For anything to come back to him, she had to prove it. But he had no idea how to get around the Manchester solicitor; that was impossible even for him. They were independent legal experts and untouchable. Sometimes Neil couldn’t figure out how he’d got embroiled in all of this. It was days like today when he wanted to collect his passport from home and disappear to some remote village on a foreign island in the sun.

The frustration welled up inside him and threatened to bubble over into anger. He saw two groups of old-timers, and they waved from the ninth fairway. He’d been invited to join them but had declined. Sometimes he just needed to be alone and concentrate on his strokes. Today was one of those days, but now it’d been spoiled. Greed. It ruined everything eventually. He’d been too greedy, but he searched around for something else to blame.

Female police officers. They were a nightmare: into everything, desperate to prove themselves worthy, as if making up for not having a dick. They’d ruined the force. He harked back to the days when men sat in boardrooms thick with cigarette and cigar smoke, making decisions and plans, only interrupted by the odd skirt bringing them tea or brandy. He shook his head: how times had changed. Now everything was transparent and it was frankly dull.

Conditions were becoming tighter and tighter. Everything was documented, checked and accounted for. Leakage was a thing of the past. Well, almost. He needed to get out of the gig, he knew that much, and he wondered if he could hold on until retirement.

He calmed a little and remembered when he’d first met Colin Day. In those days, coppers weren’t either straight or bent; they used their intuition. Sometimes people got hurt and sometimes contraband went missing. It all added to the flavour. One thing was for sure: they formed bonds with the crims and it garnered results. Nowadays, with instinct dead in a sterile textbook somewhere, hawked over by lawyers and journos, coppers daren’t even take a piss without logging it on a time sheet.