He gestured for more coffee and pancakes. Drugs. Damn drugs. He had changed his mind about almost everything to do with them in the past couple of years, as they had moved from being a peripheral nuisance to a dark presence lurking behind everything, and most of all the vulnerable young. Drugs had been common when he was in the Met, but he had rarely encountered them when he had first come to Lafferton. That had been before the men at the top had realised the cities were becoming saturated – too many dealers, too little profit – so they’d worked out ways of spreading it. If the big cities, why not the smaller ones, then the market towns, and even the villages that had been growing, new estates everywhere, for the last five years? Plenty of scope there to recruit some new users. But where were the pushers to come from? If you hung about in underpasses or up alleys or in shopping streets after dark in a big city, you were never noticed, and anyway, you could get away and vanish PDQ. Not so easy in a smaller town, or a prosperous suburb. Pushers would stand out a mile. So, switch to phones. Then someone came up with a bright idea. They thought of it as recruitment – target locals, and so as to be another step away, target young ones. Teenagers. Even younger? Why not? It was cheaper too. Pushers and dealers were getting greedy, wanting a bigger slice of the profits – kids wouldn’t have a clue. Give them a new Nintendo and a couple of games and they’d be happy. Serrailler had watched it all escalate. He had always treated drugs ops as a bit of a diversion, certainly a waste of resources, achieving little. Not any more. The picture of the young man’s body lying on the bare boards of a bleak, empty flat would be with him, along with all those other images from his police years, because nothing went away – it might fade but it was there somewhere, ready to leap out at him without warning, at some faint reminder, another incident, or else for no apparent reason at all. When he had been in hospital after losing his arm, he had had nightmares and hallucinations in which too many sights and scenes rose to the surface of his mind and bobbed about, scummy and horrible. Bodies. Faces. Mutilations. Blood. Guts spilled onto pavements, eyes going dead in agonised faces, gunshots, screams, running footsteps, the screech of tyres, women wailing in grief, men crying silently, children too traumatised to cry. The stench of burning flesh. They would always be there, the pictures, the sounds, they were there now, as he poured maple syrup onto his pancakes and topped it with a sprinkle of cinnamon.