LITMIR.BIZ

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along the uneven pavement between decaying Victorian houses fringed with iron railings. The Irishman paused, pulling the other man to a halt, and listened, but the only sound was the roar of the early morning traffic from the main road, strangely muted by the fog.

      A frown creased his face and he took an anxious step forward. Behind him, Garvald moved up the steps from the area in which he had been waiting, swung the small man round and raised a knee into his groin.

      He sagged to the pavement with a gasp of agony and the Irishman turned round. Garvald stood on the other side of the writhing body, hands in the pockets of his raincoat, a slight smile on his face.

      ‘Looking for somebody?’

      The Irishman moved in fast, great hands reaching out to destroy, but they only fastened on thin air and his feet were kicked expertly from beneath him.

      He thudded against the wet flagstones and scrambled to his feet cursing. In the same moment, Garvald seized his right wrist with both hands, twisting it round and up, locking the man’s shoulder as in a vice.

      The Irishman gave a cry of agony as the muscle started to tear. Still keeping that terrible hold in position, Garvald ran him head-first into the railings.

      The small man was being sick into the gutter and now he got to his feet and leaned against the railings, an expression of horror on his face. Garvald stepped over the Irishman and moved a little closer and the small man felt such fear as he had never known before move inside him.

      ‘For Christ’s sake, no! Leave me alone!’ he gabbled.

      ‘That’s better,’ Garvald said. ‘That’s a lot better. Who sicked you on to me?’

      ‘A bloke called Rosco – Sam Rosco. He and Terry did some bird together at the Ville a couple of years back. He wrote to Terry last week from this dump up North where he lives. Said you were bad news. That nobody wanted you back.’

      ‘And you were supposed to convince me?’ Garvald said pleasantly. ‘How much was it worth to pass the message along?’

      The small man moistened his lips. ‘A century – between us,’ he added hastily.

      Garvald dropped to one knee beside the Irishman and turned him over, whistling a strangely sad little tune in a minor key as he searched him. He located a wallet and took out a wad of five-pound notes.

      ‘This it?’

      ‘That’s right. Terry hadn’t divvied-up yet.’

      Garvald counted the money quickly, then slipped it into his inside breast pocket. ‘Now that’s what I call a very satisfying morning’s work.’

      The small man crouched beside the Irishman. He touched his face gingerly and recoiled in alarm. ‘Holy Mother, you’ve smashed his jaw.’

      ‘You’d better find him a doctor then, hadn’t you?’ Garvald said and turned away.

      He vanished into the fog and the sound of his whistling hung on the air for a moment, then faded eerily. The small man stayed there, crouched beside the Irishman, the rain soaking through the ­shoulders of his cheap coat.

      It was the tune – that damned tune.

      He couldn’t seem to get the sound of it out of his head and for some reason he could never ­satisfactorily explain afterwards, he started to cry, helplessly like a small child.

      Chapter 2

      And then there was the night with a cold east wind that swept in all the way from the North Sea like a knife in the back, probing the alleys of the northern city, whistling along the narrow canyons that divided the towering blocks of flats that were the new housing developments. And when the rain came, it was the cold, stinging rain of winter that rattled the windows like lead shot.

      Jean Fleming sat on a hard wooden chair in the main CID office at Police Headquarters and waited. It was a little after nine and the place seemed strangely deserted, shadows crowding in from the corners, falling across the long, narrow desks, filling her with a vague, irrational unease.

      Through the frosted glass door of the room on her left, she was aware of movement and the low murmur of voices. After a while, the door opened and a heavily built, greying man in his early forties beckoned to her.

      ‘Superintendent Grant will see you now, Miss Fleming.’

      She got to her feet and went in quickly. The room was half in shadow, the only light a green shaded lamp on the desk. It was simply furnished with several filing cabinets and a map of the city on the wall, divisional boundaries marked in red.

      Grant was past feeling tired in any conscious sense, but a persistent ache behind one eye and a slight involuntary shiver, which he found quite impossible to control, seemed to indicate that he was under attack from the Asian flu that had already placed something like a fifth of the entire force on the sick list.

      He opened a drawer, took three aspirin tablets from a bottle and washed them down with a glass of water. As he reached for a cigarette, he glanced across at the girl on the other side of the desk.

      Twenty-seven or -eight and Irish-looking, dark hair razor-cut to the skull in a way he didn’t really approve, but it certainly gave her something. The heavy sheepskin coat had cost anything up to forty pounds and the knee-length boots were real leather.

      She sat down in the chair Brady brought forward and crossed her legs, giving Grant the first lift he’d had that night. She arranged her skirt carefully and smiled.

      ‘You don’t remember me, Mr Grant?’

      ‘Should I?’

      He frowned. Fleming – Jean Fleming. He shook his head and his ugly face split into a smile of quite devastating charm that was one of his most useful assets. ‘I must be getting old.’

      ‘I’m Bella Garvald’s sister.’

      As if she had said some magic word, it all dropped neatly into place. Ben Garvald and the Steel Amalgamated hoist. Eight no, nine years ago. His first big case as a Chief Inspector. His mind jumped back to the house in Khyber Street, to Bella Garvald and her young sister.

      ‘You’ve changed,’ he said. ‘As I remember, you were still at the Grammar School waiting to go to college. What was it you wanted to be – a school-teacher?’

      ‘I am,’ she said.

      ‘Here in the city?’

      She nodded. ‘Oakdene Preparatory.’

      ‘Miss Van Heflin’s old school? That was on my first beat when I was a young copper. Is she still active? She must be at least seventy.’

      ‘She retired two years ago,’ Jean Fleming said. ‘It’s mine now.’

      She was unable to keep a slight edge of pride from her voice and her northern accent became more pronounced.

      ‘A long way from Khyber Street,’ Grant said. ‘And how’s Bella?’

      ‘She divorced Ben not long after he went to prison. Married again last year.’

      ‘I remember now. Harry Faulkner. She did all right for herself there.’

      ‘That’s right,’ Jean Fleming said calmly. ‘And I don’t want anything to spoil it for her.’

      ‘Such as?’

      ‘Ben,’ she said. ‘He was released yesterday.’

      ‘You’re sure?’

      ‘With all his remission it would have been last year, but he lost time for breaking from a working party at Dartmoor some years ago.’

      Grant blew smoke up to the ceiling. ‘You think he’ll make trouble?’

      ‘He was difficult about the divorce. That’s why he tried to break out when he did. Told Bella he’d never let her go to anyone else.’

      ‘Did

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