Whatever it was, it felt good as well as strange.

‘We should do something different tonight then,’ Alice said. ‘Why don’t we have dinner together? I know this lovely restaurant. It’s near here and it’s cosy and romantic and—’

‘It’s a date,’ Rosa said.

‘Fantastic. I’ll make the reservation for eight o’clock. Would that be OK?’

Rosa nodded. ‘It should be.’

‘Well, if you’re held up just call me.’

But Rosa was determined that she wouldn’t be late for the first dinner date she’d had in years. And to help ensure that she’d be on time she decided to visit Laura Jefferson’s house earlier than she had planned to.

If the detective wasn’t home by then, she would simply kill the boyfriend instead. He was bound to be there.

35

Laura

So Roy Slack apparently referred to the death of Terry Malone as ‘the final straw’.

Naturally this had got me wondering. The first call I made was to the detective in the NCA who had mentioned it in his report.

His name was Julian Wheeler and he confirmed that his informant had been adamant that Slack had said it at Malone’s wake. He added that the guy was one of his most reliable snouts.

I chose not to believe that it was simply an off-the-cuff remark. It was too loaded. Too full of menace. It was what people said when they’d had enough of a situation or a sequence of events and had decided to do something about it.

So the questions I now wanted answers to were:

Did the death of Terry Malone at the hands of a police officer trigger an angry reaction from Roy Slack?

Did he regard it as the latest in a catalogue of grievances against the police?

And did he decide to vent his fury, first by arranging for the officer in question to be kidnapped or killed, and then through a final, desperate act of vengeance against the Met itself before the cancer claimed him?

It would certainly explain why the task force had been targeted and we’d received that absurd ultimatum. He would have known that the Met wouldn’t dare close the unit down or allow the detectives to step back from it. But he would also have known that we’d be put in an invidious position once the killings began.

Jesus.

It might have been a pretty far-fetched theory but that didn’t mean it wasn’t entirely plausible. And the more I studied Slack’s file the more convinced I became that I was onto something.

The old villain was on record as saying that he held the police responsible for the deaths of his wife and father.