He would give anything for her to be sitting upright and chatting away, not only for her own personal wellbeing, but because he was desperate to hear her side of what happened in the Taylor Fisheries building. Had she seen what happened to Gibson? Had she seen Bolton? He prayed she would remember some or all of the frantic charge up the stairs, although he couldn’t pin all his hopes on that. The doctor had said there was a chance she might remember nothing. He knew the right thing to do for the time being was to assume she had nothing to give them, and pursue all other lines of enquiry to get something more concrete.

His thoughts darted back to the photo of the deputy commissioner. That was one mess he would gladly follow Campbell’s lead on, but one situation he couldn’t walk away from was the intersection of the two cases after yesterday’s maelstrom of events. Anderson and Whittaker would likely welcome his help with their case, not least of all because their team was lighter by two after yesterday. Locke was a big fish, though, and whoever landed him would have their moment in the limelight. Porter didn’t give a damn about the backslapping that came with closing a case, and his worry was that Anderson would want to keep his own hand on the rudder but didn’t have the stomach for what lay ahead. Anderson had been a good detective in his day, but he had peaked with the Spice Girls in the nineties and any fire that had burnt in his belly was more of a glowing ember these days. The time to tiptoe around Bolton had passed, but Porter worried that Anderson would want to continue the softly-softly approach to keep fishing for Locke.

Porter decided he would talk to Campbell about it. Emotions always ran high when anything happened to an officer, and they needed a show of strength, a message to any and all onlookers that the full force of the law would crash over you like a tidal wave if you dared raise a hand to one of theirs. Men like Bolton and Locke would read anything else as a sign of weakness, and that was the last thing they could afford right now.