‘What risk?’

‘A smear of butter on the cover sheet. Won’t look exactly professional when we’re doing the interviews.’

‘I’m feeling reckless today,’ Fox countered. ‘I’ll take a chance

…’

With a sigh from Kaye, the three men started reading.

Paul Carter was the reason they’d come to Fife. Carter held the rank of detective constable and had been a cop for fifteen years. He was thirty-eight years old and came from a family of cops – both his father and an uncle had served in Fife Constabulary. The uncle, Alan Carter, had actually made the original complaint against his nephew. It involved a drug addict, sexual favours, and turning a blind eye. Two other women then came forward to say that Paul Carter had arrested them for drunken behaviour, but offered to drop any charges if they would be ‘accommodating’.

‘Does anybody actually ever say “accommodating”?’ Kaye muttered, halfway down a page.

‘Courtroom and newspapers,’ Naysmith replied, brushing crumbs from his own copy of the case notes.

Malcolm Fox had some of those newspaper reports in front of him. There were photos of Paul Carter leaving court at the end of a day’s testimony. Pudding-bowl haircut; face pitted by acne. Giving the photographer a hard stare.

It was four days since the guilty verdict had been delivered, along with the sheriff’s comment that Detective Constable Carter’s own colleagues seemed ‘either wilfully stupid or wilfully complicit’. Meaning: they’d known for years Carter was a bad cop, but they’d protected him, lied for him, maybe even attempted to falsify witness statements and put pressure on witnesses not to come forward.

All of which had brought the Complaints to town. Fife Constabulary needed to know, and in order to reassure the public (and more importantly, the media) that the investigation would be rigorous, they had asked a neighbouring force to run the inquiry. Fox had been given a copy of Fife Constabulary’s Suspension Policy and Suspension Process Considerations, along with the Chief Constable’s written report outlining why the three officers under investigation were still at work, this being ‘in the best interests of the force’.