Stephen hung up and stashed his mobile in a pocket, and I threw my smoke away and stepped out of the gardens into his path. “Stephen.”

“Yeah?”

“Frank Mackey,” I said, putting out a hand. “Undercover.”

I saw his eyes widen, just a touch, with what could have been awe or fear or anything in between. Over the years I’ve planted and watered a number of interesting legends about myself, some of them true, some of them not, all of them useful, so I get that a lot. Stephen at least made a decent stab at keeping it under wraps, which I approved of. “Stephen Moran, General Unit,” he said, shaking my hand just a little too firmly and holding the eye contact just a little too long; the kid was working hard to impress me. “It’s good to meet you, sir.”

“Call me Frank. We don’t ‘sir’ in Undercover. I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while now, Stephen. We’ve been hearing a lot of very nice things.”

He managed to hold back both the blush and the curiosity. “That’s always good to know.” I was starting to like this kid.

I said, “Walk with me,” and headed back into the gardens—there were going to be more floaters and more Murder boys coming out of that building. “Tell me something, Stephen. You made detective three months ago, am I right?”

He walked like a teenager, that long springy stride when you have too much energy to fit in your body. “That’s right.”

“Well done. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see you as the type to spend the rest of your career in the General Unit, tagging along after whatever squad detective snaps his fingers this week. You’ve got too much potential for that. You’ll want to run investigations of your own, eventually. Am I right?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Which squad are you aiming for?”

This time a little bit of the blush made it through. “Murder or Undercover.”

“You’ve got good taste,” I said, grinning. “So working a murder case must be a dream come true, yeah? Having fun?”

Stephen said, cautiously, “I’m learning a lot.”

I laughed out loud. “You are in your arse. That means Scorcher Kennedy’s been treating you like his very own trained chimpanzee. What’s he got you doing, making coffee? Picking up his dry cleaning? Mending his socks?”

One corner of Stephen’s mouth twitched reluctantly. “Typing up witness statements.”

“Oh, lovely. How many words per minute can you do?”

“I don’t mind. I mean, I’m the newest, you know? All the others have a few years under their belts. And someone has to do the—”