‘I don’t know about the first part, but he’s definitely lying about the second. There’s been a lot of tension lately: suspicion and counter-suspicion. The equilibrium’s been upset since the polis poked the nest. I know it’s not a popular opinion, as it was high-fives all round at the time, but the recent spate of scalps taken from the drug world may prove counterproductive in the long run.’

Catherine knew she shouldn’t bite, but there was something insufferable about the piety with which he said this, as well as the insult to her intelligence that he thought she couldn’t see how he was disparaging other officers’ successes in order to put a fig leaf on his own unit’s failings.

‘I’m unable to see how getting drug dealers off the streets can ever be counterproductive to anybody but drug dealers. Indeed, there is a school of thought around here that would point to the fact that Cairns and Fletcher secured more convictions in the space of a few months than Locust has managed since its inception. It’s one thing talking about a long game, but people need to see results or they start to lose faith.’

‘I know it must sound like sour grapes,’ he conceded, with that indefatigable air of reasonableness and fair-minded calm that sometimes made Catherine want to scream. ‘We’re all polis, we all know how good it is for morale to put a few bodies away. Cairns and Fletcher chalked up some scores, and I’m not trying to take that away from them.’

‘Good. Because they did it through a couple of unfashionable old-school policing methods known as hard graft and initiative.’

‘They cultivated some well-placed and reliable sources, and fair play to them for that. But it’s a harsh truth that if they’d shared that information with my unit, we could have got a lot more from it than merely banging up a few mid-level faces and providing drugs-on-the-table photocalls to maintain the public’s faith, as you put it.’

Catherine could have slapped him for that one. At least he had the decency to be self-conscious about the name Locust. It was on all the forms and posters, but he was clearly embarrassed to refer to it as such in front of proper, growed-up polis, referring to it instead as ‘my unit’. She couldn’t see herself saying it with a straight face had she got the gig, so kudos to him for that much, but he was still an arrogant tosser, and she’d dearly love to hear him say what he just had to Cairns’ and Fletcher’s faces. She took a moment to calm herself, but didn’t quite make it.