Skinner gave a smug smile. ‘He’ll have no choice but to agree. I’ve done this many times before, so I know what I’m doing.’

Mullett sighed with relief. ‘It’s good to have you aboard the Denton flagship, John. I can see we’re going to get on very well together.’

Skinner smiled back. Mullett looked the sort of man he could twist round his little finger. If he played his cards right, he could end up sitting in that very chair behind that mahogany desk. He stood up. ‘I’d better get back to my suspect now – the woman who tried to kill her baby.’

‘I’m impressed by the way you’ve got stuck in on your very first day,’ said Mullett. ‘Very impressed.’ As Skinner left, he switched off the red warning sign. It would be good to have some one like Skinner in the division to do all the dirty jobs Mullett didn’t have the guts to do himself. Yes, this was going to work out very well.

Frost squeezed his car into the only available space, narrowly avoiding scraping the paint off Mullett’s brand-new, metallic-blue Porsche. He mooched across the car park to the rear entrance of the station. He was not feeling very happy. The semen sample from the rape victim didn’t match any known offenders – but perhaps that would have been too easy. And Forensic, while admitting that the severed foot could have come from a hospital dissecting room, refused to rule out the possibility of foul play, which meant he would have to treat it as a possible murder inquiry. And his team was already stretched to the limit now that Hornrim Harry had sent half the force out to catch some other division’s drug barons, and the other half were on courses to improve efficiency. The way to improve sodding efficiency was to be on the spot, solving the flaming crimes, not writing poncey essays about understanding the criminal mind. If Forensic had to provide the manpower, they’d flaming soon classify the foot as a medical student’s joke, he thought glumly.