She rolls her head in order to stretch her stiff neck, but it provides only momentary relief from the gnawing ache that has now crept down to her shoulder blades. Through the office window, the rows of stolen vehicles are bathed in an eerie turquoise glow from the security lights in the warehouse below.
‘Would you like a cuppa, ma’am?’ says WPC Millican.
Millican insists on calling her ‘ma’am’, even though there’s no more than six years between them. Yes, it’s protocol, Ptolemy thinks, but it still sounds weird.
‘If I have any more tea I’ll be piddling for England,’ she says. ‘But I will have one of those chocolate digestives.’
Millican giggles and goes across to a table on the other side of the office, where over the course of the last twenty-four hours she has systematically assembled a small life-support pod containing a kettle, tea, milk and, most importantly, a tin of chocolate biscuits.
Ptolemy thinks back to her days in uniform, to her first secondment to CID as part of a door-to-door inquiry team investigating a fatal hit-and-run. The detective in charge was a DI from Carlisle called Barrie Doggart, a quiet, pensive man with grey skin and a permanently furrowed brow. Aged eighteen and fresh out of training school, Ptolemy had thought Doggart was the most thrilling man she had ever met. She imagined him as a lonely maverick, existing on the margins, living his life to a soundtrack of Miles Davis and the rhythm of a whisky bottle. Later she found out he lived with his wife in a semidetached new-build on the outskirts of Workington, spent most of his time on the sick with a bad back and was therefore regarded not only as a malingerer, but as the detective with the worst clear-up rate in Cumbria CID.
Ptolemy wonders what Millican thinks about her. What she will say five or six years down the line when she looks back at her first CID investigation.
Yeah, I was stuck in a warehouse with this biscuit-scoffing DC who was obviously a useless bitch, because they’d given her all the paperwork to do. What a fucking loser she must have been.
It wasn’t even as if she led a glamorous life outside of work, Ptolemy reflects glumly. Ray had called this morning from Tallinn to say one of the other truckers had suffered a suspected heart attack, and that he was now expected to drive on to Riga to fulfil the contract. That meant he wouldn’t be back home until the middle of next week at the very least, and she could tell from his voice just how utterly thrilled he was at the prospect of another four days driving on Eastern Europe’s potholed roads and staying in its primitive truck stops.
Almost as thrilled as she is at the prospect of another night on her own with only the prospect of a frozen dinner and some backed-up episodes of EastEnders on Sky+ to look forward to.
As she drags over another box, she wonders what Severin will be doing tonight. Letting his hair down? Toasting his success in cracking the car-ringing gang? Just how did an undercover detective let his hair down? Presumably the nature of his job meant there were limited places he could go. A darkened cinema, perhaps? The idea of inviting him round for dinner skitters unexpectedly into her mind; two lost souls, all dressed up with nowhere to go, sharing a lonesome spaghetti bolognese and a tragic bottle of cheap red wine.
Stop it, Kath.
She reaches into the box, removes the attached paperwork and keys the VIN and the registration number of the vehicle in to the computer database, along with the name of the registered owner and insurance details. Beneath it, something bulky inside a plastic grocery bag. What now? she thinks wearily. She picks up the bag and tips it upside down. Its contents fall with a thud on the desktop.
‘Naughty, naughty,’ says WPC Millican, who has come across with a plate of biscuits. She reaches down for the object on the desk. ‘I thought these were illegal.’
‘Don’t touch it!’
Millican recoils and the biscuits fall to the floor. Ptolemy reaches into her pocket for a pair of thin rubber gloves. She puts them on and picks up the object. It is the size and shape of an electric shaver, except instead of blades it has two raised nubs.
‘Get me an evidence bag,’ she says.
Millican hurries across to her desk and returns with a clear Ziplok bag. Ptolemy drops the object in the bag and seals it.
There is something else in the box.
It is a rope, coiled like a sleeping snake.
Detective Chief Inspector Frank Maguire, head of the Greater Manchester Police Drug Squad, is a tall man with the languid demeanour of someone who has ruled his particular fiefdom for so long that he has outlived all his enemies.
But Newcastle is not his patch – and Mhaire Anderson, while not strictly an enemy, is not beholden to him either. Furthermore, Maguire has been conducting an investigation on her patch, without telling her. And if there’s one thing that pisses Anderson off, it’s a lack of professional courtesy.
‘Six months?’ she exclaims disbelievingly. Then, noticing the other diners in the restaurant looking at her, she lowers her voice to a hiss. ‘You’ve had Wayne Heddon under surveillance for six months? And how many fucking times has he been to Newcastle?’
Maguire, trying to remain calm under fire, offers a weak smile and plucks distractedly at the moules marinière in the bowl in front of him.
‘Listen, Mhaire,’ he says in his smooth Ulster brogue. ‘You know the form. If Heddon had had meetings at the Savoy we wouldn’t necessarily have told the Met about it.’
‘You fucking liar, Frank. You would been round at Scotland Yard kissing their arses for permission to be on their patch. But just because this is Newcastle, you think you can do what you bloody well like.’
‘That’s not true and you know it. I have the utmost respect for—’
‘Ah, don’t give me that slaver, Frank. I’m too old and I’m too ugly. I ought to make an official complaint and bugger your six-month surveillance operation.’
Maguire shrugs. ‘Look, we could have done this over the phone, Mhaire, but I came up to see you personally as a gesture of good faith.’ He hands her a slim file. ‘And I’ve brought this with me, in a renewed spirit of cooperation.’
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a log of Wayne Heddon’s visits to Newcastle. All his meetings with Jack Peel and Okan Gul. Where he stayed. What he did. When he went for a shit. It’s all there.’
Anderson flips through the file suspiciously, but from what she can see it’s as thorough as Maguire claims.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘Then answer me this: who tied Okan Gul to the railway line?’
Maguire shakes his head. ‘I have no idea. I didn’t even know he was dead until you told me.’
‘You don’t seem terribly bothered about it, considering Gul was central to your investigation.’
‘If I thought it had anything to do with my investigation then I assure you I would be.’
Anderson narrows her eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean on the night Okan Gul died in Newcastle, Wayne Heddon was in a hotel in Amsterdam having a meeting with several high-ranking representatives of the Kaplan Kirmizi.’
‘You’re saying Gul’s last visit was nothing to do with the drugs deal?’
Maguire smiles, sensing that after all his discomfort, he has finally gained the upper hand.
‘Not unless it was a social visit to catch up with his Newcastle middleman. In which case, I wouldn’t be interested anyway.’
‘His Newcastle middleman had been dead two weeks, Frank,’ Anderson reminds him.
‘Jack Peel was dead, yes,’ Maguire says, ‘but heroin abhors a vacuum. The deal still needed to go through.’