Nikki yawned. She’d been here before. Juggling thoughts, what ifs and maybes. And it always came back to the fact that it would mean fewer hours on the streets. Fewer hours delousing the town of two-legged vermin. Living here, she was a only few moments walk from their lair, or the rat runs that led to it. Cloud Fen was a twenty-minute drive from the nick, slow-moving tractors and agricultural equipment allowing. And that just wasn’t acceptable.

She yawned again. It should be funny, but it wasn’t. You would have thought that her single-minded dedication to jailing the bad guys would have made her something of a hero in the eyes of her colleagues, but it had had the reverse effect. No one wanted to work with her any more. They resented her passion, refused to accept her rather unorthodox methods and called her unreasonable. Well, they called her a lot of things actually, and none of them pleasant. But then they had lives, didn’t they? Families, friends and activities outside the Force. She just had the Force, and her Crusade.

Nikki pulled the blanket around her and vaguely wondered when she had last changed her bed linen. Not that it mattered, because she never slept in the bed. She only went into the bedroom at all because the shower was off it, and her clothes needed to hang somewhere. She hated the pokey, dark room with the low ceiling and the mud-coloured carpet. She hated it most of all because it was the only room with a photograph in it, one she could never bring herself to hide in a drawer. One she loved with all her heart, but could hardly bear to look at.

CHAPTER TWO

AT THE SAME time as Nikki’s drug pusher was being processed by the custody sergeant, a young woman was picking her way hesitantly along the dark sea-bank. The track was muddy and uneven, full of waterlogged trenches and gullies, and although she knew it well and carried a pretty useful torch, it really wasn’t a good place to be at night.

She shivered, pulled her short denim jacket tighter across the thin skinny T-shirt, and thought that maybe she had made a mistake in rushing out here to meet him.

In daylight, it was different. She hated the town, and whenever she could she would escape to this strange water world. Out here, you could look across the vast stretch of marshland, see flocks of migrant seabirds and hares and rabbits, and no people. In the distance you could sometimes see the silver-grey waters of the Wash, and you could always see the clouds. Wonderful skyscapes, full of magical, billowy, fluffy, windblown clouds. She believed it to be almost mystical, with its ever-changing light and the elusive mists that would creep across the fens like wraiths.