She looks across the tracks again, into the hut’s dark interior, and sees someone sitting on a metal bench in the shadows. It’s hard to make out his face in the poor light, and he’s wearing a beanie, pulled down hard. But she can glimpse enough to know that she has seen him before – staring out from a missing person poster.

51

Silas

The boss is furious with Silas, much as he expected, demanding to know why he should authorise him to spend time on a murder investigation two hundred miles away in Cornwall.

‘Even when you told him about a possible link to our modern slavery investigation?’ Strover asks.

Silas shakes his head. They’re sitting in the canteen at Gablecross, where he is debriefing Strover about a twenty-minute roasting from his boss. He called Silas in after his email request late last night to assist Devon and Cornwall with a murder inquiry.

‘Told me to leave it to Major Crime,’ Silas says, nursing a plastic cup of cold coffee. ‘Reckons the man was in Cornwall trying to sell drugs to the locals. Extend the Swindon county lines network.’

‘So who does he think killed him?’ Strover asks.

‘Looks like a rival north London network supplying drugs into Truro from Tottenham. Apparently the bloke had been under surveillance in Swindon for several weeks – until he gave the Proactive Team the slip and headed west.’

‘What about Kate?’ Strover asks. ‘Her accident? Nearly drowning?’

‘The boss is not buying any of it. Too circumstantial.’

‘The man tried to bloody run us over,’ Strover protests. ‘Did you show him the footage from the pub?’ she asks, glancing around the canteen.

‘Not interested.’ Silas takes another sip of coffee. ‘It’s back to the nail bars for us.’

He doesn’t even bother to smile. It’s not funny. For six wonderful months after Silas cracked his last case, he basked in his boss’s praise. Couldn’t put a foot wrong. But then normal service resumed. Silas was a good detective, but he must learn to be more of a team player. Play the corporate game. Which means not meddling in another force’s business. Liaise, by all means, but don’t try to run the show.

In half an hour, Silas will be interviewing some poor woman from Latvia who thought she was coming to the UK for a new life and now finds herself doing acrylic overlays for eighteen hours a day. He glances around the canteen. A group of uniforms has lined up and are joking with the woman behind the food counter. He misses his own days in Response in the Met.

‘Last night I looked back at some of the interviews Kate gave to the media,’ Strover says. ‘Just to see what she actually said.’

‘And?’