Not for the first time, Tom was pleased that his foster parents had insisted he kept some link to his country of birth. While growing up in the Highlands he would often visit a very small resource centre in Inverness that offered support to refugees. There he’d met a kind, old Serbian man called Filip, who’d talked with him in Serbian about the old country once or twice a month. It had kept his grasp of the language intact, meaning that he could still converse well in Serbo-Croat even after all those years. Many of the adjacent countries’ languages were based on the same Slav rules, which had proved useful in his career when investigating crimes among his countrymen.

Tom finished his coffee and left the building deep in thought. An undercover deployment? He’d done a few, mostly on drug buy/busts, but not for a while. He felt a slight prickle of excitement. It sounded like a tricky assignment, but he would’ve tried anything to get away from the mundane quest for clear-up rates and detections, even if it did piss his boss off. Especially if it pissed his boss off.

Anyway, there was every chance it would not come off. There were so many hoops to jump through to get assignments like those authorised, that they often got cancelled at the last minute. He put it out of his mind and made his way to Kilburn, ready for another weary late-turn, sat in front of a computer terminal, juggling too much crime with insufficient resources.

Like most undercover-trained officers, Tom had a day job: in his case, running a small team of detectives on a volume crime team dealing with day-to-day minor crimes. He could, however, be called on to fulfil an undercover role if one came up that suited his profile and legend, or back story. He hadn’t had many deployments since completing his undercover course a couple of years before, and the prospect of a more involved spell undercover was appealing. It would certainly be a break from the deathly boring and frustrating crime-report-shuffling he was forced to do every day. Once again, he questioned his decision to get promoted. His skills and experience were wasted stuck behind a desk when he should be out there, nicking big villains.

He got to Kilburn just before 2pm. As he passed DCI Taylor’s office his superior called, ‘Tom, a minute please.’

Tom wandered in, trying to look innocent and hide his pleasure at his boss looking none-too-pleased. Taylor was quite young for a DCI: skinny-fat with sandy, thinning hair, a permanent air of panicky stress hanging round him like a cloud. Taylor was renowned for being ambitious and would do anything to get the next rank up, no matter who he had to trample on.