‘Well . . . I’ll leave it there, anyway. It was nice to see you. Goodbye, Angel.’

131

When DS Paddy Hopkins got to the hospital after receiving the alert, he found his boss sitting in a curtained booth on an examination table, wearing a hospital gown. Farmer looked beaten. There was a darkening bruise and a small cut on his left cheek, and more bruises on his forearms and lower legs.

‘Bloody hell, sir, what happened?’ asked Paddy, appalled.

‘Got done over,’ said Farmer simply. ‘Pulled down an alleyway. They beat the crap out of me.’

Paddy eyed his boss in horror. ‘What, they take your money?’

‘No. They didn’t.’

‘Just thugs then? Random?’

Farmer didn’t answer. Right now, he felt too fucked to go into details. And embarrassed. Those gits had turned him over as easily as if he was a child.

‘What do the doctors say?’ Paddy pulled up a chair and sat down.

‘Minimal damage. Nothing busted, they don’t think. They’re wheeling me down for X-rays in a bit. I’ll be staying in overnight. Only a precaution, they’re saying.’

‘Got off lucky then.’

‘Yeah.’ But Farmer was seething. It had been a calculated attack, doing just enough damage to warn him off; not enough to create any major comebacks.

You drop that, sunshine.

He thought of Poulter, sitting there in the pub, grinning at him. It hadn’t been Poulter’s voice, old-school and a mate of Donny Maguire’s and still perfectly capable of giving anyone a pasting. But Donny’d had other mates, too. Poulter had no doubt dropped a word in their ear, and Farmer had received his warning.

‘Pads,’ he said.

‘Yeah, boss?’

‘It wasn’t random. Not at all. You know Fiona Maguire?’

‘The mad chair-through-the-window woman.’

‘I’ve been looking into what happened to her husband since then. To Donny Maguire.’

Paddy pushed his specs up his nose. ‘Word is he took off with some woman. That he’s overseas. Anyway, it was all shut down pretty quickly by those up above. He was a bit of a bastard, from what I heard. Seems the force didn’t want to start in on a wide-reaching corruption investigation. Too much collateral damage, maybe. So when Maguire moved on, they pissed on the bonfire and put it out, quick.’

‘You think that’s what happened? That he just moved on?’ asked Farmer. ‘Only, Pads – between us, you got that?’

Paddy nodded.

‘Between us,’ went on Farmer, ‘those two men beat me up because I’ve been asking around about Maguire in my own time. They said so while they were doing it. Said to leave it alone.’

Paddy was quiet for a while. Then he said: ‘You didn’t get a glimpse of them? Anything?’

Farmer thought again of Charlie Poulter. ‘Maguire had a lot of mates on the force,’ he said.

‘So what now then? You going to leave it?’

Farmer chewed his lip and didn’t answer for a long, long while. Thought of the beating. The sheer humiliation of it. His whole body ached.