‘Mind if I take a look?’ Lockhart asks with some hesitancy. Looking back at a case that’s done and dusted is always an implicit criticism of the original investigation. He knows it and he knows his boss knows it.

Leyla.

Barker isn’t all that bothered. He’s only been inspector here a year, joined just after Lockhart, so the young woman was before his time. It’s no skin off his nose if Lockhart wants to play TV cop; all the young PCs want to, from time to time. By and large, they grow out of it. It comes to him that what he really wants is a chicken and chorizo pasty from the West Cornwall Pasty Company, he loves how they are slightly spicy, and he wonders if he’s got time to nip over to Platform One and get one. Trouble is, he’ll have to eat it while he drives and then he’ll get flakes of pastry all over the car, it’s unavoidable. Wife will go ballistic.

‘Of course,’ Barker says, ‘go ahead.’ He likes Lockhart, bit politically correct and all that, with his degrees and everything, but a good lad at heart.

*

After Barker has gone, Lockhart and his colleague return to their biscuits. Lockhart nibbles on the edge of a Hobnob and wonders whether he should move sideways after a few years, over to the Home Office force, do detective training and aim high, apply to join a murder squad. BTP is all very well; there’s a good sense of solidarity in Division C on account of there being only four thousand of them for the entire country – he’d like to see the Met do better on that ratio – and the promotion prospects are quite good. But he’s not sure it’s where he sees himself in ten years’ time.

He takes a sip of his coffee and his fellow PC says, ‘I don’t know how you drink that piss when you’ve left it half an hour. Makes me shudder.’

Lockhart ignores his colleague – he likes it lukewarm.

The two young men fall into silence. They are both thinking about the train full of football supporters that has just left Stevenage and is hurtling towards them.