He folded the cover sheet, then stuffed it in his pocket, left the office and quietly closed the door. He descended the stairs as quietly as he could. The CID office was almost empty as he made his way across.

‘Wickens.’ It was eagle-eyed DCI Gillard, sitting in his office with the door slightly open.

‘Yes, sir.’ Wickens made his way to the doorway.

‘Got those notes for me?’ Gillard continued to tap away on his keyboard, only occasionally raising his eyes to the junior officer.

‘Yes, sir. They’re here, sir.’ Wickens walked into Gillard’s office and set them on the desk.

‘Thank you. What were you doing upstairs?’

Wickens paused for a moment. Playing dumb wasn’t going to work. Gillard must have heard him. ‘I was looking for you.’

Gillard continued to tap away. ‘You walked right past my office. Got my name on the door.’

‘So it has, sir.’

‘I take it you have no ambition to become a detective then?’

‘Sorry sir?’

‘Not exactly Sherlock Holmes, are we? Can’t read a name on a door.’

Eventually, Wickens extricated himself with another couple of apologies. He felt his face burning with embarrassment. The trouble was he really did have ambitions to be a detective. He’d dreamed of it since he was a child.

It was late afternoon. Baz Mulholland was tired and not in the best of moods, trying to finish the final stretch of wall in the herpetarium. Jakes was working on the other side, finishing off some edges. The bill for the van repair was much higher than Baz had anticipated, and then he had argued with Claire on the way in, about the death penalty and how to treat the worst murderers. He’d made the mistake of calling her a bleeding-heart leftie, and in the ensuing row she’d run rings round him. He was so annoyed that when he got out of her car he’d forgotten to take his radio. Now he was missing his music, and it didn’t help that he knew that Jakes was continuing to listen to his own on his earbuds. The slight hiss of the classical music hovered at the edge of Baz’s concentration as he swept one clear arc after another with his trowel. Baz hadn’t often tried to engage his colleague in conversation. It wasn’t an easy task, because Jakes took such an intellectual and philosophical approach to every subject. But today Baz, still needled over the subject of crime and punishment, wanted to provoke a conversation.

‘So what about this bloke Rollason, getting out with a new identity courtesy of the British taxpayer?’

Jakes slipped off his earbuds, said nothing for a while, then ventured: ‘Ethically it’s a complex subject.’

‘Is it bollocks. They should hang him.’

‘Justice and retribution are not synonyms.’

‘Eh?’

‘Have you read any Nietzsche, Barry? The will-to-power concept has some interesting insights into the nature of good and evil.’