He amused himself with the faux-rivalry of Pennine provincialism as the traffic crawled along. Crossing the city centre at nine in the morning? Yes, it had been a little optimistic. Then again, he told himself, optimism always used to be his greatest quality, even when it was completely counter-intuitive. Where would we be without a bit of counter-intuitive optimism, without a misplaced sense of the possible in our back pocket?

Three years ago Joe Romano had been a Detective Sergeant with just over a decade’s service. As a late starter, he’d done well. He’d already passed his inspector’s exams, and was biding his time, waiting for a DI position to open up. Then an ad in the Federation newsletter: Interpol was recruiting multilingual British police officers for a new unit, based at their headquarters in France.

Several weeks of excited conversations followed with his wife and son. It would be an adventure, an amazing opportunity to try something totally new. Joe had a degree in French and Italian, and Sam had a few years of French under his belt at school. Jackie was also keen, as if she’d simply been waiting for an excuse to leave the life of a primary schoolteacher behind. A fresh start in France for the three of them. They’d buy an old farmhouse, do it up, live the rustic dream. It was perfect, the chance to spread their wings and eat pains au chocolat.

A couple of difficult years later and he was back in his old job at Leeds CID. Still a DS, and now working missing persons cases and the low-level stuff that no one else fancied. Je ne regrette rien? It wasn’t his theme tune, not exactly. On the plus side, his French was amazing.

Ten minutes later he was on the university campus. Having ditched his plan to do battle with the university’s Lords of Data, he was going for the personal touch.

He made his way down a long, warm corridor in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures. Things didn’t seem to have changed much since he was at Nottingham University, a quarter of a century ago. There was the same air of subdued vibrancy, colourful posters announcing everything from a performance of Death of a Salesman to karate classes. Perhaps this was where he should have pursued a career. A university. None of the ridiculous alpha-male game-playing that could make CID so tedious.