On impulse, he reached out and took her hand in his. She stiffened, but let him. ‘I meant what I said about your dad.’ He wanted her to ask about that third date. Perhaps it would, by default, be tomorrow, the night of the auction. Or perhaps that was putting too many stressful concepts together for Ross. He wasn’t sure she’d even recognize what ‘third date’ tended to mean in modern dating culture. She watched TV, didn’t she? He found it odd, distantly, that he was so attracted to someone who’d reminded him so fiercely of his glimpse of Hell. Or maybe he liked the idea of being with someone who cared enough to keep him on the straight and narrow.

‘I know you did.’ He wasn’t sure if that was a lie or not.

‘We should talk about what we’re going to do about the auction.’

‘Yeah.’

He decided he was going to risk it. Just to see her reaction. ‘You could call it our third date.’

She stopped what she was going to say, actually a little flustered, which was deeply pleasing. ‘Technically,’ she said.

Chapter Twelve

TWELVE

The following evening, Sarah Quill watched her husband silently drink his coffee at the kitchen table. She never liked it when he was silent. ‘So they didn’t find an easy exit to the brothel?’

‘Nah, but I’m not ready for Christmas presents in the middle of summer. We spent the day trying to find the woman from the Ripper attack on the Soviet bar and her male friend, but we don’t really have enough to go on.’

‘What are you going to do next?’

‘Prepare to send Costain and Sefton in. Continue to pursue an interview with Vincent. Continue to search the victims’ histories for some connection.’

‘The announcement of the result of the postal ballot of Police Federation members is tomorrow.’

‘Yeah.’

‘If they have decided to take industrial action, coppers coming out illegally, won’t it all contribute to how bad London is feeling right now?’

‘And therefore to this ostentation malarkey. The thought had occurred to me. London will have been told it can do what it likes. And so it will. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen.’

‘The driver, Tunstall – you think he must have been in on it?’

‘It looks that way. We looked over Spatley’s two other offices, his constituency one and the one in the House, and didn’t find anything there. We spoke to the chief whip, and he told us that, if anything, Spatley had been focusing himself, cutting down on constituency work.’

‘To prepare for some sort of fight.’