Little and Large had both shaken their heads. It was a sad indictment of modern society that a seemingly healthy and fit young couple could be at home watching movies on a glorious Monday morning. But hey, maybe they were night workers or on holiday, they weren’t to judge.

‘Did you hear what Jonno said the other day?’ Alldridge asked.

Little shook her head. Jonathan – Jonno – Mackie was popular in the force. A plain-clothes cop, six foot two tall and solid with it, not many people wanted to mess with him, and he loved nothing better than to prowl, in the shadows, the city’s crime hot spots.

‘He nicked an Eastern European pickpocket in West Street the other night.’

Holly grinned. ‘Seriously?’

‘Apparently this good, honest citizen was just trying to warn the man that his wallet was sticking out of his back pocket.’

‘Almost as good as my bag-snatcher.’

Alldridge remembered that. Holly had been off duty, drinking with friends in a pub, when she’d seen a man acting shiftily. Minutes later, he had ducked under a table, grabbed a handbag and legged it. She’d chased him for a mile before bringing him to the ground with a rugby tackle. His excuse was, he swore blind that he thought he saw the owner leaving without it, and was running after her to try to catch her up and give it back. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Alldridge was in his twenty-eighth year in the force and, apart from his spell as a detective, always as a uniform PC. Like a number of his colleagues, he’d never wanted promotion, always turning down every opportunity he’d been given – and as a popular and respected officer, he’d been offered plenty. He was happy to be back in uniform again after his time as a DC with Roy Grace’s Major Crime Team, which he had enjoyed. But he loved even more being a front-line copper, where he could sometimes make a real difference to people’s lives.

Over the years he’d seen so many of his mates go up the promotion ladder, getting more and more pay but less and less bang out of the job as they became increasingly desk-bound. His wife worked for a bank on a good salary and, like himself, had a sizeable pension coming, so it wasn’t the higher pay and bigger pension promotion offered that drove him.

They were financially comfortable and he was happy with the career decisions he’d made; the only cloud now looming over the horizon was retirement. Plenty of his mates in the force couldn’t wait for their day and would announce gleefully, ‘Only sixty-two more shifts to go!’, ‘Only seventeen more shifts to go!’ But he wasn’t counting. At the time he’d joined, when you hit thirty years’ service you took your pension and went, making room for younger, supposedly brighter people to fill your shoes. But at forty-eight, he hardly felt like a dinosaur, he relished his experience and still felt fit enough. He was considering whether maybe he would stay on a few more years.