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JIM
Kenneth Steele House is where I work. It’s the CID headquarters for Avon and Somerset
Constabulary. It’s not a pretty building from the outside, and neither is its location. It’s on a strip of
trade and industrial estates behind Temple Meads Station in St Philip’s Marsh. It’s a flat inner city
area with an isolated, wasteland feel because there’s no housing in the vicinity, and its boundaries are
the canal and the River Avon. There’s CCTV everywhere and a fair bit of barbed wire.
I was at my desk by 08.05. I noticed the atmosphere straight away. There was none of the usual
Monday morning chatter, only a tension about the place that you get when a big case is in. Mark
Bennett – same rank as me but about a hundred years older – popped up from behind the partition that
separated his desk from mine before I’d even turned on my PC. ‘Scotch Bonnet wants to see you,’ he
said. ‘Soon as.’
Bennett had a bald shiny head, a thick fleshy neck and the eyes of a bull terrier. He looked like a
bruiser. Truth was, he was anything but. We’d gone out for a drink once, when I first arrived in Avon
and Somerset, and he told me that he’d never gone as far or as fast as he’d wanted to in CID. Then he
told me that he thought his wife didn’t love him any more. I’d got out of there as fast as I could. You
don’t want that mindset to infect you. ‘Scotch Bonnet’ was Bennett’s nickname for our DCI, Corinne
Fraser. It was because she was Scottish, and female, and could be fiery. It wasn’t especially clever or
funny. Nobody else used it.
Fraser was in her office. ‘Jim,’ she said. ‘Close the door. Take a seat.’
She was immaculately turned out as usual in a sharp business suit. She was eccentric looking, with
frizzy grey hair that didn’t suit her short fringe and puffed out over her ears, but she also had an
attractive, delicate face, and implacable grey eyes that could look right through you, or pin you to a
wall. I sat down opposite her. She didn’t waste time:
‘As of zero eight hundred hours this morning I’ve got an eight-year-old boy who has almost
certainly been abducted from Leigh Woods. We’ve got multiple scenes already, the weather’s been
against us, and we’ve lost more than twelve hours since he first disappeared. We’re going to have the
press trying to crawl up our arses before lunchtime. I’m going to need a deputy SIO to take on a lot of
responsibility. Are you up to it?’
‘Yes, boss.’
I felt blood rush into my cheeks. It was what I’d hoped for: a high-profile case, a senior position.
I’d been in CID in Avon and Somerset for three years, putting in the hours, proving myself, waiting for
this moment. There were DIs above me in the pecking order, older, just as ambitious. Mark Bennett a
case in point. They could have got the role, but it was my time, my chance. Did I think of turning it
down? No. Did I think it was going to be a minefield? Maybe. But the words that were doing
cartwheels in my head were these: bring it on. Bring. It. On.
A big part of the thrill was getting to work with Fraser. She was tough and clever, one of the best. It
was well known that she’d grown up on a shitty council estate in Glasgow. As soon as she could
leave home, she’d moved as far away as possible so that she could train as a police officer and start a
new life. Problem was, while she was a young DC she’d ended up married to a DCI from Scotland
Yard who reeked so badly of corruption that even the Met had to get rid of him eventually. In his
spare time he’d knocked her about. She’d ended up in the hospital once but her old man was never
charged. The police looked after their own in those days, so long as they were white males.
Her good fortune was that her husband had died before going to trial for corruption. He had a heart