An hour later, Superintendent Geoffrey Vickers walked into the task-force room. His hair was dyed black except for precise white sideburns. He was fooling no one, and perhaps wasn’t trying to. Superintendent Vickers was a ballroom dancer in his spare time and he carried himself well. He swept in, followed by a small messy man with ginger hair, suede patches on his tweed jacket and round John Lennon glasses on the end of his nose. The stranger shifted nervously from foot to foot as Vickers stood in front of the grey metal desks and shouted: ‘Drop what you’re doing and listen up!’ He cast his eyes around the assembled group of officers and his eye fell on WPC Sam Jones, the only female officer in the room. He pointed at her. ‘Two coffees love, just milk in mine.’ He turned to the stranger and asked, ‘How do you take yours?’

The visitor, quickly sizing up the situation, declined the invitation. Sam Jones outranked several of the men present, but the superintendent didn’t pick up on the atmosphere, turning back to her and saying, ‘Did you hear that, love? Just one coffee, there’s a good girl.’

Sam stood up, the muscles in her jaw tight and the little vein on the side of her head beating dangerously. She opened her mouth and prepared to answer back. Out of the corner of her eye she glanced at Inspector Davies, her superior officer. A gritty northerner, he was a rumpled man, but he had often given her good advice in the past. Davies sat on the edge of a desk, arms and legs crossed, staring down at his shoes as he pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. ‘Pick your fights, lass,’ had been his motto in previous situations; scrapping with the superintendent in front of most of his senior officers over a cup of coffee might not be the best career move she could make. Swallowing her pride, she went over to the rickety table and poured Vickers a coffee. She just managed to suppress the urge to spit in it.