Craig knew that if that was true for Becker it wasn’t the case for him. He lived here. He liked it here. He’d lost two men. Two friends. The whole fucking thing was very much his personal problem. He looked at the older man for a moment as if waiting for more, and when nothing came but a gaze of indifferent resignation, he stood up and left the room without a word. He could get to Katie Hunt before they started the search for her husband, and right now that seemed important. Important enough not to tell Becker.

The journey from the spare office Becker was occupying to his own, was through a war-zone. The phones rang like alarms and the humans they alerted jumped and scurried from desk to desk as though the cheap teak tables were trenches affording cover.

In the shifting chaos, an Edmonton constable was sullenly clearing out Daniel Hawk’s desk, putting the contents into marked plastic bags. Craig stopped and watched. The young policeman eyed his superior with caution as he scooped up a magazine and a packet of indigestion lozenges and bagged them with some papers.

‘Sir?’

Craig was hardly aware he had been staring at the man performing his mundane task. ‘Huh?’

‘You need something?’

Craig looked at him, then down at the drawers and put his hands in his pockets. ‘Yeah. Give me a minute with this stuff, will you? Go grab a coffee.’

The constable nodded, put his bag down on the desk, smoothed it like it was something precious and then left. The desk was an island in the babbling noise of the office and Craig sat down in Hawk’s chair with his hands on the desk in front of him. Was this what a man’s life amounted to? A few small things that could be put into bags and poked through by indifferent strangers?

He pulled open the second drawer, feeling like a spy. Files were stacked in neat rows, the odd yellow square of sticky notepad paper stuck to the spine, marking something for Daniel’s attention. Notes to himself. Craig fingered them, his heart sore at the scribbled things that had meant something to the man who was never going to hug his son or wife again.

Chateau. Inc. Thefts, and another, Int. Faccini bar fight. Bell’s witness, comp lit.

Who knew what they meant? Who cared now? He flicked another file back, then stopped. A small yellow square was sticking up like all the others. Nothing unusual. Except Daniel’s scribbled message to himself on this one, unlike all the others, was not in English. It was not abbreviated notation, but quite obviously a word written in Daniel’s native tongue.