Derek Poole looks at the floor of the car. He’s got sick on his trainers and I’m worried he’ll puke again and we’ll have the stink for a week.

‘Let’s just get this over with,’ I mutter, knowing I’ve gone too far.

DC Ellis opens the door for Mr Poole and we’re all back out in the sun.

There are so many fucking coppers now, and I’m looking at them thinking, too many chiefs:

There’s my gaffer Detective Inspector Rudkin, Detective Superintendent Prentice, DS Alderman, the old head of Leeds CID Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson, the new head Noble and, in the centre of the scrum, the man himself: Assistant Chief Constable George Oldman.

Over by the body Professor Farley, the Head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Leeds University, and his assistants are preparing to take her away from all this.

Detective Superintendent Alderman has a handbag in his hands, he’s taking a WPC and a uniform off with him.

They’ve got a name, an address.

Prentice is marshalling the uniforms, going door to door, corralling the gawpers.

The cabal turns our way.

Detective Inspector Rudkin, as hungover as fuck, shouts, ‘Murder Room, thirty minutes.’

The Murder Room.

Millgarth Street, Leeds.

One hundred men stuffed into the second-floor room. No windows, only smoke, white lights, and the faces of the dead.

In comes George and the rest of his boys, back from the park. There are pats on the back, handshakes here, winks there, like some fucking reunion.

I stare across the desks and the phones, the sweating shirt backs and the stains, at the walls behind the Assistant Chief Constable, at the two faces I’ve seen so many, many times, every day, every night, when I wake, when I dream, when I fuck my wife, when I kiss my son: