Pewe stood up, opening his hands in a gesture of friendship, and walked round his desk. He put an arm round Roy’s shoulder and steered him over to the L-shaped sofa. ‘Sit down – can I get you any tea or coffee?’

As he sat, Grace shook his head. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

Pewe sat a short distance away. ‘OK, let’s start again. Bury the hatchet?’

‘How deep? Beneath sonar range?’ Grace said it with a smile like dry ice.

Pewe winced, visibly stung by the reference to his previous time in Sussex, when he had been on equal rank to Roy Grace. Prompted by the parents of Roy’s missing wife, Sandy, who had long suspected Roy of murdering her, Pewe had taken it upon himself to have a sonar scan done of the back garden of the house where he and Sandy had lived.

Grace had never forgiven Sandy’s toxic parents, nor Pewe for this outrage, although he had been marginally more forgiving of Pewe for acting on information, albeit unsubstantiated, given by her parents.

‘I didn’t have any choice, Roy,’ Pewe said. ‘You know that, you’d have had to do exactly the same if the roles had been reversed.’

Grace resisted the urge to say he would have had the courtesy to let Pewe know first, and not done it behind his back. But if the ACC was genuinely offering him an olive branch, he didn’t want to throw it back in his face. Not yet. ‘Sure,’ he replied, flatly.

‘So,’ Cassian Pewe sat up, brightly. ‘You’ll have my support for your application for the Chief Superintendents boards. And we start afresh from next Monday, maybe not as bosom buddies but as colleagues who respect each other?’

‘Sounds good,’ Grace said, guardedly.

Pewe beamed. ‘Right then, get out there and move the needle on Sussex’s crime statistics. Know a negative feedback loop when you see one.’

Grace looked at him, wondering as he always did where the hell Cassian Pewe got all this corporate gobbledygook from. ‘Absolutely,’ he replied.

Pewe patted him on the shoulder and jumped up again. ‘Are we done?’

‘We’re done.’

‘Good man! Good to have you back.’

25

Thursday 9 May

When people encountered Richard Jupp for the first time, away from his work environment, most of them assumed the tall, thick-set, teddy bear of a man in his late sixties, with thinning grey hair and a beard verging on the straggly, was a teacher or perhaps an environmentalist, or maybe even some kind of local politician. No one would have put him down as the country’s longest-serving Crown Court judge.

But beneath his cuddly exterior was a man who could, when needed, be as hard as nails or as kind and humane as your favourite uncle. He was one of three judges in Sussex who were ‘ticketed’ – as it was called in legal parlance – to sit on murder trials.