My eyes homed in on the bridge of the man’s nose. His face was adorned with a vast array of piercings that looked like a bad case of metallic acne. But it was the dumbbell through the bridge of his nose that drew my sick fascination. Sick being the operative word. My stomach gave a lurch whenever he twitched his nose, which unfortunately for me was with the frequency of a rat sniffing out lunch. Every time my eyes went to engage his, they skewed off target and found themselves back on his nose. It was fortunate, then, that I wasn’t conducting the interview and therefore wasn’t the focus of his attention, otherwise I would have come across as unforgivably rude. Somehow, I didn’t rate this guy as a suspect. It was difficult to imagine someone so identifiable committing the crimes, unless he was very careful and wore a balaclava to hide his appearance. If it came to it, we’d have a hell of a time trying to find comparable people for a line-up. Any witness would pick this guy out in an instant.

I would have loved to have been the one asking the questions, but as usual, I was riding shotgun and had been given the brief to be a warm body in the room. A warm body with a good memory and a pen and pad to record the interview. Being secretary was a girl’s job, after all. It was no surprise as to who took great delight in informing me of my role. Although DI Johns had to suffer the indignity of Terry Bennett’s insistence on my presence, he still found a way to remind me of my station in life. One small consolation was I didn’t have to type the interviews up, but I tried to keep my scrawl as legible as possible for the lovely bevy of typists at the station. You couldn’t pay me to do their job. It felt like a bit of a joke though. In this age of electronic wizardry and digital everything, why the hell were we still taking notes with something as archaic as a pen and paper? Modern policing at its budget-restricted best.