Maybe she should use the next hour to do a little sleuthing about him. Then again, that would be something of a pointless exercise. The Super had made her position perfectly clear. She was going to have to try to work with him, so she may as well draw her own conclusions as they went along. She just hoped that the subject of religion would not creep into their conversations. She wasn’t sure how she’d react to being told just how great God was, when as far back as she could remember, the Almighty had taken a back seat when it came to helping her out. Perhaps some nice, clear ground rules should be the first item on her agenda.

She pushed through her office door, trying not to spill her coffee, and saw an untidy pile of rubber masks lying on her desk.

‘Oh shit!’ She muttered, picking up a memo from the nightshift crews. Fifteen of the hideous things confiscated in just one night!

She glanced at her watch and wondered if the Super would be in yet. He’d asked to be kept informed about them, and clearly they were becoming more than just a nuisance.

She flopped down at her desk. It would be a little while before he arrived, certainly long enough to do a search. Not on Joseph Easter, but on someone from a different investigation, a rather private one that she had been discreetly running for a very long time. Nikki switched her computer on, drummed her fingers impatiently on the desk while she waited for it to boot up, then punched in her password. A few screens later and she was where she wanted to be. She carefully typed in FLUKE, and waited.

Damn! No one known to them used that particular tag. She tried FLOOK, in case she had misunderstood the spelling, then widened the search, but still nothing. Nikki closed the programme and went on to the Internet, but after half an hour’s hunting gave up. Only a rock band of that name, one that Hannah had been a fan of, jarred off any sort of recognition. Nikki signed off the computer, and sat thinking about her daughter. Hannah loved the kind of music that destroyed both eardrums and brain cells in one hit, and for a moment Nikki could hear herself screaming, ‘Will you please turn that rubbish down!’

She sipped her coffee, and wished that her daughter was still at home. She missed her. She missed the mess, the noise, the arguments, the tantrums and the tears. Funny, really; she missed all the things that she had spent years complaining about. Nikki swallowed another gulp of her drink and glanced back at her watch. No time to start wading through the mud and mire of the past, the superintendent should be in by now, and she needed to get her brain back into work mode.