“How did he seem about it?”

Bradley scratched his temple. “He was a bit broody for a while. He had his moods, did Chiller. I suppose it could have been something to do with that, you know, being told to lay off. He wouldn’t have liked that. Very much his own man, was Chiller. I would imagine that whether or not he thought Caxton might be guilty of such a thing, he’d have liked to have had a look into it himself, just to satisfy his curiosity. But there was nothing he could do by himself, going up against someone like Caxton against orders. That’s the stuff of fiction and, for all his courage, he valued his job.”

“So he took it seriously?”

“I’d say he was disturbed by it, yes, but I still think he would have found it hard to believe such a thing of a bloke like Caxton.”

“What did you think of him?” Banks asked. “Caxton. I mean, when you heard his name in connection with a possible sexual assault.”

“I didn’t know him, of course. Never met him. But I suppose I thought, nah, never, not him. He’d even been in the station once or twice, so I was told. And he was hardly ever off telly in those days. It’d be like thinking your uncle Ted was a perv.”

“Many a person’s uncle Ted is a perv.”

“You know what I mean. Familiar. Friendly. Cozy.”

“It’s a good disguise, don’t you think?”

“So it would appear now.”

“Do you remember anything else from around that time?” Banks asked. “Anything DI Chadwick might have said? Or anyone, for that matter? The super? The chief?”

Bradley pursed his lips. “I had little truck with any rank higher than Chiller’s, so no to that last part. As I remember, it was around my first anniversary with Leeds CID, the end of my first year working with DI Chadwick. As I said earlier, we had a fair bit of the Summer of Drugs stuff going on, so we found ourselves liaising with the Drugs Squad a lot. There was also the Sexual Offences Act, or the Queer Act, as we called it. You might remember that the House made homosexuality legal between consenting adults in private sometime during that summer. A lot of poofs seemed to take that as open season, and we had more work than ever. I do remember the first murder investigation I ever took a big part in, earlier that summer. A prostitute found floating in the canal down by the Calls. Posh now, with all those fancy restaurants, boutique hotels and flats, but it was a proper warren of crime back then. She’d been stabbed twelve times and dumped there. Foreigner. Polish. I never saw the body, like, only came in later for the legwork.”

“Did you ever find out who did it?”