Jamie went into the bathroom and found his muddy jeans on top of the laundry basket. The first day he’d turned up for work at the building site, he’d been wearing his trainers. His second best pair, not the cool ones he went out with his friends in. And Nikolai had laughed at him. So had all the other blokes, though not quite so obviously.

‘Little Jamie, do you want to lose your toes?’ Nikolai had said, lighting up a Benson and Hedges and blowing the smoke towards his feet. ‘Boy, you won’t last a day on my site. We’ll find you some proper boots, OK?’

‘OK, Nikolai.’

‘Call me Nik.’

Most of what had gone on at the site was a mystery to Jamie. The brickies and carpenters and plasterers were skilled men who worked quickly and often silently, wielding specialist tools he didn’t even know the names for.

Some of it was obvious – the trenches dug for the new drains, the gravel laid for site access. But a few things had been odd. If he’d felt more comfortable with the other men, he would have asked them the reasons for things they did. Jamie knew that you should ask if you didn’t understand something, and not worry about looking stupid. If you didn’t ask questions, you’d never know the answers, and that was more stupid, wasn’t it?

The only good thing about the way he’d been treated on the site was that Nikolai and the men hadn’t always worried about whether he was hanging around with them, or how hard he was working.

Jamie showered and hunted out some clean clothes. Then he went to find his mother, to see if he could borrow her car to drive over to Rakedale.

Cooper arrived at work that morning to find forty-three new emails in his inbox. No spam, no jokes, no personal emails – in accordance with force policy, the IT department had blocked all those. No, these forty-three were all work-related. Not necessarily related to his own work, of course. Unfortunately, he had to open every one of them and read it all the way through before he could be sure it wasn’t relevant to him.

Today, he’d received a fairly typical batch. There were the usual requests from the Criminal Justice Unit for completed statements and copies of notebook entries. There was a series of directives and advisory notices from the senior management team, many of them related to key performance indicators. He had a couple of emails from the Police Federation, and there were notifications of five entirely new policies and procedures, all with start dates in the next month.