He has been expecting the question, or something like it, ever since Doggett’s comment in the car earlier. But now it’s here, the question takes him by surprise and he struggles to find an answer.

Doggett folds his arms. He’s watching closely, looking for some reaction. “Come on, son. It isn’t every day you get to floor a senior officer and get away with it.”

Tyler rubs at the scar with his thumb. “I wouldn’t exactly say I got away with it.”

He can still see the look on Bridger’s face, the smug grin that told him, even before the punch fully landed, he’d been played. Months of windups, scores of digs about who he slept with. Usually subtle enough they might be taken for innocent remarks but sometimes so obvious he might as well have accompanied them with a limp-wristed hand gesture. It was laughable, like some dubious performance by a dodgy ’80s nightclub comedian. And it wasn’t as though the two of them even worked that closely together, so he had no trouble ignoring the twat. He could have complained. He should have. But it was all just so pathetic. And besides, official complaints ran the risk of you losing the sympathy of your colleagues. No one likes a grass, not even the police. Best to keep your head down, ignore them. Sooner or later they get tired and move on. It was his golden rule. And it was manageable.

Until Bridger found his Achilles’ heel. His father.

By the time he’d joined the South Yorkshire Criminal Investigation Department, it had been years since Richard’s death, and it wasn’t as though the name Tyler was all that uncommon. But the manner of his father’s passing had been memorable, and it was enough for some to make the connection. Gary Bridger was one of them. Jordan told him later that his father and Bridger had been rivals. Richard had pissed him off sometime over some case or other, and since he could no longer take it out on the father, he’d gone for the son.

Tyler was queuing in the canteen that day when it started with the usual general comments thrown out casually to his mates so Tyler would overhear. Lots of stuff about bent coppers and how they were a disgrace to the force. Nothing that couldn’t be taken at face value if challenged, so there really wasn’t any point. Only the sly smirk on Bridger’s face told Tyler they were aimed at him. And then he started on about people only getting on the force because their fathers were coppers, and nepotism and all that.