LITMIR.BIZ

       6

      Steve McCarthy had been home for an hour. He’d got home after eight-thirty and gone straight to his computer to log on to the network. His evenings would be like this now, until this case was over. There was always more information pouring in, more details often burying important details, and he intended staying on top of it all.

      McCarthy was ambitious. He’d joined the police after leaving school, choosing to go straight in rather than going on to do a degree. He still wasn’t sure if that had been the wisest decision. He’d done well, promotions had come in good time, sometimes sooner than his best expectations, and he knew he was seen as a team player with a good future ahead of him. He was thirty-two, and the next hike up the promotions ladder was the important one.

      He was working on their current database now, getting it to look for patterns in relation to other offences in the Sheffield area over recent months. He typed another command into the computer, getting it to sort the information in relation to drug offences. While he was waiting, he dug his fork into the takeaway he’d picked up from the Chinese on the way back. Cold. He looked down at the polystyrene tray. His chicken chow mein had somehow transformed itself into a grey, glutinous mass. He pushed it away impatiently. He could get something out of the freezer later, stick it in the microwave. He picked up his mug of coffee with little optimism. Cold as well. He couldn’t work without coffee. He went through to the kitchen and pushed the switch on the coffee machine.

      The flat was modern, two-bedroomed. McCarthy had bought it because it was fitted out, convenient and he could move straight in. He’d heard someone say once, or he’d read somewhere, that a house should be a machine for living. McCarthy understood that. He wanted the place he lived in to service him. He wanted to go in and find it warm when the weather was cold, cool when it was hot. He wanted to be able to cook at the push of a button, wash at the flick of a switch. He wanted to have any disorder that living created reordered before he returned.

      ‘Christ, McCarthy,’ Lynne, his last girlfriend, had said, ‘why don’t you just lock yourself away in a cupboard at the end of the day?’ Another time she’d said, ‘What you need, McCarthy, is a wife. An automatic, rechargeable, super-turbo, fuel-injection wife.’ He’d laughed and started massaging her back, running his hands over her neck and shoulders in the way he knew she liked, because he hadn’t wanted to have another of their vicious, cutting rows, and she’d pulled him into the chair and they’d had a quick wham bam thank you, ma’am – or thank you, sir, and then they’d gone into the bedroom and spent longer, spent most of the evening, exploring each other and drinking wine. But he and Lynne only had that: they had sex and they had the job. They couldn’t spend all their time screwing and working – though to McCarthy it had sometimes seemed as though that was exactly what they did – and the relationship had ended when Lynne got the job that he had aimed at, got his promotion in fact, and the whole flimsy edifice had fallen apart in the volcanic aftermath. He still felt angry and bitter about that, and he determinedly shut it out of his mind.

      He took the coffee back into his workroom and looked at the screen. There was very little there that he didn’t already know. He noted the fact that Ashley Reid had a drugs caution – hardly surprising he’d missed it, McCarthy thought, in the long list attached to that young thug’s name. And, now, this could be interesting: Paul Lynman, one of the tenants at 14, Carleton Road, the student house, had a conviction for possession. McCarthy pulled up the details. OK, it looked like a my-round deal – he’d been caught with almost enough speed to pull down a dealing charge – but not quite. He’d insisted, wisely, that it was for his own use, but he’d probably been buying for a friend as well as for himself. Worth chasing up, though. There was nothing conclusive, no real links. McCarthy rubbed the skin between his eyebrows in an effort to concentrate. He’d heard something about a problem at the Alpha Centre, something about Es and speed. And had there been some kind of action round the university? He needed to talk to someone from drugs.

      He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He wondered what to do with the rest of the evening. Listen to music? Watch the telly? He felt a sense of things closing around him, as though his life was shrinking to the walls of this flat, the route to and from the office, the office itself. Maybe Lynne had been right. Maybe he should start looking for that cupboard.

      Sunday morning, Suzanne got up early, was showered, dressed and at her desk by eight o’clock. She planned to put in a solid day’s work, to forget everything that had happened since Friday. For an hour, she tried to read and make notes from a research paper that she’d had on her desk

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