The subject of their conversation, Detective Constable Martin Webster, twenty-seven, bearded, was in the washroom filling the battered kettle from the hot tap for speed. He banged six fairly clean mugs on to a tin tray and slurped in the milk from a cardboard carton.

Is this what he had come to? A flaming tea boy? Six months ago he had been an inspector. Detective Inspector Martin Webster, wonder boy of Braybridge Division. Braybridge was a large town some forty-three miles from Denton.

Shipping him to this dump called Denton was part of his punishment, just in case being demoted wasn’t enough, and the cherry on the cake was being saddled with that stupid, sloppy, bumbling oaf Jack Frost, who wouldn’t have been tolerated as a constable in Braybridge, let alone an inspector. How did a clown like Frost make the rank? Someone had tried to tell him that the man had won a medal, but he wasn’t swallowing that… not unless they handed out medals for sheer incompetence. Police Superintendent Mullett, the Divisional Commander, seemed to dislike Frost with the same intensity as he detested Webster. “I’m not happy having you in my division,” Mullett had told him. “I accepted you under protest. One further lapse and you’re out…”

So how did Frost manage to get Mullett to recommend him for promotion? Webster smiled ruefully to himself. It probably helped that Frost didn’t stagger into the station roaring drunk and punch his superior officer on the jaw. The memory made him shake his right hand. His knuckles still ached. So hard did he clout Detective Chief Inspector Hepton, that he believed, at the time, he had broken the bones of his hand.

He’d remember that night as long as he lived. The day before, he’d had that damn-awful row with his wife, Janet. The rows had been getting nasty, but this one was the worst ever. Janet didn’t know how badly things had been going for him at the station.