As Patrick stood naked under the ridiculous trickle of alternately tepid, boiling and freezing water, he felt the ball of tension growing in his belly. Even now, after being the lead detective on a baker’s dozen of cases, he still experienced an icy dread whenever he had to face the team, ten pairs of eyes on him. A psychologist he chatted to at a party once had told him that the feeling you get when you do something that scares you – like public speaking – caused the reptilian part of your brain to scream ‘fight or flight’, releasing all that intoxicating adrenaline into your system. The feeling he got when he stood up to talk to a crowd was, apart from his enduring love of The Cure and Brighton and Hove Albion, the last thing that linked him to his schoolboy self. He dismissed the memory of himself as a schoolboy by glancing in the mirror above the basin – the shower wasn’t nearly hot enough to cause it to steam up. If he’d had those tattoos and muscles when he was fourteen, he doubted he’d have had the sort of problems he’d suffered at school when he’d been a skinny white misfit.

He replayed Suzanne telling him he was a smart-arse and the little smile that had appeared on her lips. It was the kind of exchange they would never have in front of anyone else, when they were strictly professional. It was difficult for men and women to be friends at work without rumours spreading about them, especially when one of them had authority over the other. It was irritating, just as it was irritating that some Neanderthals in the Force were resentful of women with higher ranks than them. Gill had asked him once if he minded that his superior officer was a woman and then joked that he liked to be given orders by powerful women. He smiled to himself. Maybe there was some truth in that.

He just about managed to get enough water over him to clean off the grime, and stepped out of the cubicle, drying himself with the tiny towel he’d had in his gym bag. It was hardly rejuvenating, but it was enough to make him feel halfway human again. He couldn’t help glancing nervously at the toilet door to make sure it was locked – the last thing he needed before a briefing was one of his team to walk in and catch him naked, muscles or no muscles. Old habits died hard. Besides, they’d never take him seriously again.