she’d expected, though that was probably just another part of the game. It was six months since the business with Keith Welsby, their former boss and mentor. She’d been here in HQ all that time, working largely on backroom intelligence. Page after page of data on mobile phone numbers, banking transactions, email correspondence. It was important work and she was good at it, but that didn’t make it any less boring. She’d learned to treat the boredom as part of the challenge. You ploughed your way through endless documentation, jotting a note here, a comment there, knowing that most of it was telling you nothing. But you had to keep your head engaged, waiting for the rare moment when something jumped out at you. Some trend, some pattern, some significant link with another piece of data, pages before.

  It wasn’t quite that basic, of course. The databases did a lot of the work, highlighting links and trends. Even so, when it came to the detail of a specific case, there was still a heavy dependency on the individual analyst. The most important links were often the least obvious. An odd piece of data – a name, a number – that had snagged in the back of your mind from another file. Sometimes it was little more than intuition, a feeling that there was a link you’d missed or a pattern you’d overlooked. She knew she was good at it. She could cope with the tedium, and she had a gift for finding information that others had missed.

  In any case, after everything that
had happened, she’d needed a break. She’d nearly been killed, for Christ’s sake. But then so had Salter, and he showed no obvious signs of mental trauma. And it was Salter, in the end, who’d killed Jeff Kerridge and exposed Welsby as corrupt. He’d been acclaimed as a hero and become the new rising star. Marie had watched uneasily from the sidelines, suspicious of Salter and his motives, convinced that, beneath that clean-cut ambition, he was as corrupt as their former boss. But Salter had sailed serenely on, enjoying the fruits of promotion, apparently untroubled by anything that had happened.

  So she’d been happy to step back from the front line and lose herself in the rhythm of facts and figures. For the last six months, every day had been the same. The semi-comatose journey up the Northern Line, the short walk along the Embankment, takeaway latte from the staff restaurant. Settle at her desk and boot up the computer. Check emails, then access the database or pull out the files. The same every day. A sandwich at her desk, or lunch with a couple of the other analysts. More data-crunching till it was time to get the Tube home. Despite herself, she’d begun to enjoy the routine, the predictability.

  Maybe Salter had hoped she’d be climbing the walls by now. She might have predicted it herself. She’d done this kind of work before and been happy with it, but that was a long time ago. She had been a different person then, she thought, with different expectations. But perhaps she’d changed less than she imagined.

  In fairness, she’d always intended to return to the front line eventually. After they’d brought her in from the field, they’d had her formally assessed by Winsor, their pet psych. In his inimitable style, Winsor had stated the blindingly obvious in language that no one fully understood. The upshot was that she’d suffered a major psychological trauma. Well, thanks for that, she’d thought. If you hadn’t brought it up, I might not have noticed.